Officials: Illegal hookup spews sewage

For months, a fetid stench came from a strip of land next to the Deer Park Shopping Center on Bay Shore Road, neighbors say.

Recently, Babylon Town officials found the reason: Sewage was bubbling up through the ground, running over the sidewalk and into a street gutter.

Somebody had illegally connected the center's septic system to the storm drain system, officials said; a leaching field, designed to hold excess stormwater, was overflowing with a mix of sewage and water.

Now the state Department of Environmental Conservation is investigating potential criminal wrongdoing, and the town is preparing to bill shopping center owner Joseph Di Iorio of Sea Cliff $26,000 for cleanup costs. He also has been fined $2,000 for illicit discharge into stormwater drains and discharge of sewage into the ground; additional fines may follow, said a town spokesman.

Town and Suffolk health officials said anyone who touched the discharge risked infection; the discharge also could have contaminated drinking water, they said, though a DEC spokesman said that risk was minimal because of the aquifer's depth.

The DEC spokesman said the agency has not charged Di Iorio, who said in an interview that he did not know about the sewage discharge or any pipes linking septic and storm drain systems until town officials descended on his shopping center last month.

"I am trying to do the best I can for my tenants," he said. "What happened there was unbeknownst to me."

Town officials began investigating April 26, homing in on a puddle of stinking gray water on the property's edge next to Crown Street. Nine town, county and state agencies were called in, and the center's six stores were temporarily closed.

A partial excavation revealed a pipe linking septic and storm drain systems. Tests on liquid in the storm drains found fecal coliform bacteria levels far exceeding state standards for discharge into open water, the DEC said.

Records show Di Iorio bought the shopping center in 2008 for $2.75 million from Rockville Centre-based M.R. French. Vice president Peter Ring said the company had not laid any pipe connecting septic and stormwater systems. "In our time of ownership, we never touched the septic system, other than routinely having the septic tanks pumped and cleaned. That's it," he said.

Di Iorio said, "I've had problems with that center from the moment I bought it." Rainwater collects in the parking lot, filling cesspools and storm drains, he said, and a town recharge basin behind the center is too full to drain the excess. He said he had spent more than $100,000 laying pipe connecting the storm drains so the rainwater would drain to the property's lowest part, but the lot still floods.

Ranferi Cardona, who lives across from the center, said in Spanish that there had been a bad smell for the past three months. Neighbor Noreen Ebbighausen said she'd noticed a "horrible" stench since August. She said she saw liquid running out of a pipe and into the street "all the time, day and night."

Town officials destroyed the connections between the septic and drain systems, then sealed all the leaching basins and septic tanks with concrete. A contractor pumped both systems clean, and only a faint residual odor remained last week.

Town officials said several tenants said the discharge had been occurring for more than a year.