Tag Archives: Rensselaer

Sewage Pollution Costs Big Money

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By BRIAN NEARING of The Albany Times Union

ALBANY - Sewer rates in much of the Capital Region could be rising steadily during the next two decades under a $110 million plan to reduce sewage pollution in the Hudson River.

The plan covers Albany, Troy, Watervliet, Rensselaer, Cohoes and the village of Green Island, and calls for sewage treatment plant and collection system upgrades - including disinfection of bacteria from treated sewage - to deal with the problem of combined sewer overflows.

Such overflows occur about 90 times a year in the region when sewer plants, which also handle storm water, are overwhelmed during heavy rains and dump untreated sewage directly into the Hudson.

To pay for the work, rates would go up. In Albany, the average residential bill could rise from $334 in 2013 to $405 in 2018 and $550 in 2023, according to projections released Wednesday during a meeting on the plan at Hudson Valley Community College. In Troy, that average bill could go from $350 in 2013 to $461 in 2018 and $616 in 2023. In Cohoes, the bill could rise from $448 in 2013 to $652 in 2018 and $942 in 2023.

The $6 million plan, in the making since 2005 to address continuing violations of federal water quality rules from sewage, drew criticism because it would remove only about a quarter of the 1.2 billion gallons of raw sewage mixed with rainwater currently being dumped into the river each year. And the number of overflows would remain unchanged after the project.

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Plan For Municipal Wastewater Treatment To Be Unveiled

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By BRIAN NEARING of The Albany Times Union

ALBANY - Is the best way to clean sewage from the Hudson River to focus on tighter everyday controls on treated sewage, rather than on periodic deluges of untreated sewage that happen after heavy rains?

Officials next month will unveil a $110 million plan to reduce river pollution by requiring routine disinfection - done either with chlorine or ultraviolet light - at sewage treatment plants run by Albany, Troy, Watervliet, Rensselaer, Cohoes and the village of Green Island on the Hudson River.

And while $110 million is a lot of money, the figure is much less than what officials expected to confront when planning started in 2005, said Rocky Ferraro, director of the Capital District Regional Planning Commission.

That was when thinking focused on what to do about 1.2 billion gallons of “combined sewer overflows” annually from the municipal treatment systems, which serve more than 150,000 residents in the Capital Region.

Such overflows are caused by storm drains that empty directly into sewer pipes. During heavy rainstorms, more fluid comes into the pipes than a sewage plant can handle, so overflow valves reroute a mix of excess untreated sewage and water around the plant and into discharge pipes leading to the river.

Sewage in the river raises levels of unsafe bacteria, and can make the water unsafe for swimming, kayaking or other activities. This has been true for years after heavy rains.

But rather than reduce or redirect the overflows, planners decided it was more cost-effective to require disinfection at the sewer plants, so overall bacteria levels in the river would drop during non-overflow periods, said Ferraro.

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Hudson River Ice Was Once a Hot Commodity

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By JAMES BREIG of The Troy Record

In the 21st century, two of the big harvests in New York State are of grapes and apples. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, ice was a big “crop” along the Hudson River.

The frozen water was harvested and placed into storage sheds for use in the summer, especially in New York City. Its growth through immigration had increased the demand for ice to refrigerate foods.

A measure of the size of the harvest can be found in the Jan. 28, 1879, issue of The New York Times in a story titled “Reaping the Ice Harvest: An Unusually Large Yield from the Hudson River.” The story estimated that three million tons of ice would be taken from the Hudson.

The harvesting had to be done north of New York City because the river there contained too much salt, which inhibited freezing. The shoreline between Poughkeepsie and Troy, on both sides of the river, was a key stretch for taking ice, work that was often done by farmers while their fields lay under snow.

The Times remarked that the ice being stored in 1879 was “thicker” and “of better quality” that previous harvests. Working on the frozen river were thousands of men — and even boys who handled teams of horses to transport the blocks of ice. Their pay ranged between one and two dollars a day.

At Schodack, the Knickerbocker Ice House employed nearly 250 workers to cut and store 65,000 tons of ice. There were ten storehouses in Stuyvesant, and more than 1,200 men kept them stocked with upwards of 132,000 tons of block ice.

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