ALTAMONT — To deal with high levels of manganese in its wells, the Altamont Village Board has authorized a study of potassium ferrate, which Richard Straut, the mayor of Voorheesville and an engineer with the firm Barton and Loguidice, explained would be the most effective option, albeit one that is still awaiting approval as a drinking-water treatment. 

Although potassium ferrate has “been around” and is well-understood, Straut said, a new formulation has yet to be certified by the National Sanitation Foundation, for which the New York State Department of Health is waiting before officially approving its use. 

The difference between this new formulation and the other already-certified formulations is that the new one is solid, which is more practical for the village than the liquid varieties for its transportability, he said. 

Straut said that his firm has met with health department representatives and that they’re “supportive of moving forward” and “see a lot of potential” with the treatment plan. 

Manganese levels in water can be brought down by introducing a chemical that will oxidize it and turn it into a solid that can then be filtered out, he explained. Small-scale tests revealed that chemicals like chlorine “weren’t all that effective” because they didn’t work rapidly enough to create particulate matter in the amount of time that water is expected to be inside the village’s pipes. 

Potassium ferrate, on the other hand, works quickly and “creates a very nice particle,” Straut said. 

“It’s a very stable chemical,” he said. “It comes in a granular form, [you’d] use about three pounds a day, and it should be very effective and cost-effective. We think it’ll be cost-effective.” 

There would be no risk of potassium ferrate entering into the water stream if the village adopts it as the treatment option, Straut said. But to ensure that it’s the best option, he said, the village would need to do a pilot test. 

“Is it going to work effectively if you have to, for example, throw away the bag filters a couple of times a day? It’s going to be too expensive,” he said. “If you can get a few days out of each one, it probably would work. That’s the kind of thing we’re going to look at.”

The pilot would be done in partnership with the University of Rhode Island, Straut said, which has already been researching the chemical and has “a trailer, basically, with all this equipment in it. They would come out for a couple of weeks, run this pilot test, we’ll get the results, analyze it, and basically get back to the health department and determine that we think this is a good way to go.”

None of the water being tested would go into circulation, he said.

Straut said that the goal would be to get results in hand by the end of the year or early next year so that the village can be ready for grant season next summer. Whether the chemical will actually be approved by then is unknown, but Straut said that the process would be happening parallel to the study. 

“If for some reason this doesn’t get approved, or there’s something that happens where it doesn’t work in the pilot … we’d have to go to something like an ozone generator,” Straut explained. “That’s a piece of equipment that basically generates ozone on site. It’s quite a bit more expensive, uses a lot more electricity, so that’s why we’re trying to avoid those things if we can.”

The village board approved the study unanimously for an amount not to exceed $20,000, which Mayor Kerry Dineen told the board would come out of the village’s American Rescue Plan Act money. The village had come up with a project list earlier on how to spend its federal ARPA funds, meant to help with pandemic fallout, and this project fits the parameters.

Early last year, the high manganese levels prompted the village to turn off two wells on Brandle Road, which came online in 2007. Levels were not consistently high, but values are required to be reported as averages, and the spike created an average that was above the standard set by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. 

The village’s superintendent of public works, Jeff Moller, said last year that approximately 30 percent of the village’s drinking water comes from the Brandle Road wells, so “even with that high number,” it was getting mixed with the remaining 70 percent supply coming from Gun Club Road, so the water sent out to customers didn’t have levels of manganese that were “really that high.”

A notification sent out to village residents said that it was “not an emergency” and that protective measures like boiling water weren’t necessary, but that anyone with concerns should contact their doctor or the health department. 

At the Oct. 19 meeting, when asked what the village would do about manganese levels in the meantime, Moller said that the village could turn on the wells and run them for a period to wash them out, but that the village would then be required to send out notices.