Thirty-nine million gallons of partly treated sewage poured into the Hudson River just north of New York City on Friday after a power failure at a sewage plant, according to state and local officials.
The discharge, at the Westchester County Yonkers Joint Sewage Treatment Plant, prompted the county to advise residents on Friday morning to avoid all recreational use of the river, but that advisory was lifted by nightfall. State environmental officials said on Friday evening that boating, fishing and swimming could resume as usual in most of Westchester County.
New York City’s health department said Friday night that the spill would have no impact on the city and its Fourth of July observances on Saturday, which include a parade of tall ships on the Hudson.
The discharge happened from around 9 p.m. Thursday night until about 1:45 p.m. on Friday, officials said. A person briefed on the spill said that during the power failure, the sewage was being chlorinated but not filtered. The plant, in Yonkers less than a mile north of the New York City line, typically handles about 80 million gallons a day, said Catherine Cioffi, a spokeswoman for the Westchester county executive’s office.
According to a state report released Friday night, the Yonkers plant lost power because of extreme heat and humidity and could not transfer power over to its generators.
The Westchester county executive’s office said earlier Friday that the power failure was “due to the power reductions by Con Edison from the extreme heat.”
But a spokesman for Con Edison, the electric utility that serves the plant, said that while there had been an 8 percent voltage reduction in the area on Thursday because of increased power use, there had been a continual flow of power in Yonkers throughout the day. Ms. Cioffi of the county executive’s office said the plant was also having “internal power issues.”
“The scale of this discharge is staggering,” said Dan Shapley, a senior director of advocacy, policy and planning for Riverkeeper, an environmental nonprofit. But he also noted that large spills happen routinely in places with combined sewer overflow systems, like the one the facility in Yonkers is connected to and the ones throughout much of New York City, which release “millions of gallons of untreated sewage during many rainstorms.”
The discharge occurred over a whole tide cycle in the river, meaning that the sewage sloshed both north and south. One beach, at Philipse Manor Beach Club, about 15 miles north of the plant, remained closed as of Friday night. Earlier Friday, the state had told people to stay off the river along its eastern bank as far north as Briarcliff Manor.
Under the state’s general guidelines, fishing is allowed in the lower Hudson River, but people are advised not to eat some species and to limit their intake of others. Swimming is not allowed in the river off New York City under any circumstances.
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