Dead In the Water
Cleaning up decades of pollution feels like a stagnant process
If you look at the Newtown Creek, it’s hard to believe that it’s sickening the people around it. It’s beautiful, like a tranquil river that just happens to flow between industrial shipyards. I had trouble believing it myself until I spent an afternoon walking along the creek’s banks. After just half an hour next to the creek, I felt physically sick. My throat started to itch, and I felt nauseous from the rancid smell of chemicals. When I got home, I chugged a bottle of water and blew my nose. The gunk that came out was black.
This is nothing new. The Newtown Creek is a Superfund site, or a site that the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has labeled a pollution disaster. Even though the creek wasn’t proposed for the official Superfund list until January 2009, it’s no secret that it’s been a problem for much longer.
The creek has a long and ongoing history of pollution. The creek is a four-mile long natural estuary off of the East River that runs along the north edge of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. In the 19th century, it became a major source of commerce for the neighborhood, providing a location for both a booming industrial economy and heavy water traffic. The creek was converted into a canal in the second half of the 19th century and developed into a major international trade port. Its new, unnatural angles catch any solid material floating in the creek and cause it to sink to the bottom, rather than flowing through. And there has been plenty of solid waste going into creek over the decades. By the 1920s, there was more traffic on the creek than on the entire length of the Mississippi River. Most of the water traffic came from oil shipping, since oil refining was the biggest industry on the creek banks.
In the 1950s, the creek and ground around it were so saturated with oil and industrial pollution that underground chemical vapors spontaneously combusted, creating a ten-foot wide hole in the ground.
In the 1960s, the main industry on the creek banks switched from oil refining to oil distribution. But many factories remained, and they, along with any construction projects along the creek’s shore, kept dumping their waste into the water.
In 1978, almost 30 million gallons of oil spilled into the creek, resulting in one of the largest oil spills to occur on U.S. soil. There is currently more oil under Greenpoint than in the entire Exxon Valdez spill. This event is what finally got Newtown Creek on the nation’s radar. In 2006, Representatives Anthony Weiner and Nydia Velazquez proposed (and got passed) an initial independent health and safety study of the creek. The press release from the legislation’s passing cited the oil spill as one of the main reasons for the study.
Today, the Newtown Creek is one of the most polluted waterways in North America. The once-forty-foot deep creek is now only twenty feet deep, because it has a twenty-foot thick sediment bed of “black mayonnaise,” a combination of raw sewage, oil pollution, and human excrement. It is lined with oil distribution yards, industrial recycling facilities, and an enormous wastewater treatment plant.
This plant only serves to further complicate the creek’s situation. The plant is under the authority of the New York Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), not the federal EPA. The DEP administrates according to the Clean Water Act, whose guidelines were written in the 1970s. The plant has never met the Act’s standards. Since it’s outside the EPA’s jurisdiction, however, the EPA can’t regulate the plant or the amount of pollution it contributes to the creek.
And the plant is one of the biggest contributors to creek pollution. The sewage treatment facility, which is the largest one of its kind in New York City, sits on the creek’s shore like a decaying beached whale — massive, out of place, and leaking waste. This plant, which gets sewage from all over the city, is the source of the chemical smell in the air by the creek. The treatment process uses chlorine to convert wastewater from sewage to a solution suitable for reintroduction into the water cycle. But despite its impressive scale, the plant still isn’t large enough to treat all the sewage that gets pumped into its holding tanks. Every time it rains, there’s overflow of 11 to 17 billion gallons of raw sewage, all of which gets dumped straight into the Newtown Creek.
Not to mention the abnormally high rates of cancer and respiratory conditions in Greenpoint. A 1993 study by the New York City Health Department found that Greenpoint had the highest incident rate of adult stomach cancer and child leukemia, the second-highest rate for male nervous system cancer, and the third-highest rate of female pancreatic cancer. And in their 2006 press release, Weiner and Velazquez stated that people in Greenpoint also suffer from asthma, emphysema, and bronchitis at rates that are 25 percent higher than the rest of New York City.
But it is one thing knowing the extent of the creek’s pollution and ill effects, and quite another to clean it. In fact, it can feel as if that process might take as long as it did to pollute the creek in the first place.
In fact, the extent of the pollution is so profound that the creek might actually be beyond saving.
“The creek might be dead already,” said Bob DeLuca, an environmental scientist and president of the environmental protection organization Group for the East End. It’s hard to pin down an exact timeline for cleaning up a polluted body of water, he added, because chemicals behave differently depending on the situation, such as type or temperature of the solution they’re in. For the creek, the EPA would have to start by getting permits to remove the black mayonnaise, as well as finding a place to put the sludge. The cleanup plan will also have to account for polluted groundwater. By DeLuca’s best guess, it will take several decades to get the creek fully clean.
