ONE evening in late September, a contractor named Michael Tubridy was relaxing in his boat on Jamaica Bay when he saw a tug pulling a derelict-looking barge. The barge was covered with old tires and rusted pipes, and grass grew on its deck. Two pumps worked furiously to keep it afloat.
“The bottom line for me was, ‘What is a barge with two monstrous pumps doing on the bay?’” Mr. Tubridy recalled the other day.
Mr. Tubridy, who lives in Rockaway Park, Queens, followed the tug and saw it leave the barge in Barbadoes Basin, a narrow industrial inlet on the northern edge of the Rockaways. By the next morning, another barge had shown up, and as of Friday the two vessels were sitting there, blocking the inlet and looking thoroughly abandoned. One barge had been partially beached on the scrubby marshland; the other was wallowing in the cold gray water.
The presence of the barges was reported in The Times Ledger, a weekly newspaper.
For months, local residents have been complaining about these mystery guests, saying that they look ugly, that trash has been sliding off them into the water, and that their presence could damage the fragile wetlands nearby. According to a joint city-federal study released in August, the Jamaica Bay marshlands are vanishing at the rate of 33 acres a year and will be mostly gone by 2012 unless something is done.
No owner or government agency has come to remove the barges.
“It’s kind of mysterious that these two huge barges showed up in Jamaica Bay, came in under three bridges, and ended up in this little basin,” said Dan Mundy, the founder of Jamaica Bay Eco Watchers, a local conservation group. “You have a man-made disaster waiting to happen here.”
Last week, the wheels of government appeared to be slowly turning. Lt. Cmdr. Richard Moser of the Coast Guard said that his agency had identified the barges’ owner as Pile Foundation Construction in Marine Park, and had confirmed that the barges were not leaking oil into the bay.
Representatives of Pile Foundation did not respond to three telephone messages seeking comment, but Commander Moser said that the company had told his investigators that the barges were still in use for occasional short hauls. “The owners said that they pump them out and put patches on the holes and use them for a short time,” he said.
Yancey Roy, a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Conservation, said in an e-mail message that his agency was trying to confirm the identity of the barges’ owners, after which the department would “take appropriate action to address the situation.”
For his part, Mr. Tubridy was dubious that the barge he saw would ever float again. “It was being pumped out with very, very big pumps,” he said, “and they destroyed part of the bulkhead putting the thing up there.”
