What Smells Around Lehman? and NYC??

    Ever  wonder why at times there is a foul smell in and around Lehman High School? Actually, many bodies of water around New York City have a stench. An example of this is the White Stone Creek directly adjacent to Lehman High School and the Bronx River which is also in poor condition. The problem seems to be Combined Sewage Overflows or CSO.  This problem occurs when heavy rain, sleet, and snow raises the water levels and then combines with water from the sewer system causing overflows of dirty water.  CSO also occurs when the water in the rivers and from sewage waste mix at central sewage treatment locations. There seems to be a flaw in the sewage system causing plants to overload and reach their capacity, dumping untreated sewage back into the city’s water system.

    New York City’s solution to this problem has been to place underground storage tanks that hold up to a billion gallon of sewage near local rivers. The Department of Environmental Protection thinks that this will stop these overflows in times of heavy rain or storms. After a heavy rain period the water will be pumped out of the tunnel and sent to a water treatment plant.  Some cities have expanded their basic sewage treatment capacity to handle some or all of their CSO volume. An example of this is the Flushing Bay Combined Sewer Outfall Retention Facility. These plants disinfect this polluted water by putting sodium hypochlorite, or bleach, as the water enters the treatment plant. This process of treatment takes about 20 to 30 minutes. During this time, bacteria is killed and large solid materials are dissolved.

    New York City may not be the best city when it comes to the quality of water in the surrounding rivers, but we sure have some good ideas. One of the many ideas that came out of Mayor Bloomberg’s office was to implement the PlaNYC project which would set up many different ideas based on what the community needs. According to www.nyc.gov the plan is to find solutions to environmental pollution in NYC. The growing population in NYC demands a plan like PlaNYC, which has many resources and many solutions on how to deal with such issues as CSO problems. The main point is to understand that there are solutions and they start with us.

www.nyc.gov  has many solutions to these issues and the website goes on to talk about it.