Some great Alley Creek photography

There's a great photo essay about Alley Creek over at Curbed today.

Today's sprayings

Alley Creek meeting

From Bayside Patch:

In an ongoing effort to limit the amount of storm runoff draining into Alley Creek in northeast Queens, the city Parks Department is holding a community forum to bring residents into the decision-making process.

At the end of this month, Parks will host a meeting in Douglaston to discuss Alley Creek’s watershed management plan to protect and enhance the area’s ecological resources, a spokesman said. The meeting, scheduled for Jan. 31 at 6 p.m. at Alley Pond Environmental Center, will focus primarily on open space parkland surrounding Alley Creek, where storm water runoff naturally drains into the creek and nearby Little Neck Bay.

The city Parks Natural Resources Group will seek community input as it develops its goals for a watershed-wide management plan to keep water at Alley Creek clean, Parks said. Residents of northeast Queens will have their chance to weigh in on issues of flooding, sewage runoff, environmental habitats and water quality.

The discussion comes more than a year after the city Department of Environmental Protection announced the completion of a $130 million Combined Sewer Overflow facility at Alley Creek, which keeps sewage from running off into the nearby waters.

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.