Obama Cabinet Member Takes Tour of Jamaica Bay by Ivan Pereira - YourNabe.com

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U.S. Rep. Anthony Wiener (from l.), U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Park Ranger Dandelion Dilluvio remove an invasive vine in Jamaica Bay during Salazar's visit to the ecosystem. Photo by Christina Santucci

The U.S. secretary of the Interior paid a visit to Jamaica Bay Monday and borough elected officials said they hope his trip will have a positive impact on the future of its environment.

This is the first time Ken Salazar visited the 31-square-mile ecosystem and got up close with its fauna and flora, according to U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Forest Hills), who accompanied the secretary during the tour.

“There are a lot of, ‘Oh, wow,’ moments when you visit Jamaica Bay,” the congressman said.

Salazar, who was touring several Gateway National Recreation Area sites, including the Statue of Liberty, walked the path of the bay’s wildlife refuge and took a boat tour of the bay along with park rangers, Weiner and Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-Jamaica).

Park experts explained to Salazar how Jamaica Bay’s environment is closely tied to the nearly 400 species of birds, fish and other wildlife that populate the area. The ecosystem serves as a home to many of the animals during their migratory patterns, according to Barry Sullivan, the superintendent of the Gateway National Recreation Area.

“It’s unbelievably important to the ecosystem, not just for the city ... but also for the entire Atlantic coast,” he said.

Leaders and environmentalists say the bay’s importance to the area means it should qualify for more preservation projects.

Its saltwater marshland has been dissipating for decades and more than 70 percent of the ecosystem has been lost. Over the last 10 years, city, state and federal governments have been providing funding, planning to stop the decay and restoring some of the lost marshland.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been restoring several sections of the marshland, including Elders Point West. In the winter, the city announced it was dedicating $100 million over the next decade to enhance its wastewater treatment plants around the ecosystem so the facilities discharge less nitrogen, which causes the plants to decay.

Dan Mundy Jr., a member of the Jamaica Bay Ecowatchers, an environmental group that has been advocating for protecting the bay, said projects are coming along well.

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“The results for the sites of growth are doing very good so far,” he said.

Weiner said he thinks Salazar’s visit will help bring more funding and attention to the environment since the secretary has had a hands-on experience with the bay.

“So much about the [restoration projects] is about oiling the squeaky wheel. This is not a well-known park,” he said.

Additional photos from the Rockaway Wave...

Can the City -- and the Oyster -- Save Jamaica Bay? by Anya Khalamayzer - (Gotham Gazette, May 2010)

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The marshes of Jamaica Bay have been shrinking for decades, essentially vanishing into New York's toxic waters. Photo by Unforth

The largest urban wildlife preserve in the United States sits adjacent to Kennedy Airport, near the high-rise apartments of Starrett City and the Rockaway housing projects. Home to the peregrine falcon, the loggerhead sea turtle, the short-eared owl, the area -- Jamaica Bay -- at the intersection of Queens, Brooklyn and Long Island, serves as a stopover for 20 percent of American bird species on their annual migration along the East Coast.

For years, though, this estuary, a shallow marsh where fresh and saltwater meet, has been vanishing into the toxic waters of the New York City harbor, losing an estimated 33 acres annually to deterioration, nitrogen buildup and rising sea levels. Spanning some 16,000 acres about a century ago, the salt march islands have shrunk to a mere 800 acres. Thought not nearly as dramatic as the environmental catastrophe now confronting the Louisiana coast, the threat to Jamaica Bay could completely destroy the marsh by 2024, decimating the home for an abundance of rare and endangered plants and animals.

"Marshland completely changes the nature of the bay," says Larry Levine, staff attorney for the Natural Resource Defense Council. "If it were to ever disappear and become open water, it would be a tremendous loss of natural habitat."

Now, the federal state and city governments, prodded by citizen's groups, have stepped up their efforts to preserve the area. This year, government and private groups collaborated to update the Jamaica Bay Watershed Protection Plan to try to avert disaster in the urban refuge. Whether government will keep its commitment and whether its actions can reverse the decades of deterioration remains to be seen.

[For more on efforts to revitalize New York's waterfront, go here.]

