By Katie Wagner, Staff Writer
MONTGOMERY — The Township Committee approved a contract with Omi Environmental LLC to study how planned upgrades to the sewage treatment plant at Skillman Village would impact the water quality.
The committee adopted a resolution March 6 that limits the project to no more than $39,000.
The study, which Township Administrator Donato Nieman referred to as an anti-degradation study, would determine if water at the outfall would meet the state Department of Environmental Protection’s standards if specific upgrades were made to the plant, which are to include a change in the method used to treat sewage as well as treating additional flow.
DEP spokeswoman Karen Hershey said the department has not yet received an application for conducting the study.
This is not the first time the township has contracted Omi Environmental to run tests on the effluent discharged from the sewage treatment plant.
On Oct. 18, the Township Committee adopted a resolution authorizing the consulting firm to be paid $94,000 to conduct a study to determine the percentages of metals contained in the plant’s effluent at its outfall to Rock Brook. A similar test conducted by the state in 2004 — when the property was still owned by the state — detected some levels of arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, silver and zinc in the effluent.
If Omni Environmental’s “metals translator” study indicates that the percentages of metals contained in the effluent exceed the DEP limits, the township could be required to do a different, more expensive upgrade on the plant than the planned membrane bio-reactive system, Mr. Nieman said. The township has not determined the cost of converting the sewage plant to a membrane bio-reactive system, but knows that similar sewage treatment plant upgrades recently performed have cost between $10 and $12 million, Mr. Nieman said.
The DEP received an application from Omni Environmental for conducting the metal translators study on Jan. 9, but has not finished reviewing it.
”We did contact Omni to request some additional information, because we found some deficiencies in their application,” Ms. Hershey said.
