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Overcast Village explains water violations
Clerical error to blame for 2015 DOH citations
Heading off concerns from residents about the safety of village water, the Board of Trustees, at its meeting on Tuesday night, addressed the Nassau County Department of Health citations that the Water Department received on Sept. 25.
The Department of Health issued three citations last month: one for not correctly testing for nitrates in the water, one for not testing for disinfection byproducts, and one for not filing the proper paperwork before replacing 150 feet of water main on Earl Avenue. The letter the DOH sent to the village is available on the Herald’s website.
Deputy Village Administrator Kathleen Murray spoke at the meeting, saying that the DOH started looking at the village’s water department as reports surfaced over the summer about the problems with brown water.
“The county Department of Health did a thorough analysis of our monitoring of the water situation in Rockville Centre, and the [it] found two instances in the past three years where we didn’t monitor the water correctly,” she said. “So we did make a mistake in those two cases, but the mistakes weren’t that we didn’t test the water. And the mistakes weren’t that the water contained elements that didn’t belong in there. They were mistakes that were more administrative in nature.”
Mayor Francis X. Murray, Deputy Mayor Nancy Howard and Village Administrator Keith Spadaro clarified for the Herald the citations that the village received, and reiterated that there were no concerns about the safety of the village’s water.
Spadaro said that the village missed the 2014 test for nitrates because of a clerical oversight. “In 2013, we tested it at all the well sites, which we’re supposed to do once a year,” he said. “There was some confusion: Our guy thought it was an 18-month test. So in 2014, it wasn’t tested.”
Spadaro added that although the village’s 10 wells were not tested for nitrates, the water from the community was tested, and no nitrates were found. “We’ve never had any nitrates,” he said, “and we’re not going to have any nitrates.”
