$1.5 Billion Plan Would Cut Sewage Flow Into New York City Waters

The Bloomberg administration wants to invest up to $1.5 billion over the next 20 years on new environmental techniques to reduce the flow of sewage into the city’s waterways.
The plan, announced on Tuesday by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, calls for building an infrastructure to capture and retain storm water before it reaches the sewer system and overloads it. The city would foster investments in projects like green roofs with plantings, porous pavement for parking lots, rain barrels, wetlands and depressions for collecting water in parks, for example.

Such strategies would complement more traditional methods to control sewage overflows like underground storage tanks and tunnel systems.

The plan is intended to block the overflow of untreated sewage and storm water into bodies of water like New York Harbor, Jamaica Bay and Newtown Creek when it rains. This week, Newtown Creek, which straddles Brooklyn and Queens, was designated a federal Superfund cleanup site by the Environmental Protection Agency because of severe pollution that includes discharges from sewer pipes that would otherwise overwhelm the city’s 14 wastewater treatment plants.

And another sewage-choked body, Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, was designated a Superfund site in March.

The problem of overflow from sewers is common around the country, and the city’s proposed solutions parallel approaches that are being tried in other cities.

City officials said that the natural features like plantings would help reduce sewer overflows by 40 percent by 2030 and reduce the city’s sewer management costs by $2.4 billion over 20 years, helping to keep water bills down for ratepayers. Up to 30 billion gallons of overflows from the city’s sewer system, which carries both sanitary sewage and storm water from the streets, end up in the waterways each year.

“Our green infrastructure plan is bringing a new approach to an old problem by using natural means to capture the storm water that too frequently overloads the system,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a statement. “The plan will help clean our waterways, green the city and reduce the costs for residents and business owners, who pay the bills for maintaining the city’s water and sewer systems.”

The federal Environmental Protection Agency promotes green infrastructure as a cost-effective and environmentally preferable alternative to conventional overflow management. Such methods also draw support from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which enforces federal Clean Water Act requirements and consent orders under which New York City is upgrading its treatment plants and dealing with the overflow issue.

James Tierney, the department’s assistant commissioner for water resources, said the state had already approved a similar green infrastructure plan for the City of Syracuse and for Onondaga County.

“It’s a way to hold the water in the landscape and do it in a way that beautifies a community,” he said.

Mr. Tierney said the department would undertake a careful review of the engineering involved in New York City’s plan, but added, “We’re interested in exploring it and making it happen.”

Environmental groups say that sewer overflows are the biggest water quality problem in the region, keeping many waterways from meeting federal standards for fishing, swimming and a healthy habitat for wildlife.

Paul Gallay, executive director of the environmental group Riverkeeper, which monitors water quality in the waterways around the city, called the mayor’s plan “a good start.”

“Green infrastructure is great, but there has to be enough of it to achieve water quality standards, and it has to be complemented with the more traditional approaches,” he said. “It’s a question of the mix.”

Eric Goldstein, New York City director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, also welcomed the plan, saying it was a step “in the right direction” for addressing overflow.

“There will be some spirited negotiations to secure agreement on the all-important details,” he predicted.

Cas Holloway, the city’s environmental protection commissioner, said that most of the efforts would be financed through capital projects like roads and sidewalks. The city would also impose requirements for new private residential and commercial development, effectively adding $900 million in private investment to the $1.5 billion outlay.

For example, the city plans to tighten regulations to limit the amount of runoff allowed to emerge from a new property.

The goal, Mr. Holloway said, is for the city’s landscape to absorb about 12 billion gallons of untreated runoff and wastewater a year that now fouls up the waterways. “You need to make the city more permeable,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/29/science/earth/29sewage.html?hpw