Sewage, Cement And Staten Island's Future

Port Richmond — The Port Richmond Water Pollution Control Plant has stood on Staten Island's North Shore, purifying the sewage of about half of the island's residents, for 57 years. Soon it will get a $29 million upgrade, thanks to a citywide infusion of federal stimulus funds. It will also get a new neighbor, a transfer station about a mile down bumpy Richmond Terrace where cement will arrive from South America by boat and head to local construction projects by truck.

That facility, called Staten Island Terminal, is also being financed with stimulus money—up to $28 million in tax-free bonds, approved this spring. And like the sewage plant overhaul, it has the wide support of the area's lawmakers. Besides that, the two projects have something else in common: They both reflect local leaders' vision for the waterfront, and the tension over what the North Shore, one of Staten Island's most environmentally troubled areas, should look like.

A question of capacity

Since opening in 1953, the Port Richmond WPCP has had several bad days, but one of the unluckiest came on July 12, 1988, when a series of power outages caused 25 million gallons of untreated waste to spill into Kill Van Kull and New York Harbor.

The spill, which led the city to close all of Staten Island and Brooklyn's public beaches for days before water tests declared them safe, was a freak event brought on by the rare simultaneous failure of two power supplies. It was unique, too, in another way: It was the rare incident in which the Port Richmond plant's unpleasant side effects, long familiar to North Shore residents, reached beyond its immediate neighborhood. Large spills and widespread beach closures are uncommon. But smaller overflows and the stomach-turning smells that can accompany them, neighbors say, are a part of everyday life near an aging sewage plant.

"When I lived there, a couple of nights in the summertime it got pretty ripe," said Joseph Carroll, district manager of Community Board 1, which represents the area.

Fortunately, he added, the situation is improving: A new throttling gate, installed in May, should prevent the overflow of about 30 million gallons of sewage and stormwater per year. And an even more ambitious project, beginning this year, will install three new boilers and upgrade the plant's sludge digesters, where organic material is broken down into more manageable parts. The work should improve the plant's energy efficiency and also, officials say, reduce foul smells.

The latter undertaking is being funded by $29 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as part of a larger overhaul of city sewage plants.

Local civic and environmental activists, some of whom have protested against new industry on the waterfront, say they understand the necessity for the treatment plant. But they note that the island's population has doubled in the years since the facility was built—from roughly 200,000 to more than 400,000—and say Port Richmond's condition reflects the heavy burden that larger population places on the area's sewage system.

Part of the problem, said Dee Vandenburg, president of the Staten Island Taxpayers' Association, is that sewage plant construction has not kept up with population growth. The only other plant on the island, at Oakwood Beach, was built in 1956.