Destruction of an Ecosystem

Spartina cod grass anchors the land of the marsh in place. To survive, the grass must receive fresh water rich with oxygen and nutrient-loaded sediment. Small streams in Queens and Brooklyn once provided this, but many of these vital veins have been paved over the decades.

Four sewage plants ringing Jamaica Bay contribute further to the deterioration of the marsh by spewing 250 million gallons of nitrogen and large amounts of chlorine into the water every day. Ironically the nitrogen has worsened since 1992 when the government, in an effort to prevent pollution, banned the dumping of sewage into the ocean and instead diverted the treated wastewater into the bay. The excess nitrogen in the water is naturally converted into hydrogen sulfide, which kills the roots of the marsh grass.

In this nitrogen-rich environment, weed-like algae blooms thrive, suffocating the estuary by draining it of dissolved oxygen. Algae blooms kill the thousands of fish found floating belly-up in the very waters that are meant to nourish them.

In addition, during heavy rains, untreated oils and toxins wash from nearby streets and parking lots when storm drains overflow and end up in the bay. The bay also shares many of the contaminants that pollute the rest of New York harbor, such as dioxins, PCB particles, and mercury.

"The New York harbor is a wasteland," said Jeff Levinton, professor of marine ecology at SUNY Stonybrook.

Photo by Gail Robinson

Humans have taken their toll on Jamaica Bay.

Next-generation issues also are emerging, explained Levine. Studies show that Jamaica Bay flounder are affected by pharmaceuticals flushed through the sewage system and not removed by treatment plants. The population of male flounder has drastically diminished because of the feminizing effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals -- a pattern Levine says is being observed around the world.

Sounding the Alarm

Dan Mundy, founder of citizen group EcoWatchers, noticed that Jamaica Bay was ailing in the mid 1990s. By 2000, he said, as many as 50 acres of saltwater marsh were being lost every year. And in 2002, the state authorized a study of why the marshland might be vanishing.

It was not until 2005, though, that Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed a measure calling for the city Department of Environmental Protection to devise a plan to save the bay and creating a seven-person advisory task force. The committee included community activists and representatives of nonprofit organizations and government agencies. The resulting report presented a number of options, including installing storm sewers for flood prevention, dredging and re-contouring creeks, restoring eroded land, re-oxygenating the water and hiring pump-out boats to clean waste. Overall, the committee wanted visitors to Jamaica Bay and the government to be more vigilant of the estuary's condition.

Gradually, steps to restore and preserve the marsh began. Between 2006 and 2007, the U.S Army Corps of Engineers allocated $13 million to restore Elders Point East, an island marsh which once spanned 132 vegetated acres, but which had broken apart to a mere 21 acres.

While activists applauded many of these efforts, a number of them faulted the city for failing to do more to reduce nitrogen levels in the bay. For years city officials maintained that little evidence linked the disappearance of the marshes and nitrogen levels in the bay and balked at spending millions and millions of dollars to address the nitrogen levels.

By 2010, New York City faced a possible lawsuit under the federal Clean Water Act. The threat spurred intense negotiations between citizen groups, the Department of Environmental Protection, then Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler and other City Hall officials. The city, according to Mundy, expressed concern about the cost of the technological upgrades needed to address the nitrogen problem, but over time became convinced that the installations were necessary for the bay's survival.

"It shouldn't be a matter of economics. Not when it comes to the environment. Not when it comes to Jamaica Bay," Mundy said.

Cutting the Nitrogen

In February 2010, Bloomberg announced the city would commit $115 million for a combination of efforts to safeguard the only wildlife refuge accessible via subway. As part of that, he said New York would spend $100 million to install new nitrogen control technology at sewage treatment plants on the bay.

Don Riepe, who headed negotiations on behalf of the American Littoral Society, said the city pledged another $15 million to support marsh restoration. The Army Corps of Engineers will match the restoration funds two-to-one.

The first of the plant upgrades will begin operating in 2014. Technology to control nitrogen will be installed at the 26th Ward and Coney Island wastewater treatment plants in Brooklyn, and at the Rockaway plant in Queens. These efforts are predicted to reduce nitrogen discharges by 50 percent over the next decade and to allow the bay to filter its waters over time.

