The Treatment - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 45

into a river, bay, or wetland, where it mixes with freshwater. Or it can be used as non-
potable gray water to irrigate parks or golf courses. If it is cleaned thoroughly enough,
treated effluent is sometimes injected underground, to recharge groundwater stores that
are eventually used to supply drinking water (as I will discuss later).
A sewage treatment plant was first built on the edge of Newtown Creek in 1967 , to the
standard of the day. This meant it used a two-step treatment process to remove 65 per-
cent of the waste from the water passing through its system before flushing it into New
York Harbor. In 1972, the federal Clean Water Act was passed, which required the re-
moval of 85 percent of waste from treated water. The new standard rendered the plant
out of compliance and set the stage for its reinvention. The Newtown plant's reconstruc-
tion began in 1998 and was supposed to be completed by 2007 but was delayed; it is
now scheduled to be finished by 2015, at a cost of some $5.2 billion . At peak times, a
thousand workers from twenty-five prime contractors and hundreds of subcontractors
try to push the project ahead as fast as possible.
On the cold day in February 2008 that I toured the plant with Jim Pynn, the New-
town Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant was still a dusty construction site. The prop-
erty was originally owned by ExxonMobil, and the first priority was to excavate 750,000
cubic yards of oil-contaminated soil and replace it with clean fill. When it is fully oper-
ational, the plant's digesters will hold 3 million gallons of sewage and process some 1.5
million gallons of sludge a day.
As Pynn weaved through a maze of silver and yellow ductwork, past settling tanks,
blowers, methane-gas extractors, control rooms full of gauges and flashing computer
screens, and tanks of chemicals labeled HAZARDOUS , he regaled me with tales of the
things he has raked out of the sewers: turtles, fish, eels, and all manner of aquatic life.
“I never found an alligator—it's an urban legend that they live in New York's sewers,” he
said, though he and his colleagues have recovered a working camera (which took pho-
tos as it bounced around inside sewer pipes), thousands of counterfeit dollars bundled
together, drug and sex paraphernalia, teddy bears, and “basically anything you could
imagine that anyone would chuck into a toilet or a sewer grate.”
The primary design and cleansing feature of the plant is eight huge egg-shaped stain-
less steel sewage “digesters.” The digesters soar 145 feet high and bulge 80 feet wide.
They were based on a German design, fabricated in pieces in Texas, transported across
country by rail and truck, and welded together onsite in Brooklyn. Each egg required
four and a half months of welding to assemble. When empty, an egg weighs 2 million
pounds; when full of sludge, each can weigh as much as 33 million pounds; they rest on
a slab of concrete nine feet thick. The NCWWTP uses an “activated sludge process” that
is popular in Europe but is used in only a few US cities. It works like this: raw sewage