Long Branch Sewerage Treatment Plant Odor Remedy Project Nears Completion

Residents living around the Long Branch Sewerage Treatment Plant on Joline Avenue should be noticing that air is smelling much better in recent months.

The Long Branch Sewerage Authority's Treatment Plant Modification Project is helping mitigate the smell around the plant by constructing odor abatement facilities.

The project should be completed by March 31, 2012, according to Long Branch Sewerage Authority Process Control Compliance Officer Laurie Hartnett.

"It's about 70 percent completed and all the major construction is done," Hartnett said in an interview this week.

Hartnett said the work was originally scheduled to be completed in November but that "terrible winter weather and issues getting equipment," delayed the project.

She said the part of the project that has been completed has already helped control the smell from the plant.

"We haven't gotten any complaints since July," Hartnett said. "It's been looking good and smelling good."

She explained that the scrubber systems that have already been installed clean the air discharged from the plant so that it will be "odor free."

She said the final phase of the project is the installation of digester covers which will allow the sewerage authority to use methane gas to provide heat for the facility.

The $11 million project, which is being done by APS Construction Company, Inc., is being funded by the Long Branch Sewerage Authority as well an New Jersey Environmental Infrastructure Trust (NJEIT) loan and funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), according to Hartnett.

About $5 million of the project, and of the remaining balance will be paid using low interest and zero percent interest loans from the NJEIT. The authority will bond the balance of the cost to pay back the loan from NJEIT.

Around the time the authority began planning the project, a group called the Long Branch Concerned Citizens Coalition, began voicing its problems with the plant.

Hartnett said the authority had been planning the project before the group's concerns were made public and that the plans had always included "odor abatement systems."