Reclamation of Elders Point West Island has already begun. Clean fill, or "slurry" -- muck being dredged from waters around the city -- is currently being shipped from the harbor and Long Island and will become 35 new acres of marsh. The U.S Army Corps of Engineers is hand-seeding Spartina grass into the fill. When they finish this at the end of the summer, they will move on to reclaim Yellow Bar island.

Photo by Gail Robinson

Restoring grassland is essential to the survival of marshes so many animals call home.

Wave attenuators, marina-like docks that act as buffers against beach-deteriorating waves, are to be installed between 2014 and 2019.

Despite all this technology, though, Jamaica Bay's brightest new hope may be a bivalve that once lived in the 350 square miles of the estuary: the oyster.

A Natural Solution

Oysters last thrived in the Hudson-Raritan Estuary in the early 20th century. Describing the bivalve as a "keystone" species that affects other components of its ecosystem, NY/NJ Baykeeper has championed experimental oyster farming. Every animal can filter nitrogen and pollutants from 50 gallons of water daily. They eat oxygen-guzzling phytoplankton that suffocates the bay. In, addition the beds where the oysters live serve as homes for small marine organisms and the fish that feed on them.

"Right now you can hardly find a live oyster in Jamaica Bay," says Levinton.

Their decline both signifies and intensifies the bay's ailments. Chester Zarnoch, associate professor of natural sciences at Baruch College, and his colleague Tim Hoellein have received funds from the National Science Foundation to study the growth and survival of oysters in the estuary and to determine their potential in restoring it.

Zarnoch says that there has been tremendous growth and evidence of spawning where the bivalves have been re-introduced.

While that is good news, the oysters may not solve the nitrogen problem in the long term. Research has brought to light that oysters, while they do filter nitrogen, they simply store the substance in their bodies and release it back into the environment upon their death. Scientists now hope to harness the oyster's digestive cycle to remove the nitrogen from the water.

"In Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound, you can remove nitrogen from the water by removing oysters and consuming them," said Zarnoch. "But we can't consume them from Jamaica Bay because of the amount of bacteria present."

Oyster gardening is still in the beginnings stages of a two-year experiment that will determine whether they will benefit the bay's condition. The next several years will be critical to see if the oysters can once again thrive in the estuary as part of a recovering environment and if the marshes can once again shelter and nourish an authentic mix of native New Yorkers.

This article was written under a partnership between Gotham Gazette and the Baruch College's Department of Journalism and Writing Professions.

City Plants Eelgrass to Save Marshland by Ivan Pereira - YourNabe.com

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The city will be planting new flora in Jamaica Bay to help combat the excess nitrogen that is destroying it.

The city began a new organic operation to help save the wetlands in Jamaica Bay last Thursday that they hope will stop the deterioration of the marshlands at the heart of the problem.

Cas Halloway, commissioner for the city Department of Environmental Protection, announced the second phase of the agency’s Eelgrass Restoration Project designed to add 1,000 new plants to the ecosystem. The plants not only provide a safe habitat for birds and fish, but also help reduce the excess nitrogen in the bay’s water supply and stop the saltwater marshlands from degrading.

“Restoring eelgrass to Jamaica Bay is another important step in our efforts to improve this invaluable natural resource,” Holloway said in a statement. “This program, if successful, will mark the first time in nearly 100 years that eelgrass is able to survive in Jamaica Bay.”

The eelgrass will be planted at three locations near Jamaica Bay — Breezy Point, the Breezy Point Yacht Club and Dubos Point — and will be protected by special fencing, poles and sandbags, according to the commissioner. The DEP will hold biweekly monitoring efforts to track the progress of the plants and make notes on how it grows and thrives in the ecosystem.

Last year, the DEP conducted an initial planting of the eelgrass in the bay and used the information from the planting to better prepare this project. In the fall, 3,000 more plants will be transported to the ecosystem and a mass planting is set for next year, according to Halloway.

This is one of several projects aimed at saving the 39-square-mile watershed from extinction. For decades, the bay has lost hundreds of acres of marshland because of the excess nitrogen and experts have said it could be completely gone within a decade if nothing is done, causing a major ecological problem for the dozens of species and organisms that thrive there.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is currently conducting a major restoration of several of the saltwater marshes that were lost. It has been bringing sand from similar ecosystems in New Jersey and Delaware to plant new saltwater marsh seeds.

