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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