Reviving New York's Rivers -- With Oysters! by Architect Kate Orff | Video on TED.com

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Architect Kate Orff sees the oyster as an agent of urban change. Bundled into beds and sunk into city rivers, oysters slurp up pollution and make legendarily dirty waters clean -- thus driving even more innovation in "oyster-tecture." Orff shares her vision for an urban landscape that links nature and humanity for mutual benefit.

About Kate Orff:

Kate Orff asks us to rethink “landscape”—to use urban greenspaces and blue spaces in fresh ways to mediate between humankind and nature.



Kate Orff is a landscape architect who thinks deeply about sustainable development, biodiversity and community-based change—and suggests some surprising and wonderful ways to make change through landscape. She’s a professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she’s a director of the Urban Landscape Lab. She’s the co-editor of the new book Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Park, about the Gateway National Recreation Area, a vast and underused tract of land spreading across the coastline of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and New Jersey.

She is principal of SCAPE, a landscape architecture and urban design office with projects ranging from a 1,000-square-foot pocket park in Brooklyn to a 100-acre environmental center in Greenville, SC, to a 1000-acre landfill regeneration project in Dublin, Ireland. 

"Perhaps the snazziest proposal is also the oddest, calling for oyster beds in the Gowanus Canal. The oyster reefs, as imagined by Kate Orff, would ease the impact of storms and filter pollution in the water. Orff’s fantastical future also includes a flupsy (for “flowing upweller system”) parade of oyster-filled boats along the Gowanus."

Samantha Henig, “Earl Versus the Oysters,” New Yorker, Sept. 2, 2010

Development Flows Slowly Along Gowanus And Newtown - As Predicted, Superfund Designation Supersedes Building Plans in Brooklyn by Laura Nahmias - City Hall News

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Superfund designations at Newtown Creek on the Queens/ Brooklyn border in October and at the Gowanus Canal last March incited panicked waves among developers and city administrators worried over the impact the label could have on growth in the city's most populous borough.


And the worries have only continued to fester, like the gonorrhea in the Gowanus.


The designation at Newtown Creek did not spur as much vocal debate as the Gowanus designation, but there is still potential for the label to have an adverse impact on the city’s hopes for economic development in the area, in Brooklyn and Queens, according to Marc LaVorgna, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office.


The Bloomberg administration openly opposed the Superfund designation at Gowanus, advocating for an alternate cleanup plan that would allow prospective developers to voluntarily contribute funds for the work.


The 140-year-old, four-mile-long canal is lined with thick sludge from years of toxic dumping, most from untraceable sources.


At Gowanus, Toll Brothers planned to stop building a $250 million development if the designation were approved, and when it was, they did. The Bloomberg administration was not pleased.


The parties responsible for the pollution at Newtown, on the other hand, are well known—ExxonMobil, BP and Chevron, along with several industrial companies along the waterfront. The city supported the designation at Newtown because there was “no other way to clean it up,” Lavorgna said.


One reason the designation at Newtown may have been less openly controversial is that locals already associate the neighborhood with toxicity. There is nothing wrong with the neighborhood’s water, but residents still use Brita filters anyway. The neighborhood is downwind from one of the city’s sewage treatment plants. Locals call the area “Stinkpoint.”


More importantly, awareness has been growing of the massive oil spill, under the neighborhood’s northern end, since it was first discovered in 1978; over the past several years, environmental impact studies, news articles and a lawsuit from the attorney general’s office have helped publicize the presence of oil—an amount scientists have estimated to reach 17 million gallons, or three times the size of the Exxon-Valdez spill.


According to Assembly Member Joe Lentol, who represents the part of Brooklyn affected by the designation, the Super-fund label is a relief.


“People are optimistic that something is finally happening,” he said of his constituents.


Lentol, who grew up in Brooklyn and says he swam in Newtown Creek as a child, used to believe the designation would drive down property values in the area, he said.


“My misgivings were that, you know, I don’t want the people of Greenpoint to think they’re living in such a contaminated place that they’re going to move out. I don’t want them to think that their property values would be lowered. It’s a delicate issue for people who live here. A lot of people remember Love Canal, and when they think of Superfund, they think of contamination. They think of people dying from cancer,” Lentol said.


A report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency suggests the impact of the designation on property values is mixed, and changes from site to site, with some sites’ property values rebounding after designation, before the cleanup is complete. The exact costs, extent and time frame for cleanup at both sites is speculative until more research is done, said EPA regional spokesperson John Senn.


Knowledge of the pollution and the Superfund label have not impacted average home prices in Greenpoint yet. Sales prices for two-family homes have risen over the past year from $771,449 to $799,386. The number of total home sales dropped off though, by about half, according to records from the city’s Department of Finance.


But the city is still concerned over the future of development near Newtown Creek, according to the mayor’s office. There are 184 blocks and two miles of waterfront still developable in Greenpoint, as well as the possibility for up to 7,000 additional units of housing and 7.9 acres of open space along less than a mile of waterfront, LaVorgna wrote in an e-mail. Those plans are contingent on private investment to reactivate the East River and Newtown Creek waterfront.


One part of the designation that has received little consideration is how it will affect the Queens side of the creek, specifically Hunter’s Point South, which was rezoned for development in 2008, LaVorgna wrote.


The area is cited for 5,000 housing units, a new public school, $175 million worth of utility and road infrastructure and 10 acres of waterfront park, he added.


Perhaps most crucial are $500 million in planned capital improvements for the area. Those projects could stall as the area comes under federal control, Lavorgna said.


