NYCkayaker What Are the Issues NYC Kayakers Want to SeeAddressed by the Next President.

[baptowicz at comcast.net]

Peter:

A number of older cities constructed a single pipe in their streets to convey both sewage as well as stormwater away from homes, streets and business. (Newer cities have two pipes in the street - a sewage pipe and a stormwater pipe). When it's not raining, the wastewater is all delivered to a plant for treatment prior to discharge into the receiving water (i.e rivers, estuaries, the ocean, etc). But when it rains, the rainwater enters the same pipe as the sewage and is treated until the flow (called combind sewage) reaches the maximum capacity of the treatment plant. At that point the excess combined sewage overflows into the receiving water. 
Federal laws requires all CSO systems to minimize the discharge of CSO volume but allows each municipality to negotiate their goals. Environmentally orientied organizations (and I would say that kayaking assocoations fall loosely into that catagory) should weigh in for the greatest improvement to the environment but should be reasonable or we would lose credibility with the dischargers as well as the regulators. 

Bruce Aptowicz

-------------- Original message -------------- 
From: "Gordon, Peter" <pgordon at exchange.tc.columbia.edu> 

What's CSO?




From: nyckayaker-bounces at rockandwater.net on behalf of baptowicz at comcast.net
Sent: Mon 1/21/2008 7:05 AM
To: TomBrooklyn; nyckayaker at rockandwater.net
Subject: Re: NYCkayaker What Are the Issues NYC Kayakers Want to SeeAddressed by the Next President.


Tom:

Just as requesting cleaner water is an appropriate objective, I would argue that asking for further reductions in CSO discharges, and not total CSO elimination, is reasonable.
To eliminate CSO discharges from ever occuring would require a new piping system to be constructed in every street that contains a CSO pipe or the construction of a CSO storage reservoir that would store the stormwater until the rain event subsides and the reservoir can be slowly discharged into the wastewater treatment plant. If you look at the largest rain events that have ever ocurred, the storage requirements would simply be unreasonable.
I would argue that what we want is for the CSO cities to continuously increase their capacity to capture ever increasing storm events. And by accomplishing this, all CSO discharge from the small and moderate storm events is elliminated. However, when the gully-washer occurs (and is that the time we want to be out there kayaking?), CSO is allowed to discharge. I would want to see specific numeric CSO reduction requiremnents - within a schedule - to be mandated for each CSO system.

Bruce Aptowicz

-------------- Original message --------------
From: TomBrooklyn <tombrook11232 at yahoo.com>

> What are the issues NYC Kayakers want the next US President to address or at
> least
> show a sensitivity or proclivity towards. I will suggest some things to start.
> I suppose Jim W would like to see the building of platforms be part of the
> candidates platform.
>
> 1. Waterfront access
> 2. Cleaner Water
> 3. Elimination of CSOs
> 4. Oyster seeding
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