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Village seeks new way to treat sewage

By Don Hopey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer -- September 7, 1998


	After a day of cutting hay by hand, farm workers take a horse and wagon back to their home in Krivany.

KRIVANY, Slovakia -- Bottles of chilled Slovak beer, Russian champagne and a local, slightly rust-colored mineral water sweat on a tray on the lace-covered dining room table in Jan Sejirman's home.

Seated at the head of the table, the affable 41-year-old mayor greets visitors from the Howard Heinz Endowment and People and Water, a local environmental group. They have come to this wide spot on the blacktop winding through the Torysa River valley to review progress on a sewage treatment project.

But first there is lunch. As Christ watches from a 2-foot-tall wooden crucifix on the wall, Sejirman's wife, Bozena, swoops in from the kitchen with heavy plates piled high with chicken breasts, ham and smoked cheese, deliciously lumpy mashed potatoes, and a scoop of rice. There's a side slaw of cabbage and carrots, rolls and wedges of pahuch, a flat, baked potato and cheese pie.
Dessert is a tray of cookies that would do a McKees Rocks wedding proud, plus real whipped cream with shaved chocolate for topping some of the world's best strawberries, small and sweet, from the garden out back.

They eat big mid-day in Slovakia, and this feast is Sejirman's opportunity to show he appreciates outside help for his village of 1,100, located 40 miles north of the industrial city of Kosice geographically, and maybe 30 years behind it economically.

There is no industry here. Men and women travel south to Presov and Kosice to work in steel or iron mills, or go north to the High Tatra Mountains, where a reforestation program is under way. Some farm. The old folks tend gardens.
Under the communists, the government spent money on sewage in the larger cities, ignoring small villages. Of 2,500 villages, only 6 percent have sewage treatment. As a result, sewage accounts for 60 percent of Torysa River pollution.

Slovak cement and construction industries now want to build big treatment plants in rural areas, and they have the ear of Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar.
But Sejirman and other village mayors in the Torysa River watershed believe alternative treatment methods would work better and cost less than big treatment plants.

"It's tough because the state doesn't care about this problem," Sejirman said. "It wants us only to listen. It treats environmental groups like the enemy."


Krivany Mayor Jan Sejirman shows visitors from the Howard Heinz Foundation the site of a temporary sewage collection basin that could soon be replaced with an innovative, low-cost sewage treatment system.

Working with People and Water, Sejirman has installed tanks to provide interim collection of wastewater from two apartment buildings, a school, municipal offices and an old castle now used as an information center and restaurant.

Before the end of the year, with the help of consultants from the Southern Alleghenies Conservancy and People and Water, he will select an alternative treatment system from among 20 or 30 methods.

Sejirman plans to visit Pennsylvania this fall to see a contour trench installed in Centerville, Bedford County. The trench method, never before used in Pennsylvania, features buried pipes and natural slopes to disperse waste horizontally through holes drilled in the pipes.

Improving sewage treatment in rural Slovakia should be a high priority, said Ron Donlan, a coordinator with the Southern Alleghenies Conservancy.

The villages draw drinking water from an aquifer supplied by snow melt from the High Tatra Mountains in northern Slovakia that has not yet been tainted by sewage.

"So far a thick layer of clay above the aquifer has kept it from being contaminated, but the region is on borrowed time," Donlan said. "There could be severe health problems, and clearly there are environmental problems. All the aquatic life in the river below Krivany is dead."

Sejirman said it would cost about $1.5 million to connect Krivany's 1,100 residents by pipe to the big wastewater treatment facility in the nearby village of Torysa. A contour trench system could be installed for a tenth of the cost.

"Under the communists we were told what to do and not do," the mayor said. "We need to learn about the environment and different ways to do things."

There's a lesson to be learned just up the road in Torysa, a prosperous crossroads settlement of 1,300 people. The sewage plant there was built during the communist era to serve 3,500 people in five villages. Only 800 are hooked up; only half of the facility's tanks are used. The government ran out of money to connect everyone else.

Now, while the government bickers with rural mayors and environmental groups, a local entrepreneur is pursuing his own novel alternative. With the Torysa treatment plant operating so far below capacity, the man has rented two of the unused 20-yard-long treatment tanks and set up a trout hatchery.

The tanks are teeming with fish, even if the river isn't.