No relief from brown water on Wright Avenue in Malverne

Posted

To the Editor:

I wanted to thank you for bringing to light an issue within our village that everyone is aware of and frustrated by (“Millions of dollars later, Malverne still has brown water,” Oct. 2-8). Anyone who has washed their whites or filled a bathtub knows that we have had a brown-water issue in Malverne for many, many years.

Since my wife, Eileen O’Hara, was quoted in the first article, I wanted to add to her comments in the event that you found them helpful. As indicated, clearly there is a problem in the water (iron?) and it is nice that after years of deflecting the cause to other reasons, the water company is slowly changing their position. I do find it interesting that the current stance is to blame the water mains; I agree with Jeanne D’Esposito’s comment that infrastructure is a responsibility of the provider, and the provider should have as a part of their annual strategy to determine where water mains are at risk due to age or other factors. One interesting point is that I have lived in some of the oldest neighborhoods in Washington D.C,, Boston and Manhattan and have never had brown-water issues like I do in suburban Malverne. Eileen and I have lived at 16 Wright Ave. with our four children for over a decade. Brown water has been a problem since day one, and we have not seen any significant improvement in our water quality since the new facility came on line. I want to describe how we manage the issue within our home.

As Eileen indicated, we installed a whole house filtration system at the entry point into our home. That filter is replaced about every 45 days. Our water heater is 10 years old — replaced when we moved in — and I drain it about every 60 days. I’ve included a picture of water drained from the water heater [page 1] — 50 to 60 days since last draining it and 10 buckets into the draining.

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