Douglas
Daley is an Associate Professor and Director of the SUNY Center for Brownfield
Studies. His teaching and research focus on relations amongst environmental
engineering design, phytotechnology, physical processes, and green
infrastructure. Daley is active with the Central New York Air and Waste
Management Association, the New York Water Environment Association, and the
American Ecological Engineering Society. Additionally, he runs an outreach
program for those who want to get or maintain professional engineering
registration through Professional Developmental Hours (PDH). If you wish to
learn more about Douglas Daley, visit his homepage: http://www.esf.edu/ere/daley/
Tell me a little about
yourself and your profession?
Ok,
first my name is Doug Daley. I’m an associate professor in environmental
resources engineering at SUNY-ESF. I’ve been an engineer in title since the mid
80’s and working in environmental engineering since about that same time. I am
an alumni of ESF, received two degrees from ESF. So I have been around Syracuse
and ESF for a while – there was about 15 years interlude where I was some place
else doing other things related to environmental engineering. So I have been
here in this department for 18 years.
From your understanding are
there still wastes finding their way into the lake today?
Interesting phrase “are there
wastes finding their way into the lake”. So at one level yes, there are things
from all different sources going into Onondaga Lake. The Onondaga country metro
wastewater treatment plant sits on the shores of Onondaga lake, so all of the
treated waste water from the metro plant goes into the lake. So that is a
source of waste if you want to think about it really really strictly defined.
However, they meet regulatory permit limits – some people call those a “permit
to pollute”. From that particular source there’s things that are mostly
biological in nature, but everyone flushes things down their drain like
pharmaceuticals and other types of emerging contaminants of concern that come
through the sewer system. Then you have your combined sewer overflows, which
goes into Onondaga creek that ends up in Onondaga Lake.
And
then there’s the industrial legacy around Onondaga lake, Honeywell which I’m
most familiar with owns a lot of the properties and they have been doing things
to cut off the flow of water borne contaminants either surface or groundwater
but on the east side of the lake where Ley Creek comes in, there are several hazardous
waste sites from GE (General Electric) and those sites have not been remediated
yet.
So they could be leaking?
Yeah and leaking is such a
hard term, generally the real bad leaking or dumping stuff – that is not happening
but there still are always going to be detectable trace levels some place going
into some body of water. So there are still a few things going in but Honeywell
spent a lot of effort taking care of what they called the upland sources. They
had a couple of project sites where there was actually mercury in the soil or
mercury in some of the small streams that led into Nine Mile Creek so they
started with the source and them moved down stream to take care of each of
those areas which were impacted. So there are no longer sources into the lake.
If you go up in the area where the state fair ground parking is, I think the
orange lot. That’s some of the older waste beds.
And the concrete now covers
them?
Well,
there’s some areas that are covered by asphalt but most of it is just gravel.
So there is still water that percolates down into the waste beds. In that area
there are some hazardous wastes, some liquids and some organic chemicals that
are in the beds and they continue to leach out into the groundwater and the
groundwater goes to the lake, so its still there. No one is putting waste in
the lake the way they used to but the things that dissolve from the waste that
are disposed of someplace else leach out and that’s what can still enter the
lake.
When you said sewage
overflow, what do you mean? Is that untreated?
Yes, so that’s a term of art
but its combined sewer overflow. So a combined sewer in the older parts of
Syracuse, and this is the way it is in many north eastern cities, the wastewater
from your house and industry goes into the sewer system and that is supposed to
go down to the treatment plant. But a lot of the storm water also flows into
that same pipe. So that’s why during storm events when the street runoff goes
into the drain inlet, it’s actually, in some parts of Syracuse, combining with sewage
carrying both the sewage and the storm water. Now, some other cities and other
parts of Syracuse have separate sewers so that the sewage and the storm water
are kept separate and then the storm water can be discharged into a stream and
the sewage continues on its way.
