Douglas Avenue water facility gets new treatment systems and building

Work on the new filtration systems at the Suffolk County Water Authority’s Douglas Avenue property will be starting next month. If you’ve noticed an additional $20 “water quality and treatment charge,” that’s where the money is going, along with a $900k grant from the NYS Environmental Facilities Corporation. The project, which entails installing new treatment systems and a building to house them, is estimated to cost $3+ million in total. It is the latest step in an ongoing effort to overhaul the outdated systems across the island.

The SCWA revealed plans for the upgrades earlier this year. According to the plans, the new filtration system will remove a number of potentially toxic contaminants from our water, including 1,4-Dioxane, which has been found in groundwater at sites throughout the United States. According to the EPA, the synthetic industrial chemical is likely a human carcinogen that’s highly mobile. It’s expected to move rapidly from soil to groundwater and is relatively resistant to biodegeneration. In other words, once it gets into the soil and water supply, it’s not going anywhere unless treated, which is why it’s been called a “forever chemical.”

Historically, 1,4-Dioxane was used as a stabilizer for chlorinated solvents, such as TCA. Although its use as a stabilizer was banned in the 1990s, it’s still used in small amounts as a by-product in many household goods, including paint strippers, cleaning supplies, dyes, deodorants, hair relaxers, shampoos and cosmetics. Residue from these home and body products go into your cesspool and end up in our drinking water system.

Reports show that short-term exposure to the chemical can cause eye, nose and throat irritation, and long-term subjection may cause damage to the liver and kidneys. While data on adverse effects in humans is limited, animal studies have found that chronic exposure can cause carcinogenic responses. Exposure to the chemical among the general public usually occurs through the ingestion of contaminated foods and water.

1,4-Dioxane is a federally-unregulated contaminant, but in 2017, it was added to the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule, a program that collects data for chemicals that are suspected to be present in drinking water, but do not have health-based standards under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). At this point, the chemical was monitored, but New York got a head start on setting strict standards for its presence in drinking water.

In July 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the first in the nation drinking water standard for 1,4-Dioxane. He set a Maximum Contaminant Level, or MCL, of 1 part per billion. The new standard also set a MCL for PFOA and PFOS (organic compounds that are used in clothing, furniture fabrics and food packaging) at 10 parts per trillion, which is the strictest regulation for these chemicals in drinking water across the nation. According to state health officials, these numbers are set “well below levels known or estimated to cause health effects.”

It turns out that the SCWA anticipated these tough regulations. They knew that because 1,4-Dioxane can’t be removed effectively using traditional treatment systems, a new method of filtration would have to be implemented. In 2018, an award-winning treatment technology for 1,4-Dioxane called Advanced Oxidative Process (AOP) was first approved to treat a well in Suffolk and was found to destroy 1,4-Dioxane molecules to virtually undetectable levels.

Now the SCWA has until August of 2022 to add the AOP treatment systems to all affected county wells. They plan to install 56 specialized AOPs to remove 1,4-Dioxane and 20 Granular Activated Carbon (GAC) treatment systems to remove PFOS and PFOA.

The Douglas Avenue facility, on the corner of Douglas and McKinney Avenue in Northport Village, is one of the facilities that will be upgraded with these treatment systems beginning in May. This facility produces approximately 19 percent of the water consumed in the Northport area, although it’s the smallest property owned by the SCWA. Both wells on the property have what are considered low levels of 1,4-Dioxane, with 2.73 ppb in well one, and 1.2 ppb in well two. But the presence of levels above 1 ppb means that something must be done to eradicate the contaminant in drinking water.

The first well at the Douglas/McKinney property was drilled in 1967 and a GAC filtration system was added in 1989. In 2015, the SCWA purchased the neighboring property, 21 McKinney Avenue, where they drilled a second well. The plan was to use only part of that property for the second well and sell the remainder of the property, which had a house and cottage, but there were two unsuccessful attempts to make that happen in 2016 and 2017.

Four years later and the SCWA has been tasked with reimagining the facility and installing the new filtration systems in order to maintain adequate emerging contaminant levels. Here’s what the update project entails:

• The house and cottage at 21 McKinney Avenue will be removed.

• Two new GAC systems will be installed, as well as two AOP treatment systems that will be used to remove emerging contaminant 1,4-Dioxane.

• A pre-engineered building will be installed to house the new systems.

• The old GAC systems will be removed from the site.

• New fencing and landscaping will be installed.

The public was made aware of these plans with signs at the Douglas/McKinney location, letters to the surrounding properties, and an informative Village Board of Trustees meeting on April 13. Joe Pokorny, the SCWA Deputy Chief Executive Officer for Operations, said “We know that a project like this can be disruptive to the neighborhood and we want to minimize that as much as possible. We think that by informing everybody of what our plans are so they know that to expect, will help things along the way.”

The project is scheduled to begin in late May and will be completed by Spring of 2022. Residents are assured that it will not cause road closures and noise levels will be kept to a minimum for the duration of project construction.