As the vote on the Bridgeport Sewer District nears, the town continues to address the concerns of Sylvan Beach officials in sending any more flow to its sewer treatment facility. The Sullivan Town Council approved the expenditure of about $40,000 to begin fixing the problems it promised Sylvan Beach to address 10 years ago.

“There’s some work that needs to be done on the East Sullivan Sewer District,” said engineer Kenneth Knutsen of Barton & Loguidice. “The mapping we’ve done under Phase I of the infiltration study, where we mapped all the existing manholes that are tributaries, there are some wet weather problems in that system. During significant rainfalls, the Sylvan Beach pump station has reported surcharges.”

Knutsen said the state Department of Environmental Conservation Region 6 directed the town to do further investigation to remove sources of inflow and infiltrations. He said a proposal by his firm would include inspection of about 100 more manholes.

Knutsen said about 38 of 137 manholes were inspected last year before weather stopped work on the effort.

“What we are looking for are sources of inflow and infiltration that result in spikes that reach that pump station,” Knutsen said.

Supervisor John M. Becker said last week that Barton & Loguidice staff spent from midnight to 5 a.m. one night earlier this month to observe flows around the ESSD during the lowest usage period.

“This is when sanitary flows in the pipes are minimal,” Knutsen said. “We are looking for clean water and the manholes that have the most flow coming into them.”

According to Becker, Knutsen and colleague Christian Lawton observed about an inch-and-a-half of steady flow even during that time. Additional measures planned include the installation of flow meters and analysis of the data collected by the devices, Knutsen said.

“We want to try to catch the wet weather events and follow up on smoke test problem spots to try and inspect suspect areas,” Knutsen said.

Knutsen said the results of the work will then be reported to the town of Sullivan, village of Sylvan Beach and DEC.

“The summary will detail the sources of I&I, information on where these inflow and infiltration sources exist, how we’re going to fix them and what it’s going to cost,” Knutsen said. “The idea is to create capacity. It needs to come out of this system because it’s taking away from Sylvan Beach’s capacity.”

Becker said the problems are inherent to a 30-year-old system for which a maintenance and upgrade plan was never developed for the ESSD.

“The town board is moving forward with addressing these problems because the town agreed to do this in 2001 or 2002, so we need to do this,” Becker said.

“There are long-term benefits all around,” Knutsen said. “The village admits there hasn’t been overflow since 2001 or 2002 since we found some of the larger sources. We provided the estimated hours it will take to do each of these tasks and a key breakdown for each of these services.”

The work will cost the town nearly $42,000 if B&L does the inspections on the remaining 100 manholes or $38,000 if town performs its own manhole inspections.

“I did some of this work a couple of years ago before I became [Madison County Board of Supervisors] chairman,” Becker said. “Since then, I haven’t had time. We found and remediated a number of significant problems then, and I’m sure there are a lot of things that we can find here that we can take care of. This system has been in since 1977, and no maintenance has been done. No maintenance was provided for in the creation of the district, unlike the Bridgeport Sewer District, which we are trying to do very responsibly.”