So
the problem is when you have a lot of storm water the pipe just fills up and
has no place to go. If it fills up too much it backs up into the manholes and
flows back onto the streets and floods the streets. So the old way to do it was
you put an overflow pipe in so if your combined sewer starts to fill up, you
discharge the overflow pipe into Onondaga Creek. Which isn’t good either but at
least its not getting peoples basements wet. So over the last several years
Onondaga country has built facilities, so if you look this one up: the midland
avenue, midland avenue is down in the valley here. Midland avenue treatment
facility receives the combined sewer overflow that used to go into Onondaga
creek and now goes through a treatment facility and gets a little bit of
treatment.
But not as much as the
normal sewage water?
Right.
Do you think that in the
future Onondaga Lake or other polluted lakes could be restored to their
original water quality? By original I mean prior to intervention by man – like
the 1500’s?
Well we don’t know what that
water quality was in 1500 but that is the goal. I think Onondaga lake will be
fishable and swimmable – it is already swimmable and fishable to some extent
and I think people are actually more confortable with that idea then they were
20 years ago, a generation ago. But it takes generations to change perspectives
on things. It’s interesting this morning on the way in, listening to the radio
(a local talk show) they were actually having people call in about “would you
swim in Onondaga Lake?” and there are still a lot of older people that say “No
way!” and when I was a student here late 70’s early 80’s I’m not sure I would
have wanted to walk into that lake. The lake was called a dead lake, it was
considered to be an open sewer, an extension of the sewer system and 35 years
later I would say I would swim in the lake. In fact, I had colleges that did
this 15-20 years ago.
The
lake is tremendously different than it was and the perception of the lake is no
longer that its open sewer, but that its “well I heard there’s mercury or that
I heard there’s a problem and I’d rather not expose myself to that” and that’s
understandable.
That kind of how I feel but
I don’t think that I know enough.
Yeah, I think that’s the
reality for many people but what a lot of people also don’t realize is this, I
don think there’s a lake in NY state that can be restored to its quality or
condition that it was in the 1850’s and ill tell you why: atmospheric
deposition of mercury. Which has nothing to do with what happened locally
but If you go to the state environmental conservation web site and look at fish
consumption, virtually every water body in NYS has a fish advisory consumption associated
with it. Now some water bodies are more strict than others, so Onondaga lake is
more strict than others because of mercury accumulation in the fish tissues or
PCBs or whatever other organic compounds, bioaccumulation. So that is why I say
I don’t think any lake is ever going to be restored to that so called pristine,
pre-human kind existence type of condition because mercury’s in the
environment, its going to cycle around, its in every water body even the ones
in the Adirondacks that people think of as being pristine, it’s still there. Its
there and It’s not there because someone discharged something directly into it,
its because its coming out of the atmosphere.
So, I actually live on
Skaneateles Lake and I think that lake is just perfect, but little do I know…
So I would go swimming in
Skaneateles Lake and if I want to take a drink of water, I will. I wouldn’t do
that quite yet on Onondaga Lake.
I saw that you were doing a
couple projects with Honeywell but I could not find too much detail on the
projects, could you tell us more?
The willow project, my
co-investigator Tim Volk is the director of the willow biomass program and
there has been other people involved but Tim and I have been the two principals
over the years. Tim handles the willow side of things, the silviculture of
growing willow and I handle the water side of things, the engineering side if
you will. So back around 2003 Honeywell approached the college, we talked about
taking the knowledge we have about willow and how it uses water and seeing if
we could restore some of the wastebeds around Solvay. So there are several
hundred hectares of these waste disposal areas and they are full of what we
called Solvay wastes which is calcium chlorides, calcium carbonate, stuff that
occurs naturally but there was too much of it. The wastes came from a chemical
manufacturing process to produce soda ash (baking soda like material). So we’ve
got these huge areas that need to be “closed” or “covered” as if they were
landfills. The last time these particular beds were in operation was in the mid
1980’s so we got involved about 15 to 20 years after that. The alternative [to
willows] is to put a cover, a cover would be lots of clean earth such as clay
and the purpose is to shed water. The predominate concern is salts leeching
out, getting into the ground water, then into nine-mile creek and that just
exacerbates whatever other problems there are.
