The sewage-right-to-know law should discourage anyone from diving into the Rondout Creek from the Kingston Public Dock, whose safe water levels were satisfactory only a third of the time in the last four years. The valve on a regulatory mechanism designed to send sewage-tainted rainwater into the creek from an outfall pipe in rainy weather now stays open in dry weather as well. “This one outfall accounts for a huge amount of the combined sewer outflow discharge in Kingston,” said Lipscomb. The City of Kingston has devised a long-term control plan that addresses the issue, and the recent approval by the city’s Common Council of a $345,000 bond to make improvements so that more stormwater runoff is diverted to the wastewater treatment plant instead of into the creek hopefully means that the money to fix the regulatory mechanism will be available.
Riverkeeper has been posting its water-quality tests on its website, and starting this summer it plans to post the results for the tributaries as well. (Visit www.riverkeeper.org; you can sign up for e-mail alerts.) The organization hopes to continue the testing come May 1, although it is short of staff and funds, so at press time there was some uncertainty about the tributary testing program especially.
Riverkeeper has been footing the expense, with each test tube sample costing approximately $15. “If people feel passionately they want this work done, I urge them to make a donation,” said Shapley.
“We’re deeply appreciative of what Riverkeeper has been doing to help us get a handle on this,” said Landewe. He said more testing is needed to allow for “predictive modelings, so that we could say after so much rain the water would be unacceptable.”
The data collection is just the first step of the process. A second phase, said Lipscomb, would be to identify the sources of the pollution — a task requiring working with residents of the affected areas.
