April 17, 2006
Orange all set for sewer flow
By Chris McKennaTimes Herald-Record
[email protected]Harriman
- The Orange County sewage treatment plant on River Road used to be a
facility in crisis, unfit to handle the rising tide of wastewater in
the county's fast-growing southeastern corner.
But this month,
after an 18-year saga of sewer-hookup bans, lawsuits by developers and
environmentalists and a fine for excessive discharge into the Ramapo
River, the crisis recedes with the completion of a $26 million plant
expansion conceived a decade ago.
Suddenly, things are looking good.
Not
only do they have a bigger Harriman plant, but county officials say
they plan - at least in the short term - to keep using the Kiryas Joel
sewage plant they borrowed as a stopgap measure, which adds another
cushion of capacity.
What's more, there's a fallback option if
things get tight again: new filter technology that would enable the
Harriman plant to process another 3 million gallons a day, according to
consultants who just tested it.
Add up all the factors, and a
region habitually short of sewage plant space could ultimately find
itself flush with it - the key, whether residents like it or not, to
continued development in the region.
The Harriman plant was built
in the mid-1970s and remains the only sewage plant that Orange County
government operates. It treats wastewater from the villages of Monroe,
Kiryas Joel, Harriman and Chester, and parts of the towns of Monroe,
Chester, Blooming Grove and Woodbury.
In 2000, facing potentially
costly lawsuits by developers denied sewer hookups because the Harriman
plant could take no more, the county agreed to temporarily lease and
run Kiryas Joel's new sewer plant to satisfy pent-up demand.
That
arrangement has now stretched on almost two years longer than
envisioned. As of last month, the county had spent about $4 million to
lease, staff and power the Kiryas Joel plant, county spokesman Steve
Gross said.
Why prolong that expense now that the Harriman expansion is finished?
"Even
though we're expanding the capacity," Gross replied, referring to the
Harriman plant, "there's always a need for more. The demand is only
going to keep growing. That's why we're keeping all our options on the
table."
Peter Hammond, the deputy commissioner in charge of the
Harriman plant, added: "The objective is to keep the supply ahead of
the demand curve, so we don't end up with the kind of problems that we
historically have had."
The Harriman plant can now treat up to 6
million gallons of wastewater per day, having just gotten a
1.5-million-gallon boost. With the Kiryas Joel plant, the county has
another million gallons at its disposal.
Monthly flow figures
show true demand is well below those levels. During two dry months last
year, the Harriman plant treated less than 2.7 million gallons of
wastewater a day on average, or less than half of what it can now
handle.
By January, though, the plant's wildly fluctuating flows
were back up to 6 million gallons - the result, Hammond says, of rain
seeping into the sewer pipes through cracks and illegal storm-drain
connections.
That wide gap confirms what county officials have
said before about the plant's chronically excessive discharge: that
storm water was bulking the levels. It also suggests that combating
that problem more aggressively would greatly ease demand on the
facility.
Another bright prospect for the beleaguered Harriman
plant: The town and village of Chester plan to free up almost another 1
million gallons of capacity at the facility - the equivalent of about
4,300 homes.
Chester Supervisor Bill Tully says those communities
hope within the next couple of years to redirect their sewer flow to a
new plant in Chester and sell back to the county the capacity they pay
for at Harriman.
Long an advocate for regional water and sewer
systems, County Executive Ed Diana might now see his chance in
southeastern Orange, where the sewage situation is less dire. He's been
approaching local officials about consolidating the communities that
use the Harriman plant into a single sewer district to be run by the
county.
"It's still all in the preliminary stages right now," Gross said. "It's a goal for this administration down the road."
