Sewer system fixes will be costly

May 20, 2008  Letter appeared in The Journal News

Rockland Sewer District #1 is in big trouble. The District which services Ramapo and Clarkstown is between a rock and a hard place. The rock is the lawsuit against the District by Upper Saddle River under the federal Clean Waters Act. The hard place is New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation.

Five years ago, I suggested in this newspaper that illegal sewer connections would result in sewage flowing out of Ramapo manholes. What I didn’t know at the time was that it was already happening. Of course, we now have well documented proof of enormous sewer overflows in both reports to the DEC, and photographs and videos taken by irate neighbors and displayed on the Preserve Ramapo website. (Chart of spills here.)

For years the DEC ignored the problem, but it finally demanded that the District stop the massive sewer overflows. The District first proposed that a second pipe be installed from the critical bottleneck in Airmont down to the sewer treatment plant in Orangeburg. This solution was based on the engineering study required by the DEC and carried out by the engineering firm of Stearns and Wheler.

The Stearns and Wheler study found that during heavy rainstorms the "peak instantaneous" surge of sewage mixed with rain water averaged 4.7 times the normal flow of sewage. When one considers that the normal flow of sewage is only 20 million gallons a day, and that the capacity of the treatment plant is only 29 million gallons a day, it looks to me like all this "solution" would have done is to move the disaster from Airmont down to the treatment plant.

The DEC quite properly rejected this "solution", and instead told the District that it had to eliminate the illegal sewer connections that Stearns and Wheler found are widespread. The problem, of course, is that the District has done its best to ignore these illegal connections for many years, and smoke testing for these connections is not very reliable. Meanwhile, we continue to enrich the developers who have friends and a free ride at Ramapo Town Hall. Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence seems not the least bit concerned with the impact that the very rapid growth of Monsey is having upon our sewers.

The only solution that I see is the rehabilitation and expansion of our poorly maintained drainage system, the expansion of our storm sewer system and then a major political effort to encourage people to connect their illegal sump pumps and drains to expanded storm sewers. We are talking about improvements that will take many years, require that roads be torn up in dense and poorly drained areas, and could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Rockland County legislature, which is controlled by Democratic Party boss Ilan Schoenberger, refuses to question the judgment of Sewer District #1. Like St. Lawrence, who is also his political protégé and a sewer commissioner, Schoenberger will not recognize that we have an environmental and fiscal emergency.