In February, the DEP announced that it would spend $115 million over the next decade to upgrade its water treatment centers so those facilities would discharge less nitrogen into the bay.

New York Harbor Muck Used to Restore Jamaica Bay by Sam Roberts - NYTimes.com

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Shewen Bian, of the Army Corps of Engineers, at the restoration project site at Elders Point West, part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, in Jamaica Bay. Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

For generations, the islands of Jamaica Bay, the 26-square-mile natural sanctuary off the Brooklyn and Queens shoreline that is home to hundreds of species of migratory birds and marine life, have been disappearing, victims of environmental neglect.

A Bay’s Rebirth

A combination of factors, including development encroaching into the bay and erosion caused by the dumping of contaminants, led to the shrinking of the bay’s salt marsh islands to 800 acres, from more than 16,000 acres a century ago. At the rate they are being lost, about 33 acres annually, they could vanish entirely in two decades.

But now the bay’s fortunes are rebounding, thanks to the leftovers from a giant project taking place in New York Harbor that most people never see and probably know nothing about.

For more than a decade, workers using giant digging machines have scooped up enormous mounds of rock, clay, sand and silt from the waters around New York to deepen the shipping channels to accommodate giant cargo vessels that will navigate the widened Panama Canal starting in the middle of the decade.

Mr. Bian near a ship that is dredging New York Harbor to deepen the shipping channels. Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

The dredging has produced millions of cubic yards of muck.

“What do you do with all that stuff?” said Col. John R. Boulé II, commander of the New York District of the Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing the dredging. “Some of it we’re using to restore the islands in Jamaica Bay.” Recalling the lush “Mannahatta” that Henry Hudson encountered when he sailed into New York Harbor 400 years ago, Colonel Boulé added: “We want to put a little more of 1609 back into 2010.”

The Army Corps of Engineers and the National Park Service are the primary partners in a collaboration of city, state and federal environmental, parks and port agencies and private partners to revitalize what is known as the Hudson-Raritan Estuary, focusing primarily on Upper and Lower New York Bay. Eventually, oyster beds will be restored to serve as living water filters, and shellfish may someday be harvested commercially again.

Jamaica Bay is part of the park service’s Gateway National Recreation Area, which spans the harbor and will be expanded by hundreds of acres when the city’s former Fountain and Pennsylvania Avenue landfills in Brooklyn, recently forested with 35,000 trees, are incorporated as parkland in a few years.

Jamaica Bay, a wildlife refuge in the national park system, boasts a 9,000-acre expanse filled with birds, horseshoe crabs, diamondback turtles and many other fauna. “Jamaica Bay is in many ways the lungs of the estuary,” said Maria Burks, commissioner of the National Parks of New York Harbor.

For about a century or so, those lungs were periodically clogged with one contaminant or another, from the carcasses of dray animals (hence the bay came to be known as Dead Horse Bay), garbage and occasional victims of murder and drowning.

The bay was destined more than once to become a major seaport, from the late 19th century through the 1940s. In 1910, with the state deepening the barge canal linking upstate to the Great Lakes and with New York City still the nation’s leading manufacturing center, financing was approved to transform Jamaica Bay into what was described as “the world’s chief harbor.” It would be fringed by 1,000-foot-long docks, terminals and railroads and protected by the natural barrier of Rockaway Beach.

The Army Corps was enlisted to deepen channels, using the dredged material to fill in the shallows and enlarge the bay’s islands for maritime development.

Delays spared the bay from becoming a major seaport, but the subsequent development of Floyd Bennett Field (which itself required 14 million cubic feet of fill), John F. Kennedy International Airport, Cross Bay Boulevard and several residential developments gobbled up wetlands and salt marshes.

Nitrogen from waste treatment plants, leaching contaminants from surrounding landfills, runoff from the Belt Parkway and airplane fuel threatened the remaining natural resources — including the 330 bird and 80 fish species that Barry Sullivan, general superintendent of Gateway for the National Park Service, said have been logged in the area.

“Since the middle of the last century, we lost more than half of the salt marsh, which is critical for development of all of those species,” he said. “The wetlands are the nurseries of the ocean.”

Conservation efforts were begun in earnest by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses in the late 1930s and accelerated when Congress created Gateway National Park in 1972 after lobbying by the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay.