So
the idea is to reduce the amount of water that goes through the waste and
dissolves the salts. The willows, along with some other pioneer species like
poplar and other types of grasses are known to consume a lot of water during
the growing season, so we thought “lets keep the water in the upper root zone
area and let the plants move the water out during the growing season” which is
what they do, they’ll take every ounce of water you throw at them and they will
put it back into the atmosphere and the rest of the year, you will do other
things – increase the slopes to help shed the water, store the water in the
soil so this time of the year in April when the plants are starting to put
forth buds the water is moving through the plant back into the atmosphere. So
that’s the idea, that’s the primary thing.
The
secondary thing is all the other benefits that go with it, the production of an
energy crop, were creating habitat –some of the ecologists on campus would say “well
its not a very diverse habitat cause its all willow” which is true but that’s a
third benefit if you will. We get plenty of deer, turkey, song birds, raptors,
mice, and pretty soon you’ve got more plants and more animals than you had
before hand. It was a derelict property that nobody could really do anything
with. Honeywell is also working with snowmobile clubs that can go across the
area, so a fourth type of benefit.
So the willows are not
phytoremediation, they are just taking up water and ensuring that it doesn’t go
down through the waste?
It is not a remediation
because we are not cleaning up a contaminant; I always call them phytohydrolyic
control, plant based hydrolyic control. Instead of using plastic geo-membrane
as a barrier to the water moving downward we are using the root zone to move
the water. The important thing there is
the primary benefit, which is to minimize the water that’s going down.
Before you worked with this
project that you are currently involved in, did you have a particular interest
in Onondaga Lake?
Yeah, when I was a grad
student here I did course work with John Hassett. Hassett in chemistry has had
a really long interest in Onondaga lake, when I was a graduate student I took
his class, it may have been environmental chemistry or something like that and
I remember being out in the boat in the middle of Onondaga Lake taking water
samples, measuring the thermocline, and seeing that the bottom of the lake was
absent of oxygen. I found a report that I wrote when I was a senior on Onondaga
Lake so it’s been in my blood for quite a while. When I worked else where as a
consultant I wasn’t doing anything with Onondaga Lake but I was involved with
solid and hazardous waste management, other water quality related projects. So
I have always had interest in water.
Did Onondaga Lake spur any
interest in pollutants or we’re you already on that track?
I
was already on that track, I mean Onondaga lake was here in the late 70’s and
early 80’s, at that time like I said it was considered an open sewer and the
question at that time was “can this lake be restored?” everyone thought the
amount of effort that would need to go into it was inconceivable. But it’s
happened and the changes in the lake have come about (and they are quite
profound) as a result of eliminating direct discharges. So in the mid 1980’s
Allied chemical stopped production of soda ash and they stopped pumping waste
into these lagoons, the solids settled out. All the water that carried the
solid was briney and when that water overflowed the weirs and went into Nine
Mile Creek, it destroyed Nine Mile Creek and basically destroyed Onondaga Lake
because of the chloride concentrations. In the water quality of Onondaga Lake,
you can see when they stopped production and you can see when Honeywell has
done other things around the wastebed area. If
you just look at chloride concentrations there was a profound, almost
instantaneous response to things that they have done over a generation.
It is the same thing with the metro wastewater
treatment plant. Actually when metro put a tertiary treatment into place, an
unexpected thing happened (besides taking care of the discharge of nitrogen),
it actually improved the lake water quality because it added oxygen to the
lake. Mercury can turn into a more bioavailable form in the absence of oxygen,
methyl mercury. So with a more aerated lake, methyl mercury won’t be generated
in the water column. Since this discovery, they have been going out on barges
and injecting nitrates into the lake to increase the oxygen concentration of
the lake. Normally, nitrates would cause algal blooms, but in this case it
works.
Have any of your previous
ERE students found a particular interest in Onondaga Lake and pursued a career
in it?
Yes and yes. We’ve got several
of our ERE alumni are working for consultants, so they are doing studies that
are associated with Onondaga Lake, both Honeywell and not Honeywell related.
I’ve got a former student who worked on some of the hazardous waste landfills
that contribute to Ley Creek. Of course, we have students who continue onto
graduate school to do research. Onondaga Lake is a big driver for employment
and once students find out about it they’re like “this is pretty cool, I want
to do this”.
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