The cleanup might not be controversy-free even if it began that way. In mid- October, Queens politicians, including Borough President Helen Marshall, Assembly Member Catherine Nolan, Assembly Member Michael Gianaris and Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, issued a letter to the regional EPA coordinator taking the agency to task for what they perceived as a lack of attention to cleanup in the borough.


Few of those issues were raised by constituents when the EPA opened up the designation to public comment, Senn said.


“I will say that we got a lot more comments from the public about possibly putting the Gowanus Canal (more than 800) on the Superfund list than we did about possibly listing Newtown Creek (several dozen),” Senn wrote in an e-mail.


The reason for the limited feedback was not clear, he said.


But legislators say the designation in both areas cannot ultimately be held responsible for stagnation in development.


Lentol acknowledged that 45 planned building projects have stalled in Greenpoint since the recession began. Those developments were the byproducts of two rezonings—one in 2005 to open up the waterfront to high-rise condominiums and increased affordable housing, and another in 2008 to entrench the lowprofile post-war housing in the neighborhood’s center.


At Gowanus, Toll Brothers planned to stop building a $250 million development if the designation were approved, and when it was, they did.


The Bloomberg administration was not pleased.


Council Member Brad Lander, whose district encompasses parts of Gowanus, said he thought the developer might have had to pull out anyway, given the state of the economy. Other planned developments for the area, such as speculative plans for a Whole Foods, were never as concrete as the Toll Brothers housing development, he said.


Both Lander and Lentol suggested the designation would ultimately be good for their neighborhoods. Lander hoped the EPA could contract out cleanup work to local firms, stimulating the local economy. Lentol hoped the Newtown Creek designation would clear the way for eventual residential rezoning of the areas directly adjacent to the waterfront. Those sites are currently industrial, but the waterfront has been desolate for years, Lentol said.


“Everybody was waiting for industry to come back, and guess what?” Lander said. “It wasn’t ever coming back.”

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.

Reconsidering-Gowanus? by Daniel Bush - QueensLedger

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Planning the redevelopment of an urban industrial neighborhood as promising and complex as Gowanus takes time. Luckily, everyone involved in the effort has ten to 12 years to figure it out.

That's the length of time the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has estimated it will need to carry out a Superfund cleanup of the Gowanus Canal. The timetable-inspired fierce debate from Superfund opponents lasted through most of last year, however, now that the EPA's plan is in place a new consensus is emerging around the redevelopment prospects of the gritty canal-side neighborhood.

Yes, uncertainty over the scope and logistics of the Superfund cleanup will delay the long-sought-for transformation of the area, which is sandwiched between several affluent neighborhoods. But that might not be such a bad thing, after all.

At a recent CUNY forum aptly-titled “Reconsidering Gowanus,” public policy makers, real estate experts, and community groups that are taking the long view described the ten-year pause brought on by the Superfund cleanup as an opportunity to reassess the neighborhood's future before moving forward with plans to change it.

The high-profile conference was the first large meeting of stakeholders since the EPA announced its Superfund listing last month.

Its timing, and the sweeping report on the neighborhood unveiled at the forum, were intended to shift the focus of public discussion from the science of cleaning the canal - which is now firmly in the hands of the federal government - to the surrounding community.

The report identifies Gowanus, population 28,000, as an area bounded by Bergen Street to the north, Fourth Avenue to the east, the Gowanus Expressway to the south, and Court Street to the west.

The data on business, housing, and demographic trends shows the tiny community - which is defined by the canal and its industrial heritage, as well as by its proximity to transportation and desirable communities such as Carroll Gardens and Park Slope - is poised to explode, if new residential and commercial development can successfully be mixed in with the neighborhood's existing industrial base.

After a steady post-war decline, Gowanus experienced a major resurgence in the 1990's, according to Harry Schwartz, one of the co-authors of the report, which relied mostly on data from the 2000 Census. Since then, property values have increased, and the neighborhood's residents as a whole have become increasingly prosperous and better educated.

And thanks to an influx of creative young professionals and artists, the community has gained a reputation for its under-the-radar arts scene; Marty Markowtiz, Brooklyn's borough president, called the area the “indie adjunct” of Brooklyn's better-known BAM cultural district.

But is Gowanus a true “Soho in the making if left alone” in the coming years, as Staurt Pertz, a former member of the City Planning Commission, suggested at the forum. And how will it respond to the development boom that is sure to follow the Superfund cleanup?

“Gowanus is going to become more like its wealthy neighbors like Park Slope and Boerum Hill and so on,” if the current wave of gentrification continues, said Schwartz. However, he said, “there's a chance we can change that trend.”

That's the challenge facing community groups, which will use the next several years to argue for a comprehensive neighborhood rezoning that includes plenty of affordable housing, space for local businesses and artists, and public parkland along a revitalized canal corridor.

The city drafted plans to rezone 25 blocks inside of Gowanus several years ago, but put them on hold last year after the EPA became involved with cleaning the canal. The plan would have set aside more land for manufacturing uses, while creating broad swaths of low and high-density mixed-use zones to encourage development.

“We believe that we've come up with a pretty balanced approach,” Purnima Kapur, the director of City Planning's Brooklyn office, said at the forum. She said the city is “waiting to see how the Superfund will affect the city's plans” before resuming the rezoning process.

Whenever it does, the city must also contend with the neighborhood's growing polarization along racial and socioeconomic lines. While Gowanus has improved in general in the past two decades, several sections of the neighborhood have been left behind.

For example, the CUNY report found that in the two largely Hispanic census tracts situated in the rougher pockets of Gowanus east and southeast of the canal, the number of people living below the poverty line rose 32 and 62 percent, respectively, between 1980 and 2000.

In contrast, during the same time period, poverty declined by 38 percent in the two mostly-white census tracts northwest of the canