Babylon to spend $582G for upgrades to tanks at Covanta plant

The Town of Babylon plans to spend nearly $600,000 for mandated upgrades to tanks used to hold runoff from the town’s garbage incinerator.

The town has three underground tanks that store leachate, a liquid runoff from the town’s ashfills, which results from the burning of garbage at the Covanta waste-to-energy plant in West Babylon.

The tank system needs to be upgraded because of requirements of the Suffolk County Department of Health Services. The tanks previously fell under the jurisdiction of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, said Tom Vetri, Babylon’s deputy commissioner of environmental control. Now the county is involved in monitoring all underground storage tanks regardless of content, he said.

“What they’re doing is making us put leachate tanks on the same plane as petroleum storage tanks,” Vetri said. “It’s not really apples to apples, but I guess what they’re saying is that it is an underground storage tank.”

Vetri said the town pumps most of the leachate through a sewer line to Bergen Point wastewater treatment plant. The tanks, which date to 1991 and hold approximately 30,000 gallons each, are only used when the town cleans the leachate line, which is once a year, or if a pump breaks down and has to be changed, he said.

The town will be replacing manways, which are similar to manholes, Vetri noted, and will change the tanks’ monitoring system.

“Instead of having to put a stick in the tanks and getting a readout in inches, there will be a digital panel and it’ll be automatic, to give you a continuous readout of the amount of leachate that’s in the tanks,” he said.

The town has signed a $582,000 contract with Holtsville-based Bensin Contracting Inc. for the upgrades, with the possibility of an additional $34,500 for the cleaning and dewatering of the tanks. The company was the only bidder on the project, Vetri added.

In June, the company was awarded a $1.5 million contract with the town to clean and repair two other, larger tanks that the town uses to regularly store leachate before it is pumped out. But after spending nearly $39,000 of that contract amount, Vetri and the company determined that the tanks could not be repaired and must be replaced. The main issue, he said, is rusting from age.

Vetri did not have a cost estimate for replacing the tanks. They are still functional, town spokesman Dan Schaefer said, so the town has no immediate plans to replace them.

By Denise M. Bonilla

denise.bonilla@newsday.comdenisebonilla

Denise Bonilla has worked at Newsday since 2003 and covers the Town of Babylon, including the villages of Lindenhurst and Amityville.