Thursday, October 1, 2026
Turning a faucet or watering a lawn are relatively simple tasks for Long Island residents, but there’s nothing simple about the way the water makes it way to the thousands of homes on the south shore of Nassau County. That’s the job of New York American Water, which currently has major and routine construction projects going on at its plants in Lynbrook and Valley Stream.
NYAW, which has its offices based in Lynbrook, has 34 plants in the southern portion of Nassau County to pump water from aquifers and supply it to more than 370,000 residents each day.
Its North Lynbrook plant, located on Whitehall Street, is in the midst of a total rebuild, and when it reopens in August, it will have the capability to filter iron of out water, along with a few other improvements. The plant’s two wells will each have the capability of producing 2 million gallons of water a day.
Richard Kern, director of operations for NYAW, said the company closely monitors the water quality at each of its plants, and decided it was time to upgrade the Lynbrook facility because of the increasing iron levels at the plant, which features two wells. “The iron levels in one of the wells started to exceed the limits that we can use for drinking water,” he said, “so we’re investing in a filtration plant to remove iron.”
He added that iron levels will be reduced approximately 10 times from the levels of the existing wells and that removing iron from water is important more so for aesthetic purposes rather than health.
“The water we send to our customers meets or exceeds every standard,” Kern said, “but if it’s not perfectly clear customers are not going to be happy. Down in the well, 500 feet below the surface, the rock and sand layers have a very high natural iron content and some of that gets into that water, so when you bring it up it’s not a contamination, it’s just the geological characteristic of that water.”
