Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 5
The Treatment
THE ART AND SCIENCE OF CSOS
It was midevening in January 2010 when a light snow turned to rain over Manhattan
at just the moment when people began to wash their dinner dishes, do laundry, take
showers, and flush toilets in earnest. Within minutes, thousands of gallons of storm-
water was rushing off the city's non-absorbent sidewalks, parking lots, and buildings
and cascading into the sewer system. Sweeping along whatever was in its path—salty
grit, candy wrappers, paint, antifreeze, leaves, abandoned toys, styrofoam cups, drug
paraphernalia—the storm water dropped into a matrix of 550 pipes running beneath the
streets, where it mixed with untreated feces and industrial wastes and swooshed south
with gathering momentum.
As the slurry of waste rose and rose, its flow accelerated from a gentle 2.5 feet per
second to a raging 9.5 feet per second, scouring sediment out of the pipes and straining
the venerable system. It moved from small waste pipes eight inches in diameter, into pro-
gressively larger pipes, and then into a main seventeen feet in diameter, which channeled
the water downtown to a large pumping station on East Thirteenth Street at Avenue D.
There, giant pumps whirred and the sewage and storm-water mix was sent beneath the
East River to Brooklyn, where it was captured by the city's newest and biggest sewage
treatment plant, the Newtown Creek Waste-water Treatment Plant (NCWWTP).
This is no ordinary sewage plant. A futuristic collection of sleek gray buildings,
green towers, and giant silver egg-shaped digester tanks, the NCWWTP rises incongru-
ously from the brown-gray industrial tangle along the same waterway poisoned by the
black mayonnaise of industrial pollutants. The Newtown Creek plant is a dramatic sight.
Designed by the Polshek Partnership, the white-shoe architectural firm responsible for
the Clinton Library and other notable buildings, it is often wreathed in steam and oc-
casionally erupts as methane gas is flared off. At night, the treatment plant and its giant
silver “eggs” are bathed in a fantastical blue glow, from a lighting scheme designed by
Hervé Descottes of L'Observatoire International, in Paris. One Greenpoint resident aptly
described the plant as looking like a gleaming hunk of twenty-first-century space station
that crash-landed onto Brooklyn's nineteenth-century waterfront.
The Newtown Creek plant services a large J-shaped drainage area that starts below
Seventy-Fourth Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side, flows south through Chinatown,
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