An automatic flushing assembly has been installed in the Hopewell Township portion of Trenton Water Works (TWW) water distribution system in efforts to improve water quality.
The new flushing assembly will not only improve water quality, but the system’s reliability and maintain adequate hydraulics, according to the water utility. TWW installed the automatic flushing assembly on Pennington and Denow Roads at a dead-end section of the distribution system.
Sean Semple, director of Trenton’s Department of Water and Sewer, which operates TWW, said that the flushing assembly in the township is one of 144 installed throughout the system to strengthen the water utility’s water management.
The new flushing assembly, which is a $15,000 upgrade and part of TWW’s capital improvement program, operates automatically overnight for about an hour to discharge water from the township’s portion of the system to flush old water and maintain water quality.
The TWW system provides water to more than 200,000 residents in Trenton, parts of Hopewell Township, Lawrence Township, Ewing and Hamilton. As a water utility, it treats and provides drinking water from water taken out of the Delaware River.
The contaminants the water utility monitors include pH, iron, disinfection byproducts, and E. Coli.
TWW has a 683-mile water distribution system and is owned by the city of Trenton. In 2022, the NJDEP had to step in and oversee the operations of TWW after the utility had failed to address issues and conditions with providing safe drinking water for customers.
According to TWW, the use of flushing assemblies is key to the utility’s plan to reduce the concentration of disinfection byproducts (DBPs), which are contaminants that form when chlorine interacts with in raw water sources – rivers, lakes, and streams.
When sampling a site on 800 Denow Road the samples average for total trihalomethanes was 80.7, exceeding the locational running annual average (LRAA) limit of 80 for total trihalomethanes, which is a type of disinfection byproduct and a group of chemicals that form when chlorine is used to disinfect water.
“We are grateful to Trenton Water Works for installing this flusher in Hopewell Township, which I hope will mitigate the DBP issues we have been seeing,” Mayor Courtney Peters-Manning said. “We look forward to continuing to work with TWW on this and its other operations and capital projects.”
Peters-Manning and fellow township officials have been calling for change at TWW.
They renewed those calls for fundamental change in December 2024 following the announcement that an employee at the water utility – who has since been fired – had falsified drinking water quality data from October 2022 to December 2023.
This has been in addition to the new violations in the township’s drinking water exceeding the maximum contaminant level for disinfection by products (DBPs).
“Since 2022, I have been advocating for a direct operational takeover of TWW by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection due to the City of Trenton’s inadequate oversight of the water system,” Peters-Manning said in December.
“The addition of DEP oversight two years ago, while short of a direct takeover, was a welcome change. However, the falsification of data, in conjunction with DBP exceedances in Hopewell Township yet again, shows that more must be done. Nothing short of a wholesale change of operational control will prevent future lapses.”
