CSO Sewage Alerts: One Week for NY, One Year for NJ?

This is the first of a three-part blog about Combined Sewer Overflows.

In January Governor Christie pocket vetoed a requirement that people be notified whenever Combined Sewer Overflows dumped raw sewage into rivers and estuaries.

CSOs are old urban stormwater systems designed to reroute untreated sewage into stormwater systems when it rains to avoid blowing out sewer plants. The one that's still doing that under Broad Street in Newark was built in 1854, when they were a good idea.

From Perth Amboy north, there are about 180 CSOs in New Jersey, and about 450 in New York City, that discharge into the Hudson-Raritan Estuary (there are a total of 217 in NJ and 937 in NY state). The EPA estimates that 23 billion gallons of sewage overflow every year into the Hudson-Raritan Estuary that empties into the ocean between Sandy Hook and Breezy Point. Under the right (wrong) wind conditions CSOs directly impact beaches at the Bayshore and the ocean. Some CSOs bypass when it rains as little as one-tenth of an inch.

The law would have also required posting warning signs on the outfalls so that people would know what they were in for if they fell out of their boat or off their water skis. Warning signs on hundreds of outfalls would be ug-ly, but without them you don't get to make the choice about risking your health. In NJ, the decision for now is to go with aesthetics. Obviously this is of no help to people who recreate along the northern shore of Raritan Bay, or in the Hackensack and Passaic Rivers.

New York's Sewage Right-To-Know law was passed May 1, 2013. You can sign up for notifications from the link near the top of the NYDEC Sewage RTK webpage. These emails contain information that is about a week old. A spreadsheet that lists every overflow is not updated any sooner. There is a link to maps of NY's CSOs. A one-week wait is not useful except in retrospect.

New Jersey Sewage RTK – A Summer Away?

The NJDEP is revising the CSO permits so that they comply with EPA's mandate – one of the Nine Minimum Controls - to “ensure that the public receives adequate notification of CSO occurrences and CSO impacts.” According to the their CSO FAQ, “All draft CSO permits are scheduled to be issued in calendar year 2013. The final permits are scheduled to be issued in 2014.” The individual municipal draft permits are listed on this page.

The General Permit for Combined Sewer Systems states that municipalities will have 180 days from the “Effective Date of the Permit” - whenever the NJDEP approves it during 2014 - to implement their Public Participation Plan. “Unless otherwise directed by the Department.” However, the “permittee should not wait for receipt of a written approval or the authorization to proceed from the Department.” So … maybe by the summer of 2015?

Municipalities in NJ have a total of 217 CSOs discharging into the Hudson-Raritan Estuary and the Delaware River (listed by county and the number of CSOs in Part 3 of this blog). The NY/NJ Baykeeper has posted very useful maps of the CSOs in the Hudson-Raritan Estuary by eight watershed areas where they discharge.

There is a little known, convoluted, quirky, effective gauntlet you can run through if you really, really want to find out if there has been a CSO sewage bypass in NJ: NJDEP's online database, Data Miner. Unlike the one-week lag time in the NYRTK, the Hotline reports (called “Incidents/Complaints” in Data Miner) are updated pretty near real-time. Instructions about using it have been left for Part 3 of this blog.

The second of a three-part blog about Combined Sewer Overflows is at http://middletown-nj.patch.com/blogs/bill-simmonss-blog.