Tarrytown Pump Station Upgrade Could Mean Less Sewage in the Hudson

Among the $24 million in new capital projects unanimously approved recently by Westchester County Legislators is a win for our villages, and the river.

A Tarrytown Pump Station upgrade is on the list, slated to receive a big $9.9 million for its infrastructure and forced main line replacement.

The pump station is an essential component of the county sanitary sewer trunk line directing sewage to the Yonkers Treatment plant. As we've witnessed here a bit too often, this system can be disastrous when it fails. 

Surrounding communities often rely on gravity to get their sewage to a pump station which either pumps it back up to higher elevation to flow down to the next site or, in our case in the Saw Mill Sanitary Sewage District, pumps it into a highly pressurized force main to get to Yonkers. The breaks that occurred in our aging main in recent years have buckled roads and sent sewage bypassing its regular route and into the river at Horan's Landing instead.

The Riverkeeper organization, in a press release issued today, blamed the Tarrytown Pump Station and its faulty forced main as “directly responsible for multiple sewer line breaks and discharges of more than 20 million gallons of raw sewage into the Hudson along the Westchester shoreline the past several summers.”

“An upgrade will reduce the possibilities that the system will go down and that sewage will be released into the Hudson River,” agreed Tarrytown Village Administrator Mike Blau. 

Following the announcement of many county projects, Legislator Catherine Borgia (D-Ossining), chair of the BOL Government Operations Committee, said, “the allocation of the County’s financial resources creates new, well-paying jobs and, in turn, spurs economic growth in our communities. Moving forward on these new capital projects makes good sense in so many ways.”

But for local environmentalists and leaders in Tarrytown, and many members of the local public who helped petition for action on this issue, addressing the problem of sewage in the river goes far beyond economics.

Tracy Brown, Water Quality Advocate for Riverkeeper, said she was amazed by how many citizens made the effort to write letters to the state and thought that was what got this project going. "They really took notice," she said of the 145 letters received.

“The successful public lobbying for the sewer repair in Tarrytown shows what the public can do when they speak out on behalf of clean water,” said Brown. “Riverkeeper receives citizen reports of sewage releases into waterways throughout the Hudson Valley. Whenever possible we verify, document and try to report on those incidents. When we see a community suffering from repeated system failures we work to find solutions. The planned upgrades to the Tarrytown pump station and replacement of its forced main should bring tangible water quality improvements to the Tarrytown waterfront.”

Tarrytown Mayor Drew Fixell added: “As Riverkeeper has regularly documented, our waterfront has periodically suffered contamination from problems with the county sewer system, so we are very happy to see this project moving forward and thankful to the legislature for funding it. We also are grateful to Riverkeeper for keeping these issues on the front burner.”

The work is slated to begin in March 2014.