Environment Action Committee

League of Women Voters^®
of Schenectady County

The latest actions of the environment committee.

Environment Committee: August & September 2011. Report of the Waste Water Treatment Plant Tour, 6/21/11. Environment Committee Annual Report. CLEAN AIR ACT. Contact Environment Action Committee Chair.

Environment Committee: August & September 2011

Ruth Bonn, Environment Chair
The Environment Committee followed several issues during 2010-2011 including solid waste management in the County and City, energy saving building (the County Nursing Home and the library addition) and water quality. In November, Carol Possin took the lead organizing an informative presentation "Donʼt Waste Your Waste" with Meg Morris as presenter. Its focus was waste to energy. City Councilwoman Barbara Blanchard attended a committee meeting in May to inform the committee about solid waste management plans and special issues in the City of Schenectady. She suggested the League could help with education on recycling in the schools. In October, committee members met with County Manager Kathy Rooney and facilities engineer Don Scheuer regarding planned County building projects, the nursing home and the library addition. The committee arranged to tour the new LEED certified energy efficient Golub office. building in October to find out more about energy saving measures incorporated into that building. Members met with Niskayuna planner Kathy Matern, supervisor Joe Landry and town engineer Richard Pollock regarding the DEC citation of the town for exceeding the wastewater treatment plant capacity Carol Possin is following up this issue and in June arranged a tour of the plant for Niskayuna residents.

Report of the Waste Water Treatment Plant Tour, 6/21/11

Schenectady League of Women Voters Environment Committee The WWTP tour was led by Joe Landry (Town Supervisor), Richard Pollock (Superintendent of Engineering), Rick Hines (Plant Engineer), and Denise Murphy McGraw (Town Board). Present: Ann Hicks, Ann Bish, Johanna Petersen, Stanley Blanchard, Janet Hollocher, Carol and George Possin, Elaine Klein, Margaret Watrous, Joanne Tobiessen, Arden Rauch, and Roy Keats.
The group viewed all phases of sewage treatment, including initial grinding and removing large items to a landfill, settling out heavy sediment, skimming floatables, consuming biowaste (by "bugs" like rotofers, amoeba, and nematodes), aerating, additional settling, adding chlorine and holding the effluent until the chlorine works, releasing treated effluent into the Mohawk River, and processing remaining sludge with anaerobic digestion, and then pressing water out of the sludge to finish with dried and sterilized (heated to 400+ degrees) granules, which are trucked to a landfill. The anaerobic digester produces methane, which partially powers the plant. The final granular product could be used for fertilizer, but it contains too much copper from an uncertain source, which might be leached from copper pipes by the slightly corrosive water in the town aquifer. The town has spent $20,000 looking for the copper source because removing the copper would allow the town to sell the granular product as fertilizer instead of paying to landfill it.
The plant is licensed to process three million gallons of sewage/day, which means that it must be able to handle 4.5 million gallons under ideal, but seldom achieved, operating conditions. The following deviations are considered violations by the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC):

Average daily total flow in excess of the plants licensed capacity of 3MGD.
Less than 85% removal of BOD. Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) is the weight of oxygen consumed by dissolved and suspended biological material. BOD is a measure of how much oxygen a pollutant removes from the river where it is discharged. Such removal of oxygen kills fish and promotes algae growth.
Less than 85% removal of TSS. (Total Suspended Solids, which cloud the river, killing plants)
Any deviation from normal plant operation. The most common deviations are elimination of aeration or bypass of the one or more of the processing tanks where bugs consume the biological material.

