Monday, June 6, 2011

Alley Creek to be less crappy

From the Times Ledger:

A newly completed sewer facility in Bayside will keep the water in northeast Queens cleaner and its streets dryer.

Last week, the commissioner of the city Department of Environmental Protection announced the completion of the Alley Creek Combined Sewer Overflow Facility, which will reduce the amount of pollutants discharged into Alley Creek and Little Neck Bay.

“The completion of the Alley Creek CSO Facility is a major step forward in our efforts to improve harbor water quality, especially in northeast Queens,” DEP Commissioner Cas Holloway wrote in a statement.

The city’s waste and stormwater systems are integrated with one another, and when heavy rains push the system beyond capacity, it has to discharge the mix, which can be detrimental to the flora and fauna that populate the waterways.

When the two concrete barrels of the new retention facility overflow during large storm events, the adjacent storage tanks have the capacity to store up to 5 million gallons. According to the DEP, this decreases the overall volume of combined overflows discharged into Alley Creek by about 54 percent each year.

The DEP also rehabilitated the Old Douglaston Pump Station, which now has the capacity to pump more than 80 million gallons of wastewater a day from the Alley Creek CSO to the Tallman Island Wastewater Treatment Plant for treatment and disinfection.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The project's above ground mechanical component next to the Alley Pond Center is absolute visual pollution.

What will be done to mask this eyesore?

What happened to the One Percent for Art promise made by DEP at the first public presentation years ago?

Anony2 said...

this decreases the overall volume of combined overflows discharged into Alley Creek by about 54 percent each year.

Why didn't they build something that would decrease 80 or 90 percent of the overflow?