~ The Bay Park Sewage Treatment Plant ~

Nassau County's Sewage Treatment Plant at Bay Park was built in the late 40's and was designed to handle 27 Million Gallons Daily (MGD) of raw sewage. The plant was expanded in 1960 to add waste capacity up to 60 MGD. In the late 80's the plant upgrade their preliminary treatment facilities with new screens and pumps and built new Scavenger Waste Facilities, an aeration tank, clarifier tanks and five new aerobic fluidized bed reactors. Recent construction projects and upgrades to equipment have raised the capacity of the Bay Park plant to 70 MGD. Studies indicate that the average flow is approximately 60 MGD.

The plant works somewhat like this: At some point during the day, over 500,000 residents from all around Nassau County will take a dump then flush the toilet bowl. That waste comes flowing through sewer pipes from all these communities and intersect and connect then eventually flows into the plant. The plant then sends the waste through various sized screens/filters that remove the "grit". The grit that was screened is then removed and disposed of at a landfill somewhere. The waste water or "effluent" (actually it should be called doody water) then has chlorine added to it and is pumped into tanks to remove the sludge, which is pumped into another tank. The sludge then goes through a "dewatering" process to create Dewatered Sludge Cakes™ (yummy!). The delectable sludge cakes are then trucked out to Pennsylvania where they turn the sludge cakes into fertilizer or something like that. The waste water then flows through more screens to remove any remaining doody particles and then they dump a bunch more chlorine into it then pump the effluent through a pipe to it's final destination in Reynolds Channel.

During low tide the effluent runs out via gravity and it's pumped out during high tide when the pipe is submerged. The Bay Park plant's outfall pipe dumps chlorinated effluent into Reynolds Channel and on an incoming tide, all of that chemically treated effluent and all the nitrates and other solid particles wash into the back bays (our beaches) and settle on the bay floor.

The county put new caps on the aeration units to reduce the stench a few years back, but as we all know, that ain't really working out too well. The outfall pipe into Reynolds Channel ain't so hot either. According to reports, the plant exceeded the permit limit for excessive solids in the effluent seven days in 2004, six days in 2005 and six days in 2006. The plant also had violations for exceeding monthly averages for daily effluent flow, too much solid waste in the effluent, and too much total monthly coliform. All these violations were attributed to excessive rainfall (There's coliform in rainfall?). In 2007, the plant exceeded their daily effluent limit 15 times! This time they blamed heavy rain and repair work being done to some equipment. All this means to us is our beaches are closed due to high bacteria levels in the water . . . . the doody water.

The plant has also been adding to the county's coffers by processing grease from Suffolk County. Suffolk does not allow their sewage treatment facilities to process scavenger waste, commonly known as FOG (fats, oils & grease), because it screws up the machinery and makes the plant function poorly. This has been happening at our plant for the last few years. In 2005 alone, the plant exceeded its design capacity for 8 out of 12 months due to the FOG introduced into the plant. At the community meeting at East Rockaway High School on 3/19/08, County Executive Tom Suozzi told the citizens of Nassau County that the Bay Park plant would completely stop processing FOG by April 30, 2008 and the scavenger waste trucks would go to other destinations such as Glen Cove for processing, thereby reducing up to 45 trucks a week from our small community back roads.

The county now wants to pump the sewage from the Cedarhurst plant which has an average daily flow of slightly less than 1 MGD. The Lawrence plant has an average daily flow of 1.3 MGD. The Lawrence plant operated over design capacity for 240 days from 2002 to 2005 and was considering a plant upgrade to handle 2MGD.

But what about "Peak Flow"? Peak Flow is the time a plant is inundated with waste water and it occurs on a daily basis when the majority of people who are tied into a similar sewer system are at home taking a shower, running the dishwasher, doing laundry and, of course, flushing the crapper. According to a county study, the Peak Hourly Flow for Lawrence is 1.7 MGD and a whopping 3.7 MGD for Cedarhurst. That's potentially over 5 MGD of sewage rushing towards Bay Park on any given day. Mysteriously, the county study makes no mention of Peak Flow periods for the Bay Park plant.

The NYSDEC is soon going to require stricter limitations on the excessive amounts of chlorine, ammonia and nitrates (and doody?) in the effluent that already dumps into Reynolds Channel on a daily basis, which would mean they have to do upgrades at the plant whether they want to or not. It's time to start thinking about an ocean outfall pipe, but let's do it correctly, not as part of a voter approved environmental bond.

The sewer plants in western Suffolk and at Cedar Creek both have an ocean outfall pipe. The plant at Bay Park has been waiting over 40 years to receive the ocean outfall pipe it so desperately needs to stop the destruction of Hempstead Bay. Every day the county puts off trying to secure the funds needed to install the ocean outfall pipe at Bay Park is another day of over 70 million gallons of chlorinated effluent (doody water) being dumped into Reynolds Channel and leading the bay to its impending doom by choking the very life from it.

These are facts from the county's sewer consolidation study, yet even with all this information detailing the negative impact consolidation would have, the county contends that the Bay Park plant is in generally good working condition and is capable of handling approximately 7.5 MGD of additional sewage intake with no ill effects to the overall performance of the plant or to the environment.

ARE WE SITTING ON AN ECOLOGICAL TIME BOMB?

If you would like to see former County Executive Tom Suozzi's "Master Plan" Consolidation Feasibility Study please go to: www.nassaucountyny.gov then follow the department links to the Department of Public Works wastewater treatment page.

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