ABOARD THE DRIFTMASTER IN NEW YORK HARBOR — Rich Bulvid has picked up his share of peculiar debris in his 36 years trolling the waterways around New York for the Army Corps of Engineers. In addition to tons of tree limbs, telephone poles and broken piers, he has hauled in a mailbag stuffed with a human torso; snakes, monkeys and whales; and not long ago, near Bayonne, N.J., a Good Humor truck long since out of ice cream bars.
Whether large or small, animal, vegetable or mineral, the floating debris poses a danger to the tens of thousands of craft that ply the waters from Jamaica Bay to Raritan Bay, up the Hudson to the Tappan Zee, the Harlem River, and the East River to the Throgs Neck Bridge.
“We go to where stuff collects, from a body to a Popsicle stick,” Mr. Bulvid said as he stood next to the two metal nets that hang between the two hulls of the Driftmaster, the oldest of the corps’s three debris-collection boats in the New York area.
Last year, the three boats picked up 4,600 cubic tons of debris, enough to fill nearly 200 tractor-trailers and prevent an estimated $23 million in damage to boats and ships. Driftwood made up about 90 percent of the debris, but the operation also stops everything from soda bottles and Styrofoam to sneakers from washing ashore.
The corps has been collecting debris in New York’s waters since 1915, and works year round. But as beach season approaches, it is beefing up its efforts on the everyday debris it calls “floatables” in hopes of avoiding beach closings that can cost coastal communities millions of dollars in lost income.
The corps, environmental regulators and other federal and state agencies are wary of repeating the mass beach closings of the late 1980s, when medical waste washed ashore in New York and New Jersey. That crisis triggered hundreds of pieces of legislation, as well as additional funds for the corps to pursue floatables.
Closings still occur, though not all are debris-related. Last year, the beaches at Surf City and Ship Bottom on Long Beach Island in New Jersey were closed before Memorial Day after residents discovered munitions from the World War I era buried on the beach. Not long after, a large bloom of brown algae appeared off Raritan Bay and Sandy Hook because of warm early-season water temperatures and abundant sunlight.
But it is the floating debris that most worries Mr. Bulvid and his crew, not just because of its effect on coastal towns, but also because of the dangers for pleasure boats, ferries and giant container ships. Over the past few decades, more boats have been built with aluminum instead of steel, which reduces their weight but makes them more vulnerable to floating debris, according to Scott Harris, a spokesman for the corps’s New York District.
He said a growing number of pleasure boats and ferries are powered by jets, not propellers, making them vulnerable to the plastic bags and other debris that can clog the propulsion systems.
The corps’s busiest times are after storms, when sewage systems overflow and debris is washed out to sea, and when the moon is new or full and has its strongest gravitational pull. In winter, ice can also break away from the shore and take wood and other debris with it. Come spring, warmer temperatures speed the decomposition of bodies submerged over the winter, producing gases that make them buoyant. (The police are brought in to handle the bodies.)
The three boats that the Army Corps of Engineers uses to clean New York’s waters picked up 4,600 cubic tons of debris last year, like the logs above and the mixed refuse at at top
Given that the Driftmaster and its sister boats patrol 240 miles of federal navigation channels in the harbor district, spotting small debris is not easy. The corps often gets calls from environmental agencies, the harbor police, the Coast Guard and boat captains. Sometimes it dispatches a small patrol boat to determine if the debris is a hazard before deciding whether to pick it up.
At other times, there is no debate: Every year there are a handful of small planes and helicopters that crash and have to be fished out. Cars routinely run off piers, bridges and ferries. And dozens of small boats go aground or break loose from their moorings and must be towed. The 11 boats, some with barnacles, collected so far this year sit pitifully at Caven Point in Jersey City, a former munitions arsenal that is now the corps’s marine terminal.
Mr. Bulvid looks for flocks of sea gulls, convergence of currents and boats that suddenly stop, all good signs of debris.
On a sunny afternoon this week, he spotted a 30-foot piece of wood floating near Governors Island. His crew got it onto the boat, where it joined about 15 other logs.
The wood is stacked on two 235-foot barges, one of which floats offshore near Port Liberte in Jersey City. Several times a year, the corps tows the barges to Newark, where contractors get $80,000 for each load they haul away. Most of the wood is filled with metal spikes and treated with chemicals, so it is difficult to recycle, but some is chopped into chips to cover dirt roads.
Then there are the whales. They tend to surface in the winter, after being hit by boats. The corps drags the carcasses, which can be weeks old, to Caven Point, where scientists perform a necropsy. The staff does not easily forget the experience.
“Oh, man, do they reek,” said Tim LaFontaine, the master tug foreman who cares for the corps’s boats. “You don’t want to be here.”
Other dead animals are left in the water to rot, Mr. Bulvid said, because they would attract rats if they were hauled back to shore. But plenty of other unpleasant items are retrieved, including a suitcase found near the Battery that had various body parts inside, and a canister that held cremation ashes. Legend has it a giraffe that escaped the circus was once recovered, too.
“Most people go around stuff in the water,” said Robert Pivirotto, the chief of Caven Point. “But we go after it.”
