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Tertiary Treatment Can Save Our Bay!

On Friday, April 16th, several members of the Green Bay Parkers met with Deputy County Executive Rob Walker, DPW Commissioner Shila Shah-Gavnoudias and Nassau County Attorney John Ciampoli to discuss the state of sewage treatment at the Bay Park plant and how to stop dumping almost 60 million gallons of treated sewage effluent into the bay each and every day.

We discussed various options available to help clean up the bay and all came to the same conclusion - Tertiary Treatment is the way to do it.

What The Hell Is That Thing?

The photo above shows a pipe pumping water into an overflowing dumpster thingy down by Swift Creek in the south east corner of Bay Park.

Along with everyone else, we've been wondering what the hell it is.

A local resident, who happens to be an engineer for a local municipality, checked it out and said it was just a temporary structure to pump ground water away from the plant. The reason for it being there is that the plant is undergoing an expansion to add a new de-chlorinization process to the Bay Park plant.

In order to pour the foundation for the new expansion, the construction crew must rid the area they are digging out of any ground water. Being we are not that high above sea level and the plant is submerged several feet underground, there is a lot of ground water that needs to be moved.

DEC regulations do not allow construction crews to pump ground water directly into a waterway like Swift Creek because of the sediment picked up via pumping. The water must first be pumped through a system of screens to remove sediment (that dumpster thingy) and then the clean water flows into the existing waterway. When the dumpster thingy is full of sediment, it is hauled away and replaced with another if need be.

There is a stink to the water, but that's supposedly just a natural stink of stagnant ground water being all stirred up due to pumping it through the pipe. So all in all it's nothing serious.

The de-chlorinization process is a good thing in that it will help to remove enough chlorine from the effluent so that the county can stay in compliance with new, stricter DEC limits on the amount of chlorine that is allowed to be dump into the bay.

So, while the chlorine removal is great, it does nothing to remove the thousands of pounds of nitrates, coliform, pharmaceuticals, endocryn disrupters, etc. that find their way into the bay through the almost 60 million gallons of sewage that is dumped into our bay on a daily basis.

WE must keep reminding the county that they must work diligently and expeditiously to find a solution to end the practice of dumping treated sewage into our bay and creating an environmental disaster.

Cedar Creek Sewage Treatment Plant Hearing

On Thursday, February 25th, several members of the Green Bay Parkers went to the county legislature to attend a Public Works committee hearing about the state of sewage treatment at the Cedar Creek plant in Wantagh.

The hearing was held after the county received warnings from plant workers saying that the facility was in bad shape and was also being mismanaged. The county conducted its own investigation into these allegations and held the hearing to report on their findings.

And what findings they were! The plant was literally crumbling away piece by piece, integral pieces of machinery were in disrepair, back-up equipment was broken, parts were missing and never properly replaced, machines were jury-rigged to keep them operational and leaky pipes and puddles of sewer water were located all throughout the facility.

On top of all this it was found the plant does not even have the necessary man power needed to keep it running properly. Exhausted workers are pulling 16 hour shifts on a daily basis to keep the plant running.

The hearing started with a brief overview of the county’s findings, then Plant Supervisor Rich Catugno and Deputy DPW Commissioner Joe Davenport were brought up to the podium to try and defend the plant operations in front of the Public Works Committee members.

Concerned community residents, plant workers and union leaders then had their turn at the podium and all stated the same thing - the Cedar Creek plant is an environmental disaster in the making, and things at the Bay Park facility aren’t any better.

After almost two hours of testimony, it was proven that the Cedar Creek plant is indeed in a state of major disrepair and could be the cause of an environmental disaster in the not too distant future. The committee members then all agreed that something must be done to fix up all the broken equipment and more workers should be hired.

This is an unaltered photo of Hewlett Point Beach taken June 7, 2009

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