Five years ago, the POV staff was surprised to discover that the most polluted waterway in America was situated roughly two miles north of our office in New York City on the border of Brooklyn and Queens. What was even more surprising was that none of us had ever heard of this tiny estuary before, even though many of us lived in Brooklyn. We produced a multimedia story about it called “The Invisible Creek” as part of our online-only series, POV’s Borders.
In that story, our intrepid correspondent, Gregory Warner, boated down Newtown Creek with the Hudson Riverkeeper’s chief investigator, Captain Basil Seggos, to document the environmental nightmare that the creek had become. At the time, Riverkeeper had recently filed a report on the creek in which they wrote:
“It fails to meet even the most basic goals of the 1972 Clean Water Act. Nearly the entire stretch of the creek is heavily industrialized, there is virtually no public access, and water dependent industries have stagnated. A boat trip up the creek is a journey into the heart of darkness, with the backdrop of the Manhattan skyline as a reminder of its real world locale.”
This being Earth Day, we thought about Newtown Creek, and we wondered if there had been any developments in its story. So, earlier this month, we checked in with Riverkeeper to find out what’s happened to the creek in the past five years. Unfortunately, the news is not good.
I spoke with Riverkeeper investigator Craig Michaels, who told me that there have been no improvements in the creek’s pollution levels. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency is considering listing Newtown Creek as a federal Superfund site later this year. Yesterday, the New York Daily News reported that the EPA finished testing samples of the water in the creek two weeks ago as part of a project that they undertook in January after state officials asked that Newtown Creek be added to the Superfund list.
Michaels said that he couldn’t say for sure whether the creek is really the most polluted waterway in America, but he assured me that it’s up there. He explained that New York City releases over 27 billion gallons of raw sewage into New York Harbor every year and that ten percent of that waste (2.7 billion gallons!) flows directly into Newtown Creek.
Compared with Brooklyn’s other stinky cesspool, the Gowanus Canal, which federal officials announced last week they want to add to the Superfund list, Newtown Creek Alliance director Katie Schmid told the Daily News that she believes “Newtown Creek’s a shoo-in.”
Find out more about the history of this ignored waterway in our multimedia piece, and read Craig Michaels’ full update at the POV’s Borders site.