State Announces Plan To Get Wastewater Out Of Bays

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced a $354 million project to significantly improve the water quality of Long Island's Western Bays. The solution will divert treated waste from the Bay Park Wastewater Treatment Plant, through an abandoned aqueduct under Sunrise Highway and to the existing Cedar Creek outfall, which diffuses treated sewage nearly three miles into the Atlantic Ocean.

The project will prevent the discharge of 19 billion gallons of treated sewage into the warm, shallow Western Bays each year, eliminating harmful nitrogen pollution to jump start the rejuvenation of vital marshlands that protect communities from waves and storm surge. New York State and Nassau County are investing $277 million in the project with the remaining funds being provided by federal sources.

"New York is building back better and smarter than ever before, and we are committed to upgrading our infrastructure to protect our water quality and natural resources," said Cuomo. "This project will permanently remove tens of billions of gallons of sewage from the Western Bays, restoring our natural barriers to extreme weather and revitalizing our most critical ecosystems."

Built in 1949, the Bay Park facility serves more than 500,000 Nassau County residents and discharges an average of 52 million gallons of treated sewage into Reynolds Channel each day. This discharge impacts nearly 10,000 acres of water and tidal marshland in the Western Bays, from Atlantic Beach to Point Lookout, including Hewlett Harbor and Baldwin Harbor. Due in large part to nitrogen in the treated sewage from the Bay Park plant, the Western Bays has become impaired by significant blooms of macro-algae and other related water quality impacts, such a low dissolved oxygen. Peer-reviewed scientific studies have also linked excess nitrogen to the damage and ultimate disintegration of coastal marsh islands that serve as a resilient barrier to storm surge and associated waves.

Long considered an intractable and expensive problem, this bold, creative solution, when completed, will allow for the rapid and dramatic ecological recovery of the Western Bays at a substantially lower cost and shorter construction schedule. Previous proposals to build a brand-new ocean outfall from the Bay Park facility into the Atlantic would have cost more than $600 million and taken nearly a decade to construct.

However, experts from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and Nassau County uncovered an unused 100-year old aqueduct in usable condition that can be connected to the existing Cedar Creek ocean outfall, saving at east $200 million and ensuring the project will rapidly advance.

The project will discontinue use of the Reynolds Channel outfall and construct a two-mile, 72-inch connecting pipe system north from Bay Park to the county-owned aqueduct that runs under Sunrise Highway. The project will also rehabilitate an eight-mile stretch of the aqueduct by removing the 10 gate valves and slip-lining the 72-inch abandoned main with a fiberglass pipe. Additionally, the project will install a two-mile, 72-inch connecting pipe from the aqueduct to the existing Cedar Creek out fall pipe, which is six and a half miles long and will carry treated effluent nearly three miles into the Atlantic Ocean.

In January 2014, New York State announced $810 million for the multi-year resilient rebuild the Bay Park facility after damage sustained in Superstorm Sandy. The project includes the repair and upgrade of numerous treatment systems, collection systems, pump stations, and the installation of engineered structures to protect the plant from a 500-year level storm, a storm that exceeds the intensity of Superstorm Sandy.

At an additional cost of more than $30 million, Nassau County has agreed to install two nitrogen treatment systems at its Bay Park facility that will reduce nitrogen concentrations in treated sewage by up to 50 percent.

Photo: New York State