CSO Connect Gowanus
By Elaine Hsieh, Yining Lei, Garrett Riha, and Savannah Wu
Foreword
CSO Connect was created by four friends whose paths crossed in urban planning school. Discovering a common desire to improve community development in ways that are interactive, team building, and oriented around public health, these four friends started the CSO Connect journey by serving the Gowanus neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.
Acknowledgements
We want to thank our professors, Clara Chung and Kaz Sakamoto, for their constant support and feedback, and Amy Motzny, Watershed Manager at Gowanus Canal Conservancy, for her guidance in making this project possible.
Problem Statement
Combined sewage overflows (CSOs) occur in the older parts of the city’s sewer system that combine wastewater and rainwater, where storms can overwhelm treatment plants and cause untreated wastewater to be released. Approximately 40% of the average rainfall events per year may trigger a CSO into the Lower East River, Kill van Kull, or New York Harbor (SWIM Coalition n.d.).
Currently, planners lack access to a comprehensive map of combined sewage overflow risks, which can lead to infrastructure degradation when funds are not allocated to upgrade aging sewers and pipes. Agents at the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), and the Department of Health lack a quick and convenient way to understand which bodies of water are at risk of contamination in various storm events depending on intensity and geography. Citizens often do not know of combined sewage overflow risks until they happen. There is not enough easily-digestible public information out there for people to understand localized risks and prevention measures.
We chose Gowanus Canal as our first pilot site of intervention. This is because Gowanus Canal was designated as a superfund site in 2010, deeming it a highly toxic site requiring federal support for remediation. The City plans to construct two massive sewage tanks to capture fecal flow until it can be treated at nearby wastewater treatment facilities as shown in red in our demo. However, there will still be over 100 million gallons a year of CSO entering the Canal (SWIM Coalition 2017). CSOs will continue to happen with as little as a half inch of rain, or about 35 times a year. This will continue for decades under the current plan. The public process is not reaching much of the community or allowing for meaningful input either. Both the City and the State have failed to communicate ongoing pollution to the community and how they developed the development of LTCPs (SWIM Coalition 2017). The approval of these plans was not publicly announced either. Furthermore, the rezoning plans which started from 2016 and is still ongoing, would trigger the creation of an estimated 8,200 new apartments by 2035, thus potentially triggering greater numbers of CSOs as wastewater (Spivack Dec. 2019). There has been no clarity on how the city will ensure that no combined sewer overflow pollution is added to the canal after the rezoning, thus advocates are worried that the rezoning may undo years of work now that part of the canal is the cleanest it has been in 150 years.
Currently, out of the 263 mil gal of discharge / year in Gowanus Canal, only 153 mil gal is managed (each raindrop represents 7.3 gal of rainwater):
With 20,000 new residents under the rezoning scenario, there could be an additional 1 bil gal of discharge / year:
As the EPA states, new development must take steps to offset additional sewage flowing into its waters to protect the colossal undertaking that is the canal’s Superfund cleanup. DCP is working closely with DEP on solutions to sewer overflow, including plans for facilities that will intercept sewage before it reaches the canal and nearly $41.5 million in infrastructure upgrades in the Industrial Business Zone (Spivack May 2019).. EPA officials aim to work closely with DCP to ensure rezoning plans don’t conflict with the Superfund’s $1.2 billion effort to clean the canal (Spivack May 2019).. As Walter Mugdan, the deputy regional administrator for the EPA’s region 2 says, “It would be crazy to spend that amount of money and then recontaminate the canal by simply having too much sewage for the area to manage. We’re going to be working closely with the city to get their projections, understand what plans they have. It’s their obligation to figure that out initially and to share with us how they plan to do it, and it’s our obligation to make sure that works” (Spivack May 2019). We hope our tool can help facilitate this process through community dialogue.
How you can help Gowanus Canal reduce pollution and prevent sewer overflow events with a web-app
MVP Scope & Target Persona
This month the world wide web welcomes a lovable new application that equips anyone willing with the right information, tools, and opportunities to share, to help prevent waterways and flooded streets from becoming contaminated by sewer water. We hope this advocacy tool can help residents understand CSOs and provide suggestions to take action.
The app is called CSO Connect and its debut serves the longsuffering, industrial neighborhood of Gowanus, Brooklyn in New York City. “CSO Connect” because the application helps connect neighbors and friends to collaborate in their efforts to prevent CSOs — a fancy acronym for the process of sewer water entering waterways in instances of heavy rain.