The plant is designed to process sewage, not rain water, the latter meant to flow through a separate storm run-off system into the river. However, rain water enters the sewer system through cracked sewer pipes and illegal hookups of sump pumps and foundation drains into sewer pipes. During heavy rainstorms, up to 10 million gallons flow through the WWTP. During these periods, the plant can remove large solids and add chlorine, but cannot provide the bug consumption of biowaste and aeration. Also, the water cannot be held long enough for the chlorine to be fully effective. In addition, with large flows the other treatment processes do not have the time to be fully effective. Thus, partially treated sewage goes into the river. The Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) is concerned about the following substances entering the river: bacteria (may cause disease in living things), suspended solids (clouding the river, killing plants), and biologically active material that consumes oxygen in river water (killing fish).
Under orders from DEC, Niskayuna is proposing solutions to the rain overload of the WWTP:
1) Repair cracked sewer pipes to prevent infiltration by rainwater: The town has purchased a truck with special equipment to detect cracks in underground sewer pipes and repair them and has started this work. The town will repair cracks in an area, measuring flow increases with rain before and after the repairs. If flows are still high after pipe repairs, the town will investigate for sump pump and foundation drain connections to sewers in that area. It will take several years to complete this investigation throughout the town.
2) Direct property owners to remove illegal sump pump and foundation drain connections to sewers in areas identified with problems in #1 above: The town will investigate business hookups first, including apartments. Mr. Landry pointed out reasons for not requiring homeowners to unhook sump pumps and foundation drains: rain water not drained through sewers would drain poorly on the clay soils in some areas of town, perhaps collecting in roads or on properties; changing home hook up systems may be costly for the homeowner; and some areas do not have storm water catch basins or storm sewers to handle the storm run-off. He stated that the town would provide options to the homeowner, which may include remediation of storm water drainage by the town as well as disconnection of rain run-off from sewer pipes by the homeowner. Note that the town could simply inspect houses for illegal hook ups instead of going through this multi-year process of measuring water flows for areas where there may be illegal connections. About 18 years ago there was a inspection of all houses for illegial sump pump hook ups to the sewage system. A significant number were found. In most cases the homeowners elected to run a pipe out the basement window or wall to drain into the yard. A surprise inspection was done 6 months later, and a large fraction of the homeowners had returned the sump pump connection to the sewage system. The town may need to fine for noncompliance. 3) Build a holding tank at the WWTP to hold water for 24 hours during heavy rain to process fully later. See note below for discussion of this option. 4) Expansion of the WWTP. The DEC claims that the plant is approaching 95% of its licensed capacity, but the town's data indicate that this is not true. This is still in discussion between the town and DEC. An additional problem not discussed during the tour is pollution by storm water runoff. Even though storm water runoff into the Mohawk River contains biological, chemical and suspended solids, it is not regulated by government. These large flows also cause problems in local neighborhoods. A prime example is the Lexington and Dean area, where so much storm water overflows the storm pipe system, entering the steets and eventually going down sewage manholes, causing sewage levels to rise and overflow into the streets. Raw sewage outflow is actually prevented by pumping the sewage into tanker trucks and transporting it to the WWTP. One such event occurred in November 2010 when five trucks ran for 24 hours between the neighborhood and the WWTP. The storm drain system is variable throughout the town, even non-extistent in some neighborhoods, sometimes making it impractical to unhook sump pumps from sewer systems because there is no place for the sump pump runoff to go. Some newer neighborhoods have catch basins that allow runoff to sit and slowly seep into the ground or move more slowly to the river, leaving more sediment in the ground on the way. Some water stays in permanent ponds and never flows into the river.
The WWTP is discussed at meetings of the Niskayuna Town Board and the Public Works Committee, which are announced on the Niskayuna website calendar. The LWV Environment Committee will discuss the issues raised here at its next meeting at noon on Monday, June 12, at the Moon and River Café. Carol and George Possin
Niskayuna Sewage Discharge into the Mohawk River: A Note on the Magnitude of the Problem George Possin, PhD
How much undesirable material enters the Mohawk River from the Niskayuna WWTP? Two measures of undesirable material are BOD (biological oxygen demand--organic material suspended or dissolved in water, expressed in pounds of consumed oxygen) and TSS (total suspended solids, also expressed in pounds). I examined data from the March 2011 Discharge Monitoring Report (DMR) submitted to DEC by Niskayuna. March 2011 is an example of a recent rainy month during which non-compliance events were documented, i.e. when the average daily flow into the WWTP exceeded the plant's rated capacity and when %BOD removal was less than the required 85%.
The DEC's definition of compliance for BOD or TSS is the reduction of the concentration of these pollutants by at least 85% compared to their concentration in the flow entering the plant. Compliance for total flow is under 3 million gallons per day (MGD), which is the licensed capacity for the facility. Under perfect conditions the plant can handle 4.5 MGD. It is my impression from talking to Rick Hyde at the plant and looking at the March data that the plant can almost always effectively process ~ 3.7MGD.
What is most important is the total amount of pollutants discharged into the river. The analysis described below shows that the daily average BOD discharged into the river is 200 pounds per day when the plant is operating at average flows of less than 3.7 MGD. During March, because of the large amount of storm run-off, the average BOD was 412 pounds per day. Similarly the daily average TSS when the plant is operating at normal flow conditions is 82 pounds per day. During March it increased to a daily average of 173 pounds per day. Totals for month: > 12,000 pounds of BOD and>5,000 pounds of TSS. March 2011 was not atypical. The precipitation graph below shows that at least five of the past twelve months had repeated heavy rains. Rain fall itself is not a perfect predictor of I&I. The level of the water table and the amount of snow melt are also important factors.
Calculation details: Figure 1 shows a plot of the daily average outflow of BOD during March 2011 showing least squares fit to available data. (The WWTP does not record data for every day.) The red data and regression line are for days when the flow is below 3.7MGD when the plant is presumably operating normally. The green data and line are for days when the flow is much higher and the plant is extracting less of the BOD. The inflow BOD is also measured and is typically around 2500 pounds/day with little dependence on flow, as would be expected. Flow by itself is not a perfect predictor of BOD and TSS. Water temperature and decisions by the plant operator to change aeration and bypass some processing tanks have a strong influence on the plant efficiency. Using the two regression lines as a model for the plant operation during March, I calculated the expected amount of outflow BOD for the days with missing data. (Table of calculations is available on request.) This allows the calculation of the total actual outflow BOD during March of 12,763 pounds. Without I&I, the daily average flow for all days would be less than 3MGD, according to the town and DEC, resulting in a total of 6157 pounds BOD for the month. A similar analysis of TSS is shown in Figure 2. The total March outflow is calculated to be 5364 pounds TSS and would be 2542 without I&I. Figure 3 shows the model calculations of the BOD and TSS outflow for each day of the month of March 2011. This figure is a dramatic demonstration of the increase in pollution outflow to the river during wet weather events.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4 shows the total flow and the measured rainfall for each day in March.
Figure 4
Analysis of the holding tank proposal, Figure 5:
One proposal discussed by the town is to install a holding tank to buffer the increased flow during high I&I periods. How big would this tank have to be under March 2011 conditions as an example of a wet month? For March the flow was above the plant's licensed capacity of 3MGD from March 6 through March 24, a "wet weather event". Using the March data, on days when the inflow exceeds assumed plant capacity, the amount of liquid to retain in a holding tank of unlimited size was calculated using simple accounting mathematics. This result is shown in Figure 5. The red curve assumes a maximum flow for the plant of 3 MGD, which is its licensed capacity. Assuming a 10 million gallon tank, the tank would have overflowed 4 days into the 20+ day long wet weather event, never recovering during the remaining twenty days of March. (With the more typical actual capacity of the plant of ~3.7 MGD the tank would have overflowed on the 6th day of the wet weather event.) The holding tank would have to hold 28 million gallons in order to meet the state's requirement of never exceeding licensed flow capacity of 3 million gallons per day in March 2011. We have been told that such wet weather events are typical of the spring and fall months. Figure 6 shows the rainfall record for the Albany weather station for the last 12 months. The rainfall amounts for March do not exactly match the data provided by Niskayuna. This is presumably because the sewage treatment plant has its own rain gauge. As can be seen, March 2011 was not unusually rainy, and other months have had even larger amounts of rain. Note that spring is exceptionally problematic because snow melt adds to storm water run-off. Data from additional months is coming from the town and will be analyzed later.
Figure 6

