Here's where they want you to hold onto your poop

From QNS:

The next time it rains, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) wants Queens residents to wait until it stops before doing the dishes, taking a shower or flushing a toilet.

The appropriately titled “Wait…” pilot program is expanding throughout western Queens, the DEP announced on Monday. Participating homeowners and tenants are sent text messages alerting them that the Newtown Creek and Bowery Bay Wastewater Treatment plants are near capacity — and that they should minimize their water use in order to prevent sewer overflows from spilling into already polluted waterways such as the Newtown Creek and Flushing Creek.

The pilot program area of Queens covers all neighborhoods north of the Jackie Robinson Parkway and west of the Van Wyck Expressway, as well as portions of Kew Gardens Hills and Briarwood.

According to advocates, the Wait Program is geared at educating the public about where their dirty water winds up after going down the drain. Wastewater produced whenever someone washes clothes or dishes, or even flushes a toilet, travels into the city’s vast underground sewer system, destined for one of many sewage treatment plants for cleanup and processing.

But in a heavy rain event, not all of the storm runoff and wastewater winds up in the sewage treatment plants. When the plants hit capacity, excess wastewater is expelled through combined sewer overflows into waterways across the city. About 90 percent of the overflow is comprised of storm runoff, and the rest is household wastewater containing detergents, chemicals and raw sewage.

Hey, how about limiting the building in these boroughs until the city gets a handle on how much waste they produce?

Since everything is covered with cement...

From DNA Info:

The city is building more than 300 rain gardens on streets in western Queens, part of a $7.3 million project to help curb pollution flowing into nearby Newtown Creek, according to the Department of Environmental Protection.

The 321 gardens — also known as bioswales — are being built in Sunnyside, Maspeth and Ridgewood, largely clustered east of the Kosciuszko Bridge and in neighborhoods around the Queens-Midtown Expressway in Queens Community Boards 2 and 5.

Built into the sidewalks, the gardens are designed to collect and absorb rain that would otherwise go into the sewer system, potentially overwhelming the city's wastewater treatment plants and overflowing into local waterways, including Newtown Creek, a notoriously polluted Superfund site.

And why is there so much runoff into the Creek?

That's a lot of crap!

From Crains:

A review of data reported under New York's 2012 Sewage Pollution Right to Know Act shows that nearly 2,700 sewage overflows were reported between May 2013 and June 2015.

The nonprofit Environmental Advocates of New York released a report on the sewage overflows on Thursday. The group reports 2,696 overflows during that span but says the true number is likely higher because of inconsistent data collection.

The group says funding for the state Department of Environmental Conservation must be increased to enforce the law and finalize regulations to provide standard reporting requirements.

City cleaning up Jamaica Bay

From AP:

Just a few years ago, the tributary, known as Paerdegat Basin, was a fetid mess. The water was murky green, teeming with 1.8 billion gallons of sewage and rainwater that streamed in during storms. The working-class neighborhoods along the waterway stank like an outhouse during hot weather and low tide. The shoreline was strewn with rusted out cars, garbage and broken bottles.

The Paerdegat tributary feeds directly into Jamaica Bay, a body of water and marsh sandwiched between Brooklyn and Queens, and on the shores of which sits Kennedy International Airport. Part of the area is run by the city; the other is Gateway National Recreational Area, which contains a wildlife refuge with one of the most important bird sanctuaries in the Northeast.

And now a decade-long $455 million investment by the city to clean up Paerdegat Basin is nearly complete, including a new sewage overflow retention facility at the head of the 1.3-mile-long channel and 52 restored acres of native grasslands and wetlands.

In older cities like New York, sewer systems are built on one pipe that handles both rainwater and sewage. With considerable concrete and not enough exposed earth to absorb rainwater, the combined runoff often overflows and backs into city waterways.

Plan to clean up stink of Flushing Bay

From DNA Info:

The Department of Environmental Protection will begin dredging sediment from the bottom of Flushing Bay in 2016, according to a city official, at a cost of $47 million.

Sediment has formed over years due to Combined Sewer Overflow, or CSO, from nearby roads and highways.

It hasn't helped that a runway at nearby LaGuardia Airport partially blocks the water from "flushing," according to DEP Commissioner Emily Lloyd, who testified about the funded project at a May city council hearing.

Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras-Copeland, who lead the testimony as the Council's finance chair, told Lloyd the smells are compared to rotten eggs and has plagued her district for years.

The project, scheduled to be completed in 2019, will remove most of the gunk at the bottom and make a "significant" difference, Lloyd said.