But Emily Lloyd, a former environmental protection commissioner for the city, said that while public agencies and some private volunteers were committed to improving conditions, “the bay lacked a real constituency.” She enlisted the National Parks of New York Harbor Conservancy to help advocate for Jamaica Bay’s health. (The conservancy’s chairwoman, Marian S. Heiskell, was instrumental in establishing Gateway.)

As a result, instead of filling in the bay to build docks and warehouses, the Army Corps is using sand to restore an almost pristine grassy natural habitat with a bucolic vista framed by the Manhattan skyline less than 10 miles to the northwest.

The dredged material is used to restore the wetlands at Elders Point West. Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Elders Point, an island south of the Brooklyn-Queens border, is among the most ambitious restoration projects under way. About 42 acres of wetlands have already been restored on Elders Point East. About 200,000 cubic yards of dredge material has been used to restore 34 acres of salt marsh on Elders Point West, which is expected to be completed later this year.

Another 250,000 cubic yards will be transformed into 50 acres of marsh at Yellow Bar Hassock. By the time the dredging project is finished in 2014 about 42 million cubic yards of material from the Ambrose Channel, Kill Van Kull and the Bay Ridge Channel will have been blasted, excavated and removed by barge to deepen shipping channels to 50 feet. Most of the muck has been dumped in the ocean, while some is being used for other projects in the New York area. Jamaica Bay has become an early beneficiary of the dredging project.

“We’ve been working on this for the last decade,” said Daniel T. Falt, the manager of the Jamaica Bay restoration project for the Army Corps. “We’re excited to finally see something in the ground.”

Wildlife and Progress Return to Jamaica Bay by JoAnne Castagna - Queens Chronicle

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Melissa Alvarez examines the root mass and stems of a plant that has been pulled out by geese or brant on one of the islands. PHOTO BY USACE, NYD

A few years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and partnering agencies restored Elders Point East, a marsh island in Jamaica Bay that had been deteriorating. Last summer, Melissa Alvarez, a senior project biologist with the Army Corps’ New York District, made a few interesting discoveries while inspecting the island.

“I saw movement in the water as the tide was draining one of the creeks,” Alvarez said. “I looked closer and saw something I’ve never seen — there were dozens of juvenile horseshoe crabs swimming within the tidal creek. They were the size of a quarter, but this meant so much more. It means that the restored island is now providing successful breeding for horseshoe crabs.”

Later in the year, Alvarez also found a nest of diamondback terrapins, a New York State-protected species of turtle — yet another indication of the success she says they’ve had at Elders Point East and will soon have at Elders Point West.

Elders Point East and Elders Point West are marsh island complexes located within the 26-square mile Jamaica Bay Park and Wildlife Refuge that was the country’s first national urban park and one of the Gateway National Recreation Areas.

The once-vibrant marsh islands were once a single 132-acre piece of land named Elders Point, but years of degradation split them into separate islands now connected by muddy land. Over the last century, the islands have been disappearing at a rate of 44 acres per year, even faster in the last decade. It’s believed that a great deal of the degradation is due to regional urbanization and that if it is not halted, it could cause the islands to be eliminated by 2012.

According to Alvarez, maintaining the health of the marsh islands is critical to the well-being of the wildlife and the 20 million people that live and work in the greater New York region.

“From a smaller scale perspective, the marsh islands are a home for a variety of wildlife, including fish and shellfish, which are an important food source for birds and help improve water quality by removing things like nitrogen and phosphates,” Alvarez said. “From a larger perspective, the marsh islands provide stability and water storage during storm and flood events.”

The islands also act as filters or natural cleansers for the bay as the plants capture and cycle different nutrients and particles out of the water, she added. By restoring Elders Point, and other marsh islands, the more interior islands may also be protected, resulting in less erosion to personal property, more species available for recreational fisheries, better water quality and preservation of the Gateway National Recreation Area that is visited by millions of people each year.

To restore the islands, the Corps of Engineers’ New York District has teamed up with agencies including the National Park Service, Natural Resource Conservation Service, New York City Department of Environmental Protection, Port Authority of New York & New Jersey and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

In 2006, the agencies restored East by pumping 250,000 cubic yards of dredged sand onto the island, shaping it to simulate the proper elevations of a marsh island, and hand-planting native species of grass including saltmarsh cordgrass, salt hay and spike grass that were grown from seed collected within Jamaica Bay.

