Flood highlights cities sewage shortcomings.

It may not be too long now before buyers of some of the thousands of units of luxury property slowly ringing its way around the borough's waterfront stand on their terraces and recognize the amount of junk churning in the river view they have been tempted to buy.

Aside from flooding the subway, last week's vicious storm--which unleashed three inches of rain per hour--caused a combined sewer overflow (CSO) forcing wastewater laden with resident's dirty little secrets past overfull treatment plants, through huge open pipes and into various points of the river. It is arguable that a storm of this magnitude may not occur again in the near future.

Yet with the city's antiquated pipes repeatedly failing, just 1/10 an inch of rain or snow could conceivably (and has) caused a sewer overflow that pollutes the river so badly it is considered unsafe for humans to touch for at least 48 hours.

"For developers investing in the waterfront, having a CSO pouring into the water in front of your billion dollar condo project--forcing rain and god knows what else to your doorstep--is not a really great selling point," said Roland Lewis, ceo of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, a non profit organization based in Manhattan.

Everyone who is affected by the problem--from developers to non profit environmental groups to the city--is pining for a solution.

The Bloomberg administration admits that the city's sewage system is one of the major problems that needs to be fixed in order to secure both the subways and housing on some of the city's last remaining swaths of land. The Department of Environmental Protection has instituted a $1.8 billion CSO Abatement program. Under that program, retention tanks are being constructed to hold the overflows near heavily impacted bays and tributaries. Sewers are being constructed where they don't exist.

The DEP has also pledged to continue to invest in upgrades to wastewater treatment plants and pumping stations to increase capacity; and investigate the possibility of converting several combined sewers into High Level Storm Systems and integrating High Level Storm Systems into major new developments, according to Michael Saucier, spokesman for the DEP.

Many environmentalists believe the "end of pipe" solutions, such as building new tanks and treatment plants at the end of the pipeline, are necessary as a fail-safe but should not be thought of as the main solution, Basil B. Seggos, chief investigator, Riverkeeper, Inc, an environmental research group based in Tarrytown, NY, said,

"There are two schools of thinking about the solution to this problem. One is that you could build your way out of it, invest billions and billions of dollars into more treatment plants.

"Then there is a larger chorus of people who are thinking in a much more back to the basics way, that believe with more miles of wetlands, and more permeable surfaces instead of the millions of miles of impermeable roads in the city written into the building code, we could absorb just as much runoff into the ground and improve the environment at the same time."

As far as water quality goes, the city is already required to improve the environment. The Federal Clean Water act mandates that all waters must be 85% clean. The waters flanking the city are only 72% clean, and many argue the waters are getting progressively dirtier rather than cleaner.

Blueprints for improving water quality that have been written into Mayor Bloomberg's PIaNYC 2030, echo many of the environmentalists hopes for the future. They include semi permeable sidewalks, tree plantings and more green roofs. Several best management practices (BMP) pilot projects are underway to pinpoint strategies for stormwater absorption before it reaches the pipe system, Saucier said. A task force has been set up to measure how much CSO is captured before it enters the pipe system. "In 1980, only 30% of CSO's were captured before entering New York's waterways. Today, after significant investments in infrastructure, DEP captures 70% of CSO's--an increase that has greatly improved the health of harbor and tributary ecosystems," Saucier said. "It is expected that once all aspects of DEP's Long Term Control Plan have been implemented by 2017, CSO capture will increase to 75%."

Much of the city's greenbelt system has already been primed for planting, with about a dozen or so green areas created on the side of streets, such as the one the Parks department created at 110th street and Amsterdam. The soil in the area only runs 18 inches deep, but is sufficient to absorb a fair amount of rainwater, said Paul Mankiewicz, executive director at the Gaia Institute.

Non traditional solutions that have been proposed by environmental groups include planting more green roofs which can absorb water, closing off some streets to traffic during a bad storm to create an above ground channel for the water to travel, and creating swale channels on some of the city's wider avenues.

"Its not so much about new technology as it is about old concepts of irrigation. The goal is essentially to keep as much water outside of the man made pipe system as possible," said Michael Fishman, associate director of Halcrow/HPA an infrastructure engineering firm, and professor of real estate classes at Columbia University.

Mankiewicz suggests the city consider similar solutions as the storm water recapture project he is creating at the Simms Group recycling center in the South Bronx. The project creates green swales, hollows where water runs off the parking lot and into meadows and wetlands and a green wall that is being created there, and into a series of 240 underground vaults that can hold up to 860 gallons of water a piece.

The system is being created to divert water from the Bronx River to be reused, but could be used to capture water where there is a combined sewer system as well, he said.

Mankiewicz is among those who believe there are a plethora of ways we can create permeable surfaces to divert water into the good porous surface that is already in abundance in our streets. Such strategies would make the need for more pipes and treatment plants obsolete.

"Pipes are a way of centralizing water. If you centralize water you centralize pollution. There in lies our problem," Mankiewicz said.