Environment Committee Annual Report

Hydrofracking, the removal of underground natural gas by hydraulic fracturing of deep rock layers, was followed and reported on by committee member Pat Rush who is active with the state study committee. Carol Possin who is active in the Capital Region Energy Forum reported to the committee on energy issues. Ruth Bonn and Katherine Wolfram worked on planning a conference on sustainable development in collaboration with the Environmental Clearinghouse (ECOS), the Schenectady Council Environmental Advisory Council (SCEAC), the Regional Planning Center and Union College. Nancy Peterson is the committeeʼs resource person for solid waste issues. Betsy Chase performed an invaluable service as secretary. Other active committee members are Jan Elliott, Carol Furman, Cheryl Nechamen and ECOS executive director, Patrick Clear. Ruth Bonn is chair. The committee is supporting the planning, with Union students, ECOS and others, of Schenectadyʼs 350.org "Moving Planet: Day to Move Beyond Fossil Fuels" on September 24th. Plans for next year include a field trip to the Albany single stream recycling plant in October. Energy sources and conservation, solid waste management and clean water will continue to be our areas of focus. Development and delivery of a school based recycling education will be looked at. Meetings are held on the first Monday of the month at noon (the second Monday if holidays interfere) at the Moon and River Café in the Stockade. All are welcome to attend and new members are welcome. Next meeting is Monday, September 12.

CLEAN AIR ACT

The Clean Air Act saves lives. Since it was first enacted in 1970, the Clean Air Act has succeeded in cutting unhealthy levels of air pollution throughout the country, and has done so at a reasonable cost. Now the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is updating regulations under the Clean Air Act to control toxic air pollutants, curb emissions from big power plants, and limit the pollutants that are causing global climate change. Unfortunately, special interests and their allies in Congress are trying to curtail EPA's authority and sidetrack these new rules. This is a critical public health and environmental issue. But it is also a good government issue. In passing the Clean Air Act, Congress recognized that it's poorly equipped to make specific technical and scientific determinations. So Congress set overall goals, including protecting public health, and EPA was delegated responsibility to work with the best scientists and engineers in reviewing scientific data, monitoring industrial processes, and developing appropriate controls. Bypassing this process and letting Congress second-guess specific regulations at the behest of special interest lobbyists is simply bad government. It substitutes raw politics for scientific expertise. The League of Women Voters believes that new clean air regulations are needed to protect our health and our environment. Toxic air pollution and global climate change must be addressed. And the League believes that Congress should not yield to special interests and undermine EPA. Scientific and technological decisions must be based on knowledge and expertise rather than raw politics. Submitted to the Daily Gazette as a Letter to the Editor from LWVSchenectady

Contact Environment Action Committee Chair

Ruth Bonn, Chair
We meet regularly on the first Monday of each month at noon, but the location varies. Please contact for more information.

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