The team began work on West last fall, pumping 240,000 cubic yards of beneficially used dredged sand onto the island, which is primarily composed of mud, and grading it to the appropriate elevations for a marsh. Work on West is expected to be completed by early summer.
The Army Corps and its partnering agencies may return to Jamaica Bay, says Mark Lulka, project manager for the New York Districts’ Harbor Branch.

“As we obtain additional experience and funding, we hope to build a few other marsh islands as the years go by,” Lulka said.
To learn more about the Elders Point restoration and other projects including the Hudson-Raritan Estuary Comprehensive Restoration Plan, visit harborestuary.org/watersweshare/.

— JoAnne Castagna is a technical writer and editor with the Army Corps of Engineers.

Gowanus Canal Labeled Superfund Site, Over City’s Objections by Mireya Navarro - NYTimes.com

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The Gowanus Canal is contaminated with noxious pollutants, and some of its banks, like at Carroll Street, are dumping grounds. More Photos »

The Environmental Protection Agency designated the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn a Superfund site on Tuesday and announced plans to clean up more than a century’s worth of noxious pollutants there.

Life Along the Gowanus - Slide Show

A minke whale in the Gowanus Bay near the canal in April 2007. Police boats tried to encourage it to move out to sea, but it died after a few days there. Photo: Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

The decision ended a contentious debate and was a blow to the Bloomberg administration, which had proposed a cleanup without such a designation. The city had argued that the label could set off legal battles with polluters, prolong the dredging operation and spook developers leery of the stigma of a Superfund listing.

But in a conference call with reporters, Judith A. Enck, the E.P.A. administrator for the region, said the Superfund designation would guarantee the best result for residents and the environment and ensure that the polluters cover all the costs.

“We believe that it would get us the most efficient and comprehensive cleanup,” Ms. Enck said.

From Gowanus Bay to New York Harbor, the agency has found contamination along the entire length of the clouded 1.8-mile canal in a preliminary assessment, including pesticides, metals and the cancer-causing chemicals known as PCBs.

The agency estimates that the project will last 10 to 12 years and cost $300 million to $500 million. The city estimated that its approach would take nine years.

The E.P.A., which proposed the Superfund designation last April at the urging of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, made its decision after a public comment period that involved more than 50 meetings with city officials, developers, community groups and others. Nine other Superfund sites across the country were also designated on Tuesday.

“It was the right thing to do,” said Marlene Donnelly, a leader of the neighborhood group Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus. “It’s the beginning of a plan to start the restorative process for the Gowanus area.”

City officials expressed disappointment but struck a conciliatory tone and pledged to cooperate with the cleanup.

“It’s disappointing,” said Marc La Vorgna, a spokesman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. “We had an innovative and comprehensive approach that was a faster route.”

“But we are going to work closely with the E.P.A. because we share the same goal: a clean canal,” he added.

Carved out of tidal wetlands and streams in the 1860s, the Gowanus evolved into a busy waterway for oil refineries, chemical plants, tanneries, manufactured gas plants and other heavy industry along its banks. Industrial waste and raw sewage gushed into the canal for over a century.

Most of that flow has halted since the 1960s as maritime shipping faded. Today the 100-foot-wide canal is used for commercial and recreational purposes by neighborhoods bordering it, including Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens and Red Hook.

Yet even as kayakers glide alongside the banks and fishermen catch striped bass for sport at its mouth at Gowanus Bay — the fish are too contaminated to eat — residents complain about the odors from continuing discharges of sewage and unsightly debris from scrap metal yards and other industrial enterprises.

The E.P.A. has already identified the city, the Navy and seven companies, including Consolidated Edison and National Grid, as potentially responsible for the past discharges. It is seeking additional information from at least 20 other companies so it can map out the financing of the cleanup.

“This is a historical puzzle we’re putting together here,” Ms. Enck said.

Caswell F. Holloway IV, a former mayoral aide who helped design an alternative cleanup plan for the Gowanus and is now the commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, said he had no estimate of New York’s financial liability for what federal officials said included contamination from various facilities, including an asphalt plant and an incinerator in the area. He said the city would work with the E.P.A. to ensure that costs are recovered from all responsible parties.

