Glen Cove to use $3M state grant for removing Freon 22 from water supply

Glen Cove is getting $3 million in state money to help pay for equipment to remove the refrigeration chemical Freon 22 from the city’s water supply.

The funding is among $36.1 million in grants that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced this month for 13 projects to improve the quality of Long Islanders’ drinking water.

Two of Glen Cove’s six water wells are currently closed because of Freon 22 contamination.

The $3 million will help fund a $5.15 million project to install a Freon-removing air stripper at a well on Seaman Road and make other improvements. The city closed the well in 2011 because of elevated levels of Freon 22 and structural problems.

Exposure to high levels of airborne Freon 22 has been linked in studies of laboratory animals to nervous system and heart problems. Air strippers blast air up a tank to — with the help of tens of thousands of small plastic-band balls — strip Freon 22 from water.

The walls of the Seaman well are deteriorating and city officials say they hope to refurbish it. But it may not be salvageable, and if that's the case, the city will have to drill for and build a new well, Mayor Timothy Tenke said. The city also is planning to repair and expand the well’s aging pump house.

The goal is to reopen the Seaman Road well by late 2019 or early 2020, Tenke said.

Glen Cove officials had wanted to reopen the city's other shuttered well months ago but first must replace a valve needed to run the well, Tenke said.

The Nassau County Health Department ordered that well, on Duck Pond Road, closed in January because of elevated levels of Freon 22. Another Duck Pond Road well was shut down in November 2017 and has been reopened, shut down again, and reopened again as Freon 22 levels fluctuated, city spokeswoman Lisa Travatello said.

The city installed a refurbished air stripper for the two wells over the summer.

The four wells now online are “sufficient to meet our needs at this time of year,” Tenke said. “Come the summertime, the water demand goes way up and we’ll be needing all the wells.”

The city eventually wants to install air strippers on the remaining three wells and to build a seventh well, in part to handle increased water demand from several housing developments — especially the waterfront Garvies Point project — expected to add thousands of people to the city’s population, Tenke said.