Pol marvels at sewage plant’s success

Suffolk County Legis. Wayne Horsley, whose district includes the hard-hit areas of Lindenhurst and Copiague, visited the county’s Bergen Point sewage plant Wednesday, expressing wonderment that the facility somehow exceeded the maximum amount of water it was designed to take without breakdown.

The plant in West Babylon as designed to take on no more than 90 million gallons of water per day, Horsley said. But at the height of Sandy, it received 113 million gallons. It averages a flow of 24 million gallons of water per day.

“It’s a bright spot in a very difficult time,” Horsley said of the plant’s performance.

Two pumping stations that feed to the plant — one in Amityville and the other in Copiague — overflowed, Horsley said, while the Port Jefferson sewage plant also flooded.

But across the county, there were no sewage discharges as a result of the storm, he added. Most of them remain on generators.

“The plants, overall, held up very well,” Horsley said.
Suffolk County oversees 192 wastewater management facilities, including those that are privately operated. The public Southwest Sewer District, which includes Bergen Point, serves nearly 90,000 properties, many in the hardest-hit areas of the South Shore.