Wastewater

Massive underground lakes called aquifers supply every drop of drinking water in Suffolk and Nassau. 

Without getting too deep into earth science and Hydrogeology, I can tell you it is important to protect our aquifers and the health department works very hard to do so by limiting the amount of wastewater that goes into cesspools across the Island.

This affects landlords and tenants in one very important way, each building that is connected to sewers has a certain allocation of wastewater it can produce per day.  Similarly, buildings that aren’t on sewer, but have cesspools have an engineered site plan with calculations for the capacity of the septic system and flow permitted.  In both cases these calculations show the total gallons per day of wastewater that can be put down, which limits the size and type of businesses that can occupy the building.  The biggest water users are restaurants and medical offices, while the lowest are warehouses.  

Some uses, like restaurants, food production facilities, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and heavy industrial buildings have additional wastewater requirements.  For example, a restaurant or food production facility typically will require a wastewater interceptor device otherwise known as a grease trap.

What does this mean for you?

As a tenant the question you need to ask yourself is, does my business create a lot of wastewater?  If you aren’t sure, the entities that will ultimately provide your approvals can provide answers to many of your questions:

Suffolk County Department of Health Services Office of Wastewater Management-

https://www.suffolkcountyny.gov/Departments/Health-Services/WWM 

or

Nassau County Department of Public Works-

https://www.nassaucountyny.gov/1865/Public-Works

Building Owners

One last note to the building owners out there.  It is important to understand that what goes into your ground doesn’t just come from what goes down the drain.  Neighboring properties and roadways can produce runoff that ends up in the ground under your property.  It might be necessary to conduct maintenance to ensure that you don’t have contaminants going into the ground unknowingly which could pose an environmental hangup when you go to sell your property besides of course, being bad for the environment.

If you have any questions about this article or commercial real estate email [email protected] or let me know in the comments below.  Don’t forget to subscribe to our email blasts!

Next week we’ll talk about Fire Sprinklers.