• Equipment Failure Sends Raw Sewage into Hempstead Bay •
A small article in a recent edition of Newsday announced that an equipment failure at Nassau County's Cedar Creek sewage treatment plant in Wantagh released 51,000 gallons of raw sewage, some of which spilled into East Hempstead Bay.
In case you are unaware, East Hempstead Bay is part of Hempstead Bay, the body of water that is in our backyards, and where the outflow from the Bay Park sewage treatment plant flows into.
The malfunction at Cedar Creek forced the DEC to close over 500 acres shell fishing areas so as to prevent any human consumption of contaminated shellfish and clearly illustrates Nassau County’s failure to maintain its’ infrastructure properly.
And yet the story disappeared after one day. No public outcry, no environmental groups screaming that this is a travesty, no supposedly “green” politicians stepping up to ensure us this won’t happen again. Nothing at all.
Am I crazy to think that there’s a real serious problem going on when 51,000 gallons of raw sewage are dumped into the bay we all use for our recreation and no one is up in arms about it? That’s 51,000 gallons of raw sewage dumped into the bay where our children go swimming. 51,000 gallons of raw sewage dumped into the bay where we catch fish that end up on our dinner table.
What safeguards are in place to make sure that the equipment at the Bay Park plant will not similarly fail? Cedar Creek handles about 58 million to 60 million gallons of treated sewage daily, approximately the same as Bay Park. What will happen if we suffer an equipment malfunction as well? How much raw sewage can be dumped into the bay before it dies completely?
The county’s practice of placing band-aids on major problems is nothing new, but here we all saw the result of the quick fix and the result is not pretty. The Bay Park plant, which has been running 24 hours a day, seven days a week for several decades to pump almost 60 million gallons of sewage daily, has gotten general maintenance on its equipment, but there have been no major upgrades in the past twenty years. Are we sitting on an ecological time bomb?
Now imagine that the county had gotten their wish of consolidating the sewage from Cedarhurst, Lawrence and Long Beach into our rapidly aging sewage treatment plant at Bay Park. I believe the extra waste pumped into the Bay Park facility from those plants would be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Let’s act before the camel’s back is broken.
