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How New York City Is Learning From Hurricane Sandy
Flooding near the Rockaway wastewater treatment plant.
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n October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit New York City. It was the most serious hurricane to hit New York in many years, flooding large parts of the city, damaging buildings and roads, and knocking out power. The hurricane posed significant challenges to New York’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), particularly to its wastewater treatment infrastructure. Many of its wastewater resource recovery facilities and pump stations lost power or were damaged by the storm surge. DEP’s Alan Cohn, the managing director for integrated water management, Colin Johnson, an account manager with the capital construction bureau, and Tara Deighan, a deputy press secretary, speak with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about DEP’s response to Hurricane Sandy and its planning for future extreme weather events 50 or 100 years into the future. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about DEP and its services.
Joshua Dill: Would you give us an overview of DEP’s wastewater infrastructure? Tara Deighan: We have 14 wastewater resource recovery facilities and 96 pump stations across the 5 boroughs. We
20 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER
Joshua Dill: Would you tell us about your experience during Hurricane Sandy and its effects on the wastewater system? Colin Johnson: Ten of our 14 treatment plants and 42 of our 96 pump stations were adversely affected in some way by the storm, whether they were flooded, suffered power outages, or something else. Alan Cohn: We fared relatively well compared to some neighboring municipalities. Bay Park Sewage Treatment Plant on Long Island and Passaic Valley in New Jersey were down for several weeks. Our longest outage was the Rockaway plant on the Rockaway Peninsula, which was down for 3 days. That is the smallest of our 14 treatment plants, so we fared relatively well. Those outages resulted in raw or partially treated sewage being discharged into the harbor from those treatment
PHOTO COURTESY OF NYC WATER.
Tara Deighan: DEP’s primary objective is to provide 9.6 million New Yorkers with clean drinking water. We also treat 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater every day. In addition to that, we try to mitigate hazardous air and noise pollution.
treat 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater on a dry day and can handle double that capacity during a wet weather event. We have about 7,500 miles of sewers that deliver that wastewater to our plants. Rather than simply treating that wastewater and dumping it into the harbor, we are trying to recover resources from it. There are actually various usable resources that result from the treatment process, including biosolids, methane gas, and of course clean water, which is treated to be biologically similar to the water body it is going out into. We are seeing this trend on the national level as well: not just treating wastewater, but recovering resources from it.