CSO Connect not only educates the public in a friendly and easy-to-understand way about the health hazards of CSO and the work being currently done to improve the situation, but it also demonstrates what easy steps its users can take in order to play their part in preventing the frequency and severity of CSO events.
Finally, CSO Connect serves as a platform through which users can share their contributions to a healthier, cleaner, and more CSO-free community with their neighbors and friends. All a user needs to do is identify their location on the map, select their CSO prevention action, and enter their name. Immediately the user is added to CSO Connect Team and their action to the Team Map. By joining the CSO Connect Team all users are also placed on the Team Leaderboard, through which users are ranked according to their total contributions, as each selected action is allocated a specific amount of points corresponding to the estimated impact on CSO (with extra points allotted for all actions that are entered with an attached photo). Not only can team members see their friends’ place on the leaderboard, they can also see what actions their friends have taken on the interactive CSO Connect Map, which can easily be shared on Twitter for showing-off, high-fiving, and the occasional leaderboard smack talk.
Competitive Landscape & Product Differentiation
Current competitors we identified and ways we differentiate from them are listed as the following:
- SWIM (Stormwater Infrastructure Matters) is a coalition of 70+ organizations citywide, dedicated to ensuring swimmable, fishable waters around New York City through natural, sustainable stormwater management practices in NYC’s neighborhoods. They view stormwater as a resource instead of waste. They advocate through creating factsheets, maps, reports, and an archive of testimony on their website. We have also used some of their graphics and information for our website, and endeavor to partner with them to help advocate for better stormwater management. We differentiate from their website by focusing neighborhood by neighborhood
- Open Sewer Atlas NYC is a community planning project with the goal of creating transparency into the confusing world of New York City’s sewer system. The project uses publicly available maps and data from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and NYS Department of Environmental Conservation to create dynamic maps that display a more complete picture of how NYC’s sewer system works. Amy Motzny of Gowanus Conservancy advised us to use Open Sewer Atlas’s datasets for our maps. We differentiate from Open Sewer Atlas’s website by making an interactive advocacy tool that tracks the website’ visitor’s interest and progress.
Planning Principles & Ethics
Our prototype integrates the concept of community planning and providing a platform for individuals in the community to be empowered and seen. Using one of our features on our site, Ushahidi, we allow the user to be engaged in the environmental planning and community goal setting process. This feedback in turn helps to inform local policies.
Our app follows the APA’s Code of Ethics in the following ways (APA 1992):
- Continuously pursues and faithfully serves the public interest in environmental and safety issues related to CSOs;
- Gives local residents full, clear and accurate information on CSOs;
- Expands opportunities for local residents by creating an interactive action map, engaging people in the environmental planning process;
- Assists in the clarification of planning actions, community goals, and local policies.
How to use CSO Connect
User Documentation & Key Features
This section will cover the following topics from the CSO Connect Gowanus web-app:
- CSO in Gowanus
- What you can do
- Take action
- Provide us feedback & request your neighborhood
CSO in Gowanus
The CSO in Gowanus section allows users to explore the realities of sewer water overflow as well as the infrastructure built or planned for to prevent sewer water overflow.
To see information about various CSOs, including the ID, the receiving waterbody, volume, the number of CSO events, and the amount of rainfall triggering a CSO event, simply hover your cursor over the respective icons on the map.
To filter through all relevant information, simply check on and off your desired layers in the map key legend in the upper-right corner. By clicking to show the sheds, which are areas where all the sewers flow to a single end point, users can see the number of people that reside in these vulnerable areas. Other layers can be clicked to see how the City is going to improve by adding various infrastructure projects.
To receive a brief introduction to some of the used terms like interceptors and force mains, simply hover the cursor over the term.
What you can do
In this section, simply take note of the easy, yet effective ways you can play your part in preventing the frequency and severity of CSO in your neighborhood.
Take action
Here you can record the actions you pledge to take (or have already taken) in your contribution in the greater fight against CSO. Simply click on the location of the action on the map, enter your name, select the action, and press submit. Immediately, your action will be recorded on the map along with your name, and you will be added to the CSO Connect Leaderboard!
Provide us feedback & request your neighborhood
Do you have an idea for how we can improve? We’d love to hear it. In the box below “Provide us feedback,” simply type your recommendation, enter your email address, and click submit.
Would you like to see CSO Connect in your neighborhood? We’re looking to expand, and searching for the right neighborhoods that are both in need of assistance and have a small team of passionate activists. In the box below “Request your neighborhood,” simply type your neighborhood name, city, and state, enter your email address, and click submit.
