Crews beginning work on relining Haledon's leaky sewers

The Bergen Record
August 3, 2010
By Maggie Astor

HALEDON — A fix is in sight for a decades-old saga of raw sewage backups into basements and polluted runoff to the Passaic River.

Repairs to leaky sewer lines near the Roe Street Field will begin within weeks. The borough awarded a contract to the Rahway-based Allstate Power-Vac in April and preliminary site work started July 27.

Project manager Tony Doherty said the work will take three to four months. Nearly 10,000 feet of pipe is to be relined, said Nordan Murphy, an engineer with the Alaimo Group, which is overseeing the project.

The project is expected to cost $668,000, said Doherty, and is being funded primarily by a federal stimulus grant.

The borough applied last year for $750,000 in grants and low-interest loans from the stimulus package. The state Department of Environmental Protection ranked its priority 76th out of 276, not high enough to receive funding. Officials said at the time that the project would have to be put on hold because the borough couldn't afford it.

But in February, Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-Paterson, secured up to $1.5 million in grants and low-interest loans from a second round of stimulus funding for environmental protection projects. Because bids came in lower than the borough had expected — less than $700,000 compared with an estimate of $1.8 million — most costs likely will be funded by a grant. Any loans would be repaid over several decades.

"It's going to be a very, very minimal impact, and it's the kind of project that I think residents want us to do," Mayor Domenick Stampone said. "Yes, there's a cost, but the benefit greatly outweighs it."

The sewage backups attracted public attention last summer after an investigation by The Record, which found that some homes had been affected for more than 30 years. The DEP investigated and ordered Haledon to fix the pipes.

Some of the sewers — especially in the Roe Street area — are 100 years old or older. In heavy rain, water seeps into the pipes and overloads them, causing raw sewage to back up into residents' basements and spill out of manholes. From the street, the waste flows into storm drains leading to the Passaic River.

Making matters worse, some residents have basement sump pumps that pick up flooded sewage and dump it into the street. These pumps are usually intended for storm water, but are illegal for any other purpose under Haledon's code.

In addition to the environmental and health hazards of raw sewage, the leaky pipes also cost the borough money: When rainwater infiltrates them, it flows along with the sewage to the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission treatment plant in Newark and is metered.

While the Roe Street area is the hardest hit by sewer backups, pipes throughout the borough will be repaired with a separate federal funding package. Pascrell in April secured $5 million for that purpose for Haledon and North Haledon. Half of the sum will be a grant, one-quarter a zero-interest loan and one-quarter a low-interest loan.