Lots of Water is Flowing Into Long Island, and it's Carrying Lots of Sewage With It

Not surprisingly, considering that sewers throughout the older suburbs are in terrible shape from years of wear and tear and neglect, and just because they’re old, a lot of sewage is spilling into local brooks and into Long Island Sound because of the heavy rains. (And this doesn't even taken into account the four huge treatment plants that empty into the Sound fro New York City; when it rains, those so-called combined sewage systems dump raw sewage into the Sound by design.)

This story talks about the situation in Greenwich, while this story talks about Westchester County and also raises the (unanswerable) question of what the affects on the Sound will be.

Tony Landi, the soon-to-be-retired head of the department that runs Westchester’s sewage treatment plants, told the reporter that the flow of wastewater into the sewage plants during the storm was two and three times as big as usual. In the past that has sometimes disrupted the sewage treatment process for weeks – washed the sewage-consuming bacteria that are essentialto the process out into the Sound, essentially – but there’s no indication in today’s story that the weekend storm caused any residual treatment problems.

Count me as among the skeptical.