Thursday, July 5, 2018

Overdevelopment leads to shitty beaches

From the NY Post:

The waters at three beaches in southeast Brooklyn were festering with so much fecal bacteria, they were deemed unsafe for swimming on 101 days over the past two summers, according to city Health Department records.

The filthy surf plagued the roughly mile-long stretch covered by Kiddie, Manhattan and Kingsborough Community College beaches, which are concentrated around Rockaway Inlet.

They accrued more than triple the total bacteria warnings issued at the city’s seven other public beaches. Ocean beaches have less stagnant water than inlet beaches.

The Health Department attributed the bacteria uptick to “increased rainfall.”

A clean-water advocate explained that the city has 460 points along its shoreline where about 27 billion gallons of raw sewage and storm water are dumped into New York Harbor every year when combined sanitary-storm sewers overflow during heavy storms.

“That’s the product of hundreds of years of overdevelopment in the city,” said Dan Shapley, the water-quality program director for Riverkeeper. He explained that certain city sewer designs date back to “when people were dying of cholera and the goal was to get [the sewage] out and away from the neighborhood as fast as possible.”

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM......FEEEEEEEEEECEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSS!

Anonymous said...

I dont go swimming in any NY beach. Too disgusting.

Anonymous said...

If risk swimming in a cesspool first than risk any city beach.

Anonymous said...

I would swim in a nyc beach if you paid me. The water is disgusting and the actual beaches are disgusting, people don't clean up after themselves.

JQ LLC said...

Wait till all that hyperdevelopment starts by Beach 116th street. The city will eventually shut that one down too once the skies start vomiting water.

Anonymous said...

The Rockaways have the only ocean-front beaches in the city,
so they're generally cleaner than all the others.
South Beach S.I. is still basically NY harbor, as are Coney Island and Manhattan Beach.
Orchard Beach, Bronx is off the Long Island Sound.

Whales and seals are routinely seen off Rockaway these days.
Someone caught a small great white shark last week, less than a mile off-shore.
They come with the seals.

Anyway, if you gotta swim, Rockaway seems like the best bet as far as water quality.

Harry Haller

Anonymous said...

Was swimming at the coney island beach in brooklyn because my friends invited me and the water was dark brown. I thought beach water was always like that. I felt something stick in my back it was a piece of shit. It was floating around it smelled like a dumpster. Never will i go there again. Its crowded too, i saw a guy get beat

Anonymous said...

NYC's water has gotten so much cleaner than the bad old days before the Clean Water Act and still has a long way to go.That 27 billion gallons of raw sewage goes right in our waters is a shame.Riverkeeper has done a lot for our local waterways as well as Clearwater.
Remember the slogan"Don't flush the toilet each time you pee,think about ecology" and "If it's yellow let it mellow,if it's brown flush it down".