Not for lack of trying, though. The Newtown Creek was proposed as a Superfund site in January 2009 and was officially added to the Superfund list in September 2010. In February 2012, New York City hired Anchor QEA, an external technical contractor based in Woodcliff Lake, NJ, to study the creek and determine the best course of action. That process is only half over, said Elias Rodriguez, an EPA public information officer: Anchor QEA just completed their research and will present their findings to the EPA in November 2016. If all goes according to plan, he added, the EPA will finish reviewing the data and will have selected a plan of action by 2020.
The creek’s recovery is further hindered by red tape and by science. It’s scientifically impossible to get the creek sufficiently clean any faster than the rate at which the EPA is currently going, said DeLuca. In fact, their single-decade-long timeline might even be a little optimistic, especially with a bureaucratic technicality preventing the outflow of pollution from the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant.
Meanwhile, the people of Greenpoint are feeling the effects of the slow pace of cleanup.
“Both the city and the community have different views about Newtown than Gowanus,” said Greenpoint resident Ryan Kuonen, referring to another Superfund site in Brooklyn, the Gowanus Canal. “They had people begging to be on their CAG (community advisory group). We have to beg people to come to our meetings.”
Kuonen is the co-chair of the Newtown Creek Community Advisory Group, which acts, she explained, as “the watchdog for the government,” to ensure transparency of information at every step. The group is in constant communication with the EPA to make sure the community remains fully informed about the cleanup process. The advisory group, she said, often looks to the cleanup process of the Gowanus Canal as a model for how the creek cleanup should go.
If you look at the Gowanus Canal, it’s hard not to take the Newtown pace personally.
The Gowanus Canal was proposed for the Superfund list in December 2008, about a month before the Newtown Creek. Within four years, in September 2013, the EPA had not only concluded its research on the canal, but also decided on a remedial action plan. Rodriguez explained via email that the project is currently in the midst of the engineering design work meant to both cap polluted areas and control any future pollution sources. The cleanup’s scheduled date of completion is in 2020.
The canal is about two miles long, half as long as the creek, with a proportionate amount of pollution: the black mayonnaise in the canal is only about 10 feet deep. Gowanus also benefits from name recognition. The neighborhood is sandwiched between Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, two of the most desirable (and expensive) neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and possibly the country, says Joseph Alexiou, author of the book Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal. At the time of the Superfund designation, Kuonen says that Gowanus was already in talks for high-rise developments and residential rezoning.
“Every free square inch of Gowanus has been bought by developers,” said Alexiou. “They’re waiting with bated breath for rezoning.”
Gowanus has been on the cusp of a major redevelopment boom since before the economic recession in 2008. The neighborhood, says Alexiou, was rapidly gaining popularity in the years leading up to the recession. Michael Bloomberg was a big advocate for rezoning Gowanus when he was mayor, and Mayor Bill DeBlasio has continued to push for residential rezoning. But when the canal was added to the Superfund list, the influx of people to Gowanus slowed. The toxic canal made the neighborhood less appealing to the real estate market. Some developers, says Alexiou, including the major luxury home development company Toll Brothers, actually threatened to pull their money out of the neighborhood if the Superfund designation went through.
The Superfund designation was approved, and until recently, the cleanup process was actually moving ahead of schedule. Lately, there’s been friction between the EPA and the city over where to place two retention basins, which will hold raw sewage and toxic waste filtered out of the canal, which has slowed down progress. But, even with this latest hang-up, Rodriguez says the canal will be completely clean in 2020, within just 12 years of its Superfund designation.
“The current plan sounds a little ambitious,” said DeLuca, “unless they’re dedicating almost limitless resources to it.” By his guess, there are multiple millions of dollars going into getting the canal clean.
In the case of Gowanus, “science won over politics,” said Alexiou. In Greenpoint, there were no politics to begin with. There was no reason to look twice at the Newtown Creek because no one outside of the community realized there was a problem until the damage had already been done. And those in the community have simply adjusted to living with the creek as it is. Most of the people I spoke to in Greenpoint aren’t concerned about the creek. People who aren’t involved with the community advisory group don’t even consider the creek a source of worry.
“The creek can be deceivingly clean,” said Kuonen. She feels that there isn’t enough widespread information for people to understand that just because the surface looks all right, doesn’t mean the rest of it is fine. Greenpoint locals often believe that the toxins in the water will only affect pregnant women and children, she says, or that fish passing through the creek don’t spend enough time there to absorb the toxins into their systems.
The creek has always been a part of life for Greenpoint, and always will be. Even though it’s no longer the main source of livelihood, people still use it. Locals can often be found along its banks, relaxing in the sun, smoking, and fishing.
Sometimes they even eat the fish.
