A rendering of the DEP's plans for a three-mile bypass to the Delaware Aqueduct. Image provided by NYC DEP.
Tonight, New York City Department of Environmental Protection commissioner Cas Holloway told a group of Wawarsing residents that their chronically-leaky section of the Delaware Aqueduct will soon be repaired. With grout.
According to a press release issued by the DEP this afternoon, the tunnel under Wawarsing will be patched as part of a breathtakingly expensive aqueduct repair project that will cost the city over $2 billion. 
Repair site in the Delaware Aqueduct: Image provided by NYC DEP.The bulk of that cost isn't the grout destined for Wawarsing -- it's the DEP's ambitious plan to construct a three-mile-long, under-the-Hudson-River bypass tunnel around the aqueduct's leakiest section under the hamlet of Roseton in Orange County:
Under the plan, DEP will build a three-mile bypass tunnel around a portion of the aqueduct that is leaking in Roseton in Orange County, and repair other leaks in Wawarsing, in Ulster County, from the inside of the existing tunnel. The three-mile bypass tunnel will run east from the Town of Newburgh in Orange County, under the Hudson River to the Town of Wappinger in Dutchess County, on the east side of the Hudson. The construction of the bypass tunnel and the repair of the lining will ensure that DEP can continue to deliver high quality drinking water every day for decades to come. Under the plan, DEP will break ground on the bypass tunnel in 2013, and complete the connection to the Delaware Aqueduct in 2019.
The whole shebang -- the bypass tunnel, Wawarsing repairs, and supplementary water projects to keep the city hydrated while the aqueduct is shut down for repairs -- is going to cost over $2 billion:
The bypass tunnel and internal repairs will cost approximately $1.2 billion, and water projects to supplement the city’s supply during part of the construction period will cost approximately $900 million. The tunnel repair and project is expected to create between 1,000 and 1,500 jobs.
And the engineering feats involved will be as impressive as the project's price tag: between 2013 and 2019, hundreds of feet of tunnels and shafts will be dug and bored on both sides of the Hudson.
But back to Wawarsing. The DEP's plans for the repairs in Ulster County are less impressive than its plans for Orange. According to the press release, all the aqueduct needs there is grouting:
Eliminating the leaks in Wawarsing. During the construction of the bypass tunnel, the Delaware Aqueduct will be shut down, enabling DEP to enter upstream portions of the tunnel and fix cracking at three segments totaling nearly 500 feet in Wawarsing by injecting grouting from the inside of the tunnel near the affected areas.
9:43pm update: Adam Bosch at the Times Herald-Record has a story about the news. In his account, it seems that the "grouting" isn't your ordinary around-the-bathtub kind:
[The plan] calls for a high-pressure injection of cement to fill cracks in the tunnel along Route 209 in Wawarsing.
Bosch also writes that there are 4,715 more feet of leaky tunnel in Rosemont than in Wawarsing:
Underwater cameras found that 5,200 linear feet of the tunnel is cracked near Roseton, a small hamlet in the Town of Newburgh. An additional 485 feet is cracked in three separate sections in Wawarsing.
That explains why Ulster County isn't getting its own tunnel bypass.
