The crowds came to the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in droves this weekend, eager to see what exactly goes on inside the mysterious sewage plant that resembles a half-dozen package of eggs and emits a faint indigo glow at night.
“Honestly, this is way more than we expected,” said Department of Environmental Preservation (DEP) spokesperson Michael Saucier, whose agency operates the treatment plant, located at Greenpoint Avenue and Humboldt Street.
The DEP opened the $11 billion plant (yes, billion), the city’s largest, to the public for the first time on October 10 and 11. The opening was part of Open House New York, a citywide architecture and design event featuring hundreds of sites throughout the city.
As a participating venue, dozens of tour groups, each capped at 10 people, ventured through the grounds of the plant led by DEP workers before ascending into the tip of one of the six digester eggs via elevator.
At the top of the plant, the groups received a briefing by plant Superintendent Jimmy Pynn and DEP Assistant Commissioner Vincent Sapienza about how waste water travels from your toilet to their plant and out to Red Hook to be filtered before being converted into a dry, cake-like fertilizer.
According to Sapienza, the plant churns through 230 million gallons of wastewater per day, removing almost 85 percent of pollutants from the water.
“It’s very tight for the amount of sewage we need to treat,” said Sapienza. “The plant engages in physical, chemical, and biological processes to clean the water. We found that over time, an egg shape is the most efficient for digestion.”
Sapienza and Pynn touched on bacteria cultivation that occurs inside the sludge, including a strain called nocardia that can cause the digesters to foam and emit a fetid smell.
“If you age sludge too much, you get nocardia,” said Sapienza, adding that the plant has been better in recent months containing bacterial blooms.
The smell during open house weekend was faint, as most of the sludge appeared to have been sufficiently contained.