Urban Forager:Cute Little Blob, but Watch for the Sting - by Ave Chin - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com

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Photographs by Ava Chin for The New York Times Jelly in a jar.

One recent afternoon, I stood on a dock leaning out into the Gowanus Canal with three locals armed with long sticks and plastic bags, hoping to catch a jellyfish in the high tide.

I first became intrigued by the notion of a Gowanus jelly when someone forwarded me a picture that a local resident and environmental planner, Eymund Diegel, had taken of a catch that he and his daughter Amara Diegel, 8, had made a few weeks before.

It was a lion’s mane jelly – the same species that terrorized a New Hampshire beach this week, only smaller, about the size of Mr. Diegel’s hand, in a glass vase surrounded by a pair of wide-eyed local kids.

When I contacted Mr. Diegel about taking me along with him, he sent the following hypothetical instructions:

1. Get long rusty pole out of Gowanus Dumpster.
2. Unhook plastic shopping bag snagged on barbed wire fence and tie to pole.
3. Hold daughter (to avoid falling in sludge) and scoop up passing jelly fish with urban forager hunting device.
4. Put in jar, and stare at pulsating movement. Show to playmates for “cool” factor.
5. Release.

Originally a tidal pool with water originating from the mouth of the Gowanus Bay, the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn had long been fetid from more than a century of toxic dumping and sewage from a variety of industrial operations along its banks.

But the modern emergence of a cleaner East River combined with the reactivation of the “flushing tunnel” —built in 1911 to flush water from the Buttermilk Channel through the canal, and down towards the Bay — meant not just a less smelly Gowanus in recent years, but also the growing presence of marine life, including killifish, microplankton and jellies. Folks were so enthusiastic about the improvements, some even went fishing in it.

Urban fisher-girls await their quarry.

The afternoon that we met up for our jelly expedition, Eymund Diegel arrived with Amara, 8, and her friend Alita Gaulot, 7, plus two long sticks from his backyard, and a giant glass jar. Though it was more than 90 degrees, the canal was surprisingly odor-free.

At the Second Street boat dock, four teenagers left when they saw us approaching. The high tide was still pushing the water north, but soon it would reverse and be the optimal time to catch jellies. The water was surprisingly clear close to the banks, and I spotted a few crab bodies (deceased) and some floating plankton. Mr. Diegel spied a rat running under the eroded cement bulkhead, hollowed out by the tide.

The dock, with a railing and ladder descending into the canal, making it resemble the end of a swimming pool, was submerged in about 4 inches of cleanish-looking water. The girls were allowed to put their feet in, but their entreaties to go swimming were denied.

“The top layer is fine—it’s East River water—but I don’t trust what’s six feet below,” said Mr. Diegel. He turned to the girls, who were already standing ankle-deep in the water getting their plastic bags ready. “And when we get home, we’re hosing your feet off.”

Mr. Diegel had previously collected Gowanus water samples for a P.S. 29 science fair where a group of students were eager to study it under microscopes. Mr. Diegel said, “The kids were disappointed there wasn’t anything really bad in there.”

Growing up in Queens, where we often drove across a particularly polluted part of Flushing Bay on the Van Wyck Expressway, prompting furious manual hand-crankings of the car windows shut, the first time I smelled the Gowanus, I was immediately brought back to my childhood borough. So here I was, some years later, standing in the tidal waters of the Gowanus Canal, surprised that my own desire to see a creature I’m normally leery of encountering in the ocean outweighed the reputed yuck-factor of the surroundings.

Suddenly, Amara started shouting “Look! Look!” and then both girls were pointing and yelling, and Mr. Diegel began stirring the water with a long stick.

Several feet out into the Gowanus was a tiny shimmery blob, about the size of a nickel, moving in the water like an infant’s heartbeat, pushed along by the tide.
Mr. Diegel’s method of methodical, counter-clock-wise stirring soon brought the tiny jelly within arms’ reach.

“I got it!” Alita called out, before reaching in with a grocery bag.

Back on land, where an elderly gentleman had quietly set up a net and a cooler (“Killifish,” he explained), we distributed the baby jelly into the glass jar with plenty of Gowanus water and a piece of kelp Mr. Diegel had fished out of the canal.

Jellyfish are edible, and served cold in Chinese restaurants. They are not my favorite food, with a texture and flavor rather like that of rubber bands, but even if I enjoyed them, I was not going to eat anything from the Gowanus. As we stirred the water—jellies need perpetual motion—the creature we named “Baby Jello” alternated between gliding flat in the current like a fried egg and bunching up like a French cruller.

Like the jelly Mr. Diegel and his partners discovered before, Baby Jello is a lion’s mane jellyfish that can grow to a giant (the bell can range from 19 inches to nearly 8 feet in diameter), with tentacles that resemble long masses of wig-like hair (sometimes over 100 feet). Its sting can be fatal, which inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane.” But as we stared at the jelly pulsating in the jar, it was hard to imagine that such a tiny translucent creature, with its wee orangy-red-center that upside-down rather resembled the shredded topping on Chinese shumai, could grow up to be a killer.

