Northport's longest serving worker retires

Erica Reinhard won't miss the middle-of-the-night emergency phone calls that often roused her from her Huntington Station home to rush to the Northport sewage treatment plant. Or the heated debate over whether the plant pollutes the Northport Harbor more than the hundreds of cesspools and septic tanks in the village.

But she will miss other things about being the senior operator of the village's sewage treatment plant -- such as seeing the dawn's glow from her second-floor office at the plant, located right by Scudder Park on the water.

Reinhard, 55, currently the village of Northport's longest-serving employee, is retiring on May 27.

She started working for the village in 1974 as a temporary worker picking up leaves. In 2005, she became the first woman to run the sewage treatment plant, the top job her father held for more than three decades.

"She's excellent at her job," said Northport Mayor George Doll. "She runs that sewer plant more or less with an iron fist. And it's a very important position that has a lot of responsibility. She's been just great at it."

For a time, Reinhard had even worked for her father at the small plant, where he saved the muckiest jobs for her -- painting any and all surfaces, crawling onto the sides of tanks to cut ivy, shoveling sewage sludge into the backs of trucks.

"It could be contentious," Reinhard recalled. "He was going to make darn sure that he was not playing favorites. He kind of went the other way. Which I suppose was good because it forced me to learn."

Before her father retired, Reinhard took courses at Suffolk County Community College to become certified to operate the plant's laboratory -- a task she found she enjoyed.

"I liked learning the laboratory, which is ironic because in high school I dropped out of chemistry," she said. "And years later I wound up running a New York State-certified laboratory."

Upstairs, she shows a visitor the plant's two 200,000-gallon tanks, which aerate the sewage and use microbes to clarify it until, 24 hours later, the effluent can legally be discharged into Northport Harbor.

"Our main job is to keep stuff out of the harbor," she said of the system, which serves about 3,500 homes and businesses in Northport.

"We have a beautiful harbor out here, and we're on the front lines protecting it every day," she said. "People like to talk ecology and save the earth and everything, but we do it for a living.

While Reinhard had hoped to work until she turned 62, family concerns forced her to retire early. She hopes to one day move to New Mexico, and perhaps return to riding motorcycles and shooting at the range with her husband.

"It's going to be bittersweet leaving," she said.