Brooklyn’s gritty industrial waterfront is bristling with frenetic activity as engineers and workers jockey about a tight site upgrading New York City’s largest wastewater treatment plant. The mammoth project, costing more than $3 billion, will process 310 million gallons of wastewater per day to federal secondary treatment standards by late 2007 and give neighbors much needed odor relief and community amenities.
Since 1998, 800 to 1,000 workers from 25 prime contractors and hundreds of subcontractors have labored intensively on the 53-acre site to overhaul the treatment plant. The work list includes a new battery of grit chambers, aerators, final sedimentation tanks, a biosolids dewatering complex and a disinfection facility. At the same time, others are reconstructing the existing two batteries and replacing conventional digesters with larger volume egg-shaped digesters, all while keeping the plant fully operational.