User Journey & Demo
Wireframes/ Embedded Videos/ Dashboards
Visit https://emh2249.github.io/cso-connect-gowanus for our demo!
Product Vision, Roadmap and MVP Success Metrics
Our aim for CSO Connect is to extend this app to areas of the city with combined sewers to help build coalitions, and to get citizens aware and involved in decreasing CSO events.
Above is our initial MVP prioritization matrix. We have completed our priority items including CSO 101, the LTCP info, and visuals on discharge site locations and ways to reduce CSO impacts. We also managed to include links to other resources such as the SWIM newsletter and a platform for the city to receive feedback on CSO risk mitigation and to help advocate for green spaces through the Ushahidi platform.
Some of our success metrics / KPI’s include conversion rates, click rates, and the number of people who have acted after pledging an action on the map, which we will track through following up with surveys. We also hope to involve governmental and nonprofit agencies to provide suggestions, which will help us to build a more robust version 2 platform. We will collect feedback through our feedback form, and through user training / outreach. These feedback comments will be invaluable to driving decisions on how to evolve into CSO Connect version 2, and provide validation if this is a real problem that can be solved through the site’s features.
We hope that these metrics will help us to build a user base and hopefully, our feedback form will show us where the next neighborhood would like to request CSO Connect. In the future, we hope to build out our social media tagging system that’s connected to the Ushahidi Take Action map. We also aim to include a zip code and community district search feature, more links to city resources through collaboration with Gowanus Conservancy, DCP, DEP and EPA. Other functions like a timeline to show planned actions, notifications on real time weather updates in relation to CSO events, and analyses of past 311 calls related to sewers are on our to-do list. Our team aims to add educational functions on how flooding affects soil quality and other water related climate events, such as flooding and sea level rise.
Product Viability, User Trust, Risks/ Uncertainties
We believe our product is viable as a pilot for the Gowanus Canal community. We hope the Gowanus Conservancy can test our website with residents in the area and that together, we can track and understand what’s working well, and what features should be taken out. This will build user trust and help us expand our purview of features that should be considered. Uncertainties include the fact that some people may not be incentivized or motivated to interact with our app, or feel distrustful of the platform. Other uncertainties include lack of updated data or community pushback in implementing such a tool. We plan to overcome these obstacles by engaging in a community workshop to test the app and evolve the MVP before a formal launch.
Works Cited
APA. (1992). Ethical Principles in Planning. APA. https://www.planning.org/ethics/ethicalprinciples/
DEP. (n.d.). Wastewater Treatment Plants. Open Sewer Atlas. https://openseweratlas.tumblr.com/data
DEP. (n.d.). Interceptors. Open Sewer Atlas. https://openseweratlas.tumblr.com/data
DEP. (n.d.). Combined and separate sewer areas. Open Sewer Atlas. https://openseweratlas.tumblr.com/data
DEP. (n.d.). CSO and Stormwater outfalls. Open Sewer Atlas. https://openseweratlas.tumblr.com/data
DEP. (n.d.). DEP Green Infrastructure. Open Sewer Atlas. https://openseweratlas.tumblr.com/data
Gowanus Canal Conservancy. Gowanus Lowlands. (2019). Gowanus Canal Conservancy. https://gowanuscanalconservancy.org/gowanuslowlands/
Gowanus Canal Conservancy. (2019). Gowanus Canal Sewershed. Gowanus Canal Conservancy. https://gowanuscanalconservancy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/GowanusCanal_OpenSewerAtlas_Aug2019_Final.pdf
Spivack, Caroline. (May 2019). Gowanus rezoning must not ‘diminish’ canal cleanup: feds. Curbed New York. https://ny.curbed.com/2019/5/30/18645246/gowanus-canal-brooklyn-epa-superfund-cleanup
Spivack, Caroline. (Dec. 2019). Long-stalled ‘Gowanus Green’ development will feature nearly 1,000 new apartments. Curbed New York. https://ny.curbed.com/2019/12/3/20993637/gowanus-green-rezoning-1000-new-apartments
SWIM Coalition. (n.d.). What you need to know about the city’s Combined Sewer Overflows. SWIM Coalition. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l3fzT3Du-O0GMmc1mpGbW1xA5ijoXaeM/view
SWIM Coalition. (2017). Gowanus Canal Raw Sewage Overflows. SWIM Coalition.
