County continues to truck sewage through Merrick

Trucking of raw sewage from Nassau County’s Bay Park treatment plant in East Rockaway to a pumping station on Merrick Road in Merrick is continuing as the county works to fix mechanical problems at the Bay Park plant, said Bill Fonda, a state Department of Environmental Conservation spokesman, in an interview on Thursday.

The county Department of Public Works began trucking sewage in the weeks before the New Year.

According to Fonda, trucking stopped from Dec. 25 to 29 owing to hazardous driving conditions, but has since resumed.

DEC officials said equipment at the Bay Park plant has been malfunctioning since March, and the county has been forced at times to release partially treated sewage solids into Reynolds Channel, off Long Beach, as a result. The DEC ordered the county to truck up to 80,000 gallons of sewage a day from Bay Park to Merrick, where it’s sent to the Cedar Creek treatment plant in Wantagh for processing, as a way to limit the amount of solid sewage released into Reynolds Channel. Sewage released into the channel is disinfected with chlorine, Fonda noted.

He also said that the first emergency gravity belt thickener, which is needed to separate sewage solids from water, has been online at Bay Park since Dec. 20. A second such machine is scheduled to come online by the end of the week. Once the second belt thickener is operational, it will take “a few weeks or so” to get rid of excess sewage solids in Bay Park’s system.

Scott Brinton contributed to this story.

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