Much of Bethlehem’s water goes through two treatment plats one new, one aged
Public meeting on water system tonight
The Town of Bethlehem has a choice ahead of it. It’s a choice that has been put off for years and will have at least some impact on every residence, business and person in the town. And it needs to be made now.
Town Hall watchers already know this decision has to do with the future of the town’s water system. No matter what is done, the way the people of Bethlehem get their water will change. In an effort to get a complete picture of where the town stands now when it comes to water production, The Spotlight recently toured the town’s water treatment and supply facilities along with staff from the Department of Public Works and saw firsthand the hydra that is the Water Department.
The town has a diverse portfolio of water supplies. Besides purchasing finished water from the City of Albany, Bethlehem draws its water from three sources: the New Salem Wellfield in New Scotland, the Vly Creek Reservoir outside the New Salem Water Treatment Plant and an aquifer that feeds the Clapper Road Water Treatment Plant in Selkirk.
Well water drawn from the New Salem wells does not need treatment. It is chlorinated and sent out to customers, making it by far the cheapest water source for the town. Due to the size of the wells, it’s also limited in its output, though, meaning most of the town’s drinking water comes through the New Salem plant.
Conversely, water from the Clapper Road plant goes to industrial users and only a handful of residences and businesses. It operates well below full capacity because of this.
Despite using similar processes to treat water, the two plants could not be less alike. New Salem was built in 1958 and expanded in the 1972, while Clapper Road was built in 1994. It’s a difference that shows.
If the Clapper Road Water Treatment Plant is like a gleaming new cell phone, New Salem is like a clunky old rotary phone. They’ll both accomplish pretty much the same thing, but one is far more versatile and advanced.
Despite enormous differences in equipment and process at the two plants, the basics are identical. Raw water is run through clarifiers and filters to remove particulate matter, chlorinated and sent out to holding tanks or into the town’s pipes.
The product itself is also largely identical. Water from both plants meets the quality requirements for drinking water imposed by state and federal authorities.
But the machines at Clapper Road are more compact and efficient. New Salem’s giant clarifiers and filters that need their own rooms are reduced down to a machine the length of a shuffleboard court that does both.
And if you ask the town employees which system is easier to work with, the answer is unequivocal. Like a classic car, New Salem’s systems are temperamental and must be watched with a hawk eye if they are to function properly. The water output must be closely monitored so earlier steps in the process can be tinkered with. Filters working long beyond their common operating lifespan have to be handled gingerly lest they malfunction just last year, a rusted-out clarifier failed and cost the town more than $100,000 to repair. Such repair bills are common, and with the age of the equipment, the town sometimes has to bring in specialists and make extensive searches for replacement parts.
Going from zero to 2 million gallons per day of production at New Salem is a process that must be built up gradually over the course of about three weeks. Guessing when the summer peak will hit is a yearly exercise for staff there, an analysis involving graphs, trends and weather reports that is more like playing the stock market than an exact science.
At Clapper Road, increasing output by that amount takes about two hours. When the town replaces the New Salem plant (and the question is indeed when, not if) it will construct a facility much like the Clapper Road plant.
The maximum output from both plants is identical, at 6 million gallons per day, a level dictated by the state Department of Environmental Conservation based on the water source’s renewal rate. This was not always the case, though.
The Clapper Road facility has a storied history. The original plan was to take water directly from the Hudson River, but that was abandoned after the system to draw the water failed to operate properly and the town sued the engineer for the project. A settlement agreement involved drilling 11 wells that now serve as the water source at the Clapper Road facility.
For those who don’t want to see Clapper Road’s output pumped into the town at large, the proximity of these wells to the Hudson is a sticking point. But according to the DPW, which conducts about 200 daily analyses on water drawn from all parts of the distribution system, the water in this aquifer is groundwater collected by the natural watershed and its chemistry is distinctly different from that of the river water.
`The water going into those wells is not the water that’s coming in from the Hudson,` DPW Commissioner Josh Cansler said.
He said it does not contain the much-publicized PCBs that the state has been moving to dredge from the river. What it is does contain is high levels of iron and manganese, which is not unusual for well water. Right now, those metals are removed with a dose of chlorine to the raw water administered before it comes to the plant. Soon, the water will instead enter an aeration tower, where air bubbles will oxidize the metals, removing them from the liquid water.
That should be easier on the pipes that carry the raw water, since the oxidized metals won’t collect there anymore.
The extra chlorine is removed from the water during the rest of the production process, and chlorine levels in water coming out of both treatment plants are the same, said town officials. In fact, despite differences in chemicals and treatment processes at the two plants, the end result is chemically just about identical.
`It’s a different chemistry that does the same thing in the end,` DPW Deputy Commissioner Erik Deyoe said. `We’ve got no data that indicates we’ve got any water quality issues with this facility [Clapper Road].`
By opening up Clapper Road’s output to more of the town, the replacement of the New Salem plant could be put off for years, even with new federal quality regulations going into effect in 2012. Wedding the two systems would be technical breeze. The valves and pipes to do so are already in place, and it would take a DPW employee about 25 minutes to make the change.
Uniting the systems would make it easier for the town to deal with summer usage peaks, as Clapper Road can respond more speedily to these demands.
Despite these apparent advantages, unifying the town’s water system and building a new water treatment plant have similar long-term cost impacts. Clapper Road is more costly to operate, so much so that the cost over time of opening the floodgates there would approach the burden of financing a new plant.
Water users, however, would not be dealt an immediate blow in their bills associated with building a new plant, and the town would be able to wait until a more fiscally stable period to make the upgrade. In a time of budget cutbacks and dwindling reserves, bonding roughly $18 million next year is bound to be a scenario leaders wish to avoid.
The Department of Public Works will give a presentation on alternatives to upgrade the town’s water supply at a Town Board meeting Wednesday, Sept. 22, at 6 p.m. at Town Hall. There will be the opportunity for public comment at that meeting. Also that evening, Supervisor Sam Messina will present his preliminary budget for 2011, in which the issue of water supply is to play an important role.“
