Examine School’s Impact on Harbor, Pond

As East Hampton Town begins to undertake various water quality improvement projects that have been recommended as part of a comprehensive wastewater management plan, the impact of waste from the Springs School, just a stone’s throw from both Pussy’s Pond and Accabonac Harbor, is being examined.

According to Kim Shaw, the town’s natural resources director, tests will be conducted with researchers from Cornell Cooperative Extension within the next few weeks. A DNA analysis will be used to pinpoint the source of fecal contamination in the nearby waters. “The enterococcus is through the roof,” Ms. Shaw said. The tests will determine whether the contamination is from human or other waste.

The school has 745 students and generates “very concentrated wastewater” coming mostly from toilets and not, for example, from showers or laundry facilities, where waste would be diluted, Ms. Shaw said.

Six or seven years ago, before the Springs School was hooked up to the public water supply, Ms. Shaw said, its well was found to be contaminated with septic waste.

Septic systems, said Ms. Shaw, “don’t function with high groundwater,” which is found in the area of the school. The site is within a range where groundwater, and any effluent it might contain, takes less than two years to reach Accabonac Harbor, she said.

In a letter to the editor this week, Ira Barocas, a Springs resident, suggested that the school district use some of its accrued capital improvement money to install a state-of-the-art wastewater system. He discussed the idea with the town trustees on Tuesday and is planning to discuss it with the school board. He has also spoken with Ms. Shaw, who said there are grant programs that could ameliorate the cost.

Including a wastewater treatment facility in any school upgrade or expansion will, Mr. Barocas wrote in his letter, “do Pussy’s Pond and Accabonac Harbor a favor that will resonate through our community now and into the future.”

School district voters recently rejected the district’s proposal to spend a $2 million reserve fund to pave two ball fields and create a parking lot, and to make changes to the school driveways.

The effluent from what Mr. Barocas described as “more or less a thousand flushes a day” is clearly related to the degradation of water quality, and associated algal blooms and shellfishing closures, in both Pussy’s Pond and the harbor, he says. “When it swirls down, it’s going somewhere,” he wrote. “If it weren’t going anywhere near our water, our fisheries and recreational water bodies, let alone groundwater, that has to be better.”

Other facilities in the area, such as the Springs Library, Ashawagh Hall, and the Presbyterian church, might also be hooked into a wastewater system, Loring Bolger, who chairs the Springs Citizens Advisory Committee, has suggested.

“Given modern technology, and such a robust capital improvement program,” Mr. Barocas suggested that the school facilities committee, as it formulates a plan for the school campus, might “see the wisdom in providing those of us who pay the bills with the enduring gift of keeping the most concentrated waste stream in our community out of our surface waters. . . .”

Doing so, he said, would put the school at “the forefront of protecting our environment” and set an example for the students as future leaders.