The city could be on the hook to help pay for a federal Superfund cleanup of the Gowanus Canal, officials said.While the EPA will mostly be going after industrial polluters who spewed chemicals and heavy metals such as mercury and arsenic into the canal, city-owned sewers cause additional pollution when they overflow into the waterway.
Millions of gallons of waste water - laced with raw human waste and oil, pesticides and other chemicals from street runoff - can end up in the canal when heavy rains cause sewers to overflow.
Sewers overflow into the Gowanus up to 75 times a year, dumping some 300 million gallons of sewage into the waterway, said Department of Environmental Protection spokeswoman Mercedes Padilla.
Photo from The Real Deal
3 comments:
You mean it's worse than the Flushing Creek?
I heard that the old barge captains used to clean their craft of wood worms, etc. merely be going through the canal.
Is that true?
Yet another example of us paying for developers so they can live a lavish lifestyle while they steal our city from us.
If they are not willing to clean it up, make it a passive park.
I want my taxes to pay for my family, not some developer so his daughter can go whoring on spring break.
the city has CSO's all over the place but the Gowanus gets more dumped in it if you look at the water testing reports for the whole harbor. the Gowanus gets the worst of it.
but if the city wouldn't cleanup this mess when it was flush with cash, how is it going to do this now? maybe the mayor could cut the funding of those new brownfield programs dumping cash into developers pockets and spend it on stoping sewage from filling the local waters! how about it mayor?
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