Despite being seasoned Gowanus jelly catchers (this was Amara’s third and Alita’s second jelly), both girls were excited about their catch.

“This was the best because it’s rare to find a baby,” said Alita. Amara agreed.
 Jellies like this may become rarer for the next few years with last week’s closing of the flushing tunnel for repairs, but we weren’t thinking about this as we carried the tiny creature to the Proteus Gowanus artspace near the Union Street bridge. That evening, Baby Jello became the temporary mascot of their show “Transport,” before later being released back to its watery home, where I imagined it would make its way down to the Gowanus Bay, and eventually, I hoped, out to the Atlantic Ocean.

Halliburton's Murky Name Resurfaces After Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill by Denis Hamill - NY Daily News

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Some things never change.

When Al Gaudelli, noted attorney and former Queens homicide prosecutor, first read about the disastrous oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, one word popped out of the spreading dark sea of words:

Halliburton.

Halliburton is one of the world's largest oil-field services corporations. And, as we all know, the odious company that made Dick Cheney super rich. The same company that received exclusive no-bid government contracts for almost everything involving oil in the invasion of Iraq.

But Gaudelli wasn't thinking about Dick Cheney or the untold billions Halliburton made from Iraq.

He was reading the part of a newspaper story that said Halliburton might be in for some legal problems in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill because it was in charge of "cementing" on the rig.

"I flashed back to Aug. 18, 1973, when I was the chief homicide prosecutor in the Queens DA's office," says Gaudelli. "At the time Con Ed was building a water intake facility at 20th Ave. and 31st St. in Long Island City to suck water from the East River into coal turbines. A watertight cofferdam that was constructed to build the facility had collapsed. Two sandhogs, fathers of young children, died down there. One of the companies working on that cofferdam was Ebasco Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton."

Like all New Yorkers, Gaudelli was saddened by the deaths of those two workers - Vincent Calzolaio, father of one, with a second kid on the way, and Donato Callaro, father of six.

"Then NYPD Sgt. Robert Byrne, a Harbor Patrol cop for 15 years back then, who knew that river better than anyone, called me up and said he'd watched them construct that cofferdam and that it wasn't kosher," says Gaudelli. "That corners were cut."

The veteran police salt took Gaudelli and a few ADAs out onto the river for a look-see.

Gaudelli says the construction plan was to anchor the intake facility to the river floor. In order to do that they had to put in a cofferdam, which is a watertight steel box made of corrugated tongue-and-groove steel sheeting that is driven into the hole to refusal.

"The bottom of the box was supposed to be sealed with saline concrete," Gaudelli says now. "Then the plan was to pump the water out of the box to allow workmen to go down there into the hole to build the water intake facility under the river. And later they were to remove the cofferdam. But we discovered that the contractors didn't put the concrete in place. Didn't do the cementing. And the goddamned bottom of the cofferdam kept blowing and causing great leaks. And finally on Aug. 18, 1973, it blew altogether, water rushing into the hole at 40-60 mph, and two sandhogs were killed."

Seven others barely escaped.

Gaudelli, aided by Sgt. Byrne and Detective Thomas Shay of the 17th homicide squad, conducted an exhaustive investigation and on Dec. 18, 1973, he brought homicide indictments against the contractors Spearin, Preston & Burrows, and Ebasco Services, and three of their supervisors. The charges stated that they had "failed to properly construct and supervise construction on the cofferdam and failed to perceive a substantial and unjustifiable risk of death in construction of the cofferdam."

Gaudelli says Con Ed was insulated from prosecution because they'd contracted the construction job out.

"Halliburton was insulated, too, because Ebasco was a subsidiary," Gaudelli says. "But as soon as we brought the indictments against the SOBs, these big companies hired the top lawyers from the biggest firms in town and our case was dismissed. But we wanted justice for those two men whose kids had lost their fathers because the contractors had failed to secure the cofferdam with concrete. So we appealed. But it was also denied. I always thought they'd all gotten away with murder."

Then, last week, Gaudelli, now a private attorney in Queens, was reading the papers about the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf and the name Halliburton pops out of the murk as possibly being legally responsible for the catastrophe. Oil construction experts were saying that the timing of the explosion indicates faulty, ahem, cementing. Transocean, the operator of the doomed oil platform, has claimed that Halliburton workers had been capping the 18,000 foot well with cement prior to the explosion that ultimately sank the rig, sending some 200,000 gallons of oil per day into the Gulf.

Talk about rounding up the usual suspects.

"Who knows if Halliburton will be held responsible for the oil spill," says Gaudelli. "It just gave me the chills that 37 years after two men died unnecessarily in Queens that one of the companies involved in that long forgotten underwater tragedy is implicated in the oil spill in the Gulf. Some things never change."