“The city has an obligation to ensure that the burden is shared fairly,” Mr. Holloway said.

He noted that the administration had already committed $150 million to reducing odors and preventing sewer discharges and had shared the cost of a feasibility study for an environmental restoration project by the Army Corps of Engineers. E.P.A. officials said they saw those projects as complementary and expected them to continue.

Mr. Holloway said it was uncertain how the Superfund designation would affect economic development in the area.

One developer, Toll Brothers, said it would scrap its plan for a $250 million project with about 450 housing units and retailing space on three acres by the canal. “We wouldn’t be able to obtain financing to build, and we’d have difficulties obtaining insurance,” said David Von Spreckelsen, a senior vice president with the company, citing factors like uncertainty on how long the cleanup would take.

But Gowanus Green, a $300 million project for 774 units of new housing in nine buildings as well as retailing and community facilities, mostly financed by the city, is going forward.

“We’re in full support of the project, and we’ll work with the E.P.A.,” said Aaron Koffman, a spokesman for the Hudson Companies, one of the companies in the project’s consortium.

Eager to preserve such development potential, the city had proposed an approach under which the federal agency would allow the polluters to pay for the cleanup voluntarily.

But Ms. Enck said the city’s plan lacked “financial certainty” because it relied partly on federal allocations that would require Congressional approval. Agency officials also worried that having the Corps of Engineers and the E.P.A. both tackle the cleanup would complicate an already messy challenge.

In advocating for a Superfund listing, Ms. Enck had rejected arguments that it would keep investors and lenders away.

“Banks look at the environmental conditions of the properties,” she said at a meeting with reporters last week. “It is not a secret in Brooklyn that the Gowanus is contaminated. The notion that Superfund is going to create a stigma just doesn’t hold up.”

Agency officials said the cleanup, which will focus chiefly on the sediment in the canal, had effectively begun, with sampling already under way.

The timetable calls for completing the sampling and assessments of human and environmental risks by the end of the year. A full cleanup plan is to be drafted by 2014, with the work then unfolding over at least five years.

Walter Mugdan, the agency’s regional Superfund director, said that most of the canal would probably be dredged.

Additional steps include eliminating all sources of continuing contamination, like overflowing sewage and the migration of contaminants from groundwater under old industrial plants.

Rep Weiner Secures $2.4 Million To Remove Toxic Waste At Floyd Bennett Field 2 Acres Of Contaminated Land To Be Cleaned

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn and Queens) and Barry Sullivan, Superintendent of Gateway National Recreation Area, discuss plans to clean 2 acres of contaminated land at Floyd Bennett Field.

Standing near an overgrown, polluted section of Floyd Bennett Field that is marked with a “Danger” sign to warn passersby, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn and Queens) along with Gateway National Recreation Area Supervisor Barry Sullivan and representatives from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, announced $2.4 million in funding to help clean 2 acres of land in Gateway National Park that is contaminated with fuel from over 40 years ago. The funding will help begin the process of transforming the area so that it will be safe for recreational use.

Floyd Bennett Field, which is a part of Gateway National Recreation area, is one of New York City’s hidden treasures. Located on the southeastern edge of Brooklyn, it is home to campgrounds, walking paths, fire pits, softball fields and even an archery pit for New Yorkers looking for a break from the bustle of the Big Apple. Floyd Bennett Field also serves as a training facility for the NYPD and, and it was previously used as a naval airfield and as New York City’s first commercial airport.

An examination conducted by the National Parks Service shows that the fuel contamination, which accumulated due to decades of use by planes and helicopters, has left unhealthy amounts of benzene, naphthalene and other harmful poisons and carcinogens in the soil. The funding pays for a cleanup of the soil in order to make the land safe for public use, as well as an investigation to determine the extent of the contamination. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will oversee the cleanup.

"We are very pleased that this issue is moving forward and we thank Congressman Weiner for his efforts in making significant progress towards containment and any necessary remediation in the area,” said Barry Sullivan, Superintendent of Gateway National Recreation Area.

“This important cleanup is long overdue,” Congressman Weiner said. “This will be good for the park, good for the community and good for the environment. This is another chapter in our efforts to make this park better”

Biologists Fight Erosion in Jamaica Bay by John Lauinger - NY Daily News

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Biologist Melissa Alvarez examines clumps of salt marsh grasses on Elder’s Point East in Jamaica Bay. Showalter - News

The whipping winds of Jamaica Bay sway the chest-high grasses of Elder's Point East, a salt marsh island full of marine life.

This is the new hope for the bay's future.

The island's picturesque shores are covered in clam shells and frequented by sea gulls, but its current form is almost entirely man-made - just like the capped landfill towering above the bay's northern shore.

Three winters ago, at a cost of roughly $15 million, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers molded a mountain of sand around the scattered remnants of the erosion-ravaged island, and rooted a million salt marsh grasses by hand.

Still maturing, the 38-acre wetland has served as a laboratory of sorts where scientists have learned lessons that will be used in the reconstruction of a neighboring island, Elder's Point West, beginning next month.

"There were a lot of experiments that were tried here that will make Elder's West even better," Len Houston, chief of the corps' environmental analysis branch in New York, said during a recent tour of Elder's East.

East and West were once part of a single 130-acre island that decayed into smaller pieces due to the wetland-dieoff phenomenon that some scientists predict could one day eradicate the bays' tidal marshes.

Contracts were awarded Sept. 29 for the Elder's West project, which has a $12 million price tag and will encompass 30 acres to 40 acres, depending on the final design, Houston said.

By all accounts, the grasses are thriving at Elder's East, and erosion has been minimal.

"We're not losing sand - even where there is erosion, it is shifting onto the island, not off of it," said Melissa Alvarez, a biologist with the corps.

More than 85% of the transplanted grasses - grown from seeds taken from the island's original stock - survived.

"The site is very well vegetated," said Chris Miller, a plant materials specialist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which raised the seedlings. "The plants are doing very well."

Based on lessons from East, the reconstruction of West will include more widespread use of fertilizer and a greater reliance on planting grass seeds, as opposed to seedlings, which will make the work less expensive.

Some scientists believe the bay's wetlands - now less than 1,000 acres - are vanishing at a documented rate of 40 acres per year because accumulated toxins in the marshes are causing their soil bases to break apart and wash away.

At East, sand was filled in around existing fragmented clumps of grass, and seedlings were then transplanted into the new sand. But the existing soil base, which has a soot-colored, gooey appearance, proved inhospitable.

"Now, most of the original clumps are gone and none of those seedlings survived," Alvarez said, noting that existing clumps at West will be transplanted into new sand.

"The substrate that is there is pretty much toxic to the plants," Alvarez said. "Once you pull the plants out of the old clumps, they do fine."

Elder's East alone has not reversed the alarming die-off trend, experts said, but it has become an important cog in the bay's ecosystem, providing habitat for horseshoe crabs, soft-shell clams and blue mussels.

"You never saw soft-shell clams here before," Alvarez said. "Blue mussels right now are not very common in this bay, so that is very encouraging."

Riptide Danger in the Rockaways by Carolina Leid - 7online.com

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If you want to know what a rip current feels like ask Debbie Ryerson. She almost died in one last year.

"I thought I was dead. I really thought it was going to take me out," she said. "Every time I would try to get up the tide would pull me back under."

So far this year six people drowned off the Rockaway coast because of strong rip currents.

That's compared to two drownings last year and one in 2007.

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State Representative Anthony Weiner helped get funding for a four million dollar beach erosion study.

He wants the Army Corps of Engineers to expand that study to include a look at safety measures to prevent deadly rip tides.

"Maybe over the years there have been some channels that have been built that we never noticed before," Weiner said.

The study originally focused on adding groin fields. They're designed to trap and retain sand.

The plan is while engineers work on that, they'll also take a look at why this stretch has so many rip currents.

But state and local leaders say there will never be a total fix. That's something most swimmers respect.

"There's no solution. Mother Nature is Mother Nature. You can't stop her," Deirdre Cotto of Jersey City said.

The key is following the rules. When the lifeguards leave, get out of the water.

"I really think the currents are different at night. During the day you have to watch yourself too, but you have lifeguards," Sal Ferranti of Howard Beach said.

Debbie Ryerson always swam with lifeguards around, but after her scare she just watches from her beach chair.

"I won't go back in the water, and I love the water," she said.