Renewing the sea life of the Western Bays

To lifelong Freeporter and Operation SPLASH President Rob Weltner, 23 years isn’t too long if it means the campaign for the renewal of the Western Bays is on track for victory.

“We started in 1999,” Weltner said in a recent interview. “It didn’t happen overnight.”

The Western Bays, which supply much of the marine life for Freeport’s fishing industry, have been dying for decades. The campaign to reverse the dying process is what started in 1999. The victory achieved is a massive infrastructure redo known as the Bay Park Conveyance Project.

When the project is completed in 2023, treated wastewater from the South Shore Water Reclamation Facility, in East Rockaway’s Bay Park, will be conveyed along a 15-mile pipeline to the ocean outfall pipe at the Cedar Creek Water Pollution Control Plant. The state Department of Environmental Conservation is partnering on the project with the Nassau County Department of Public Works.

The immensity of the project matches the immensity of the problem: a better solution must be found to get rid of the effluent left from treating 50 million to 60 million gallons of influent — sewage — that flow into the Bay Park plant every day.

“To quantify, that’s like a supertanker the size of the Exxon Valdez,” Weltner said. “Basically, every day a supertanker of poop and chemicals is being treated at that plant, coming from residences and businesses plus about 15 hospitals, and then you have universities, industrial sites, nursing homes, so the water treatment plant is an extremely important piece of infrastructure.”

Weltner likened the water treatment process to “a magic trick … You’re taking all of this horrible, nasty stuff, and when you pull the rabbit out of the hat, it’s supposed to be a nice, clean white rabbit (the effluent). And then you dump it into the bay.”

The effluent has high levels of a plant nutrient, nitrogen. Unfortunately, the excess nitrogen nourishes the wrong plants. It also damages the right plants.

The wrong plants, Weltner explained, are marine algae, especially ulva lactuca, or sea lettuce, which overwhelms shorelines and gives off poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas as it decays. When ulva lactuca and other marine algae die in the water, they sink, draping the bottom surface with mud. The decaying process uses up the oxygen that is normally dissolved in seawater, so the water becomes hypoxic — low in oxygen — and the sea life in the water dies.

The “right plant” that is damaged by too much nitrogen is spartina — salt marsh grass. Spartina normally develops thickly tangled root systems that help it forage for nutrients like nitrogen. The dense mat of roots helps to hold the salt marshes together, enabling them to buffer the force of wave action against the shoreline, especially during storms.

SUB: The dying process begins

But dense root systems aren’t needed in nitrogen-rich water. Marshes with looser root systems lose their ability to resist wave action. They crumble when struck by waves, whether storm-generated or from the wakes of large boats speeding through the Western Bays. Long Island’s salt marshes have diminished by 50 percent in the last half-century, so the South Shore is far less protected against storms than in the past.

Another result of the nitrogen imbalance is that mats of over-nourished algae on the surface keep ultraviolet light from reaching underwater meadows of a special plant called seagrass.

“Seagrass is very important for horseshoe crabs, crabs, clams, oysters, flounders, fluke,” Weltner explained. “These creatures come to our bays to spawn because they can hide from predators in the seagrass.” Without the hiding places, their survival rate diminishes greatly, which means a smaller harvest for Freeport’s recreational and commercial fisheries.

A decision made in the late 1940s initiated the dying process. The decision was to locate the outfall pipe from the Bay Park treatment plant in Reynolds Channel, north of Long Beach.

Engineers, Weltner said, theorized that the movement of water through the inlets would carry the treated water from the Reynolds Channel pipe out to the ocean. This theory partly works in winter, when the prevailing north-northwest winds push the bay waters southward through the inlets to the open Atlantic. Unfortunately, in the summer, winds commonly blow out of the south-southwest, which pushes ocean water northward into the inlets and traps the treated water in the Western Bays.

“That’s 420 million gallons every week of wastewater being deposited back into the bays,” Weltner said. “Some of the scientists that we deal with from Stony Brook, from Adelphi, and some of the engineering groups that we work with call this” — the waters near the Reynolds Channel outfall pipe — “the bull’s-eye of death.”

SUB: Resurrecting the Western Bays

The $439 million Bay Park Conveyance Project will eliminate the Reynolds Channel pipe and allow a resurrection of the Western Bays.

According to the project website, bayparkconveyance.org, “The Bay Park Conveyance Project will reduce nitrogen pollution in the Western Bays by redirecting treated water from the South Shore Water Reclamation Facility to the Cedar Creek Water Pollution Control Plant (WPCP). From Cedar Creek, the treated water will be discharged approximately three miles offshore in the Atlantic Ocean via an ocean outfall pipe to a one-mile-long diffuser array with 120 diffuser ports. These diffusers mix treated water with ocean water, where it quickly disperses.”

Legislators who represent Freeport are enthused about the project. “It has been described as the most transformative environmental project on Long Island in decades,” said Nassau County Legislator Debra Mulé, a Democrat from Freeport.

Legislator Steve Rhoads, a Republican from Bellmore, calls it the “single most important environmental project” in the county since the construction of sewers in the 1960s and ’70s.

For Weltner, the resurrection of the bays is deeply personal. A construction electrician who worked on both the Bay Park and Cedar Creek water treatment facilities, he was also a scuba diver for the Freeport Fire Department. During his hours underwater in the bays, he witnessed the ugly decline of underwater life up close.

Weltner, with scientists from Adelphi University, got a grant to go out on the ocean on a 256-foot Environmental Protection Agency boat in 2011.

“We spent four long days working around the clock on the Ocean Survey Vessel ship, the USS Bold, offshore, researching the effects of ocean outfall pipes on the South Shore of Long Island,” Weltner said. The data gathered on that trip was foundational to the creation of the Bay Park Conveyance Project.

Asked if the go-ahead for the project was a long time coming, Weltner said, “The wheels of government can sometimes turn extremely slow,” and laughed. But seeing the work that has been accomplished since Superstorm Sandy shows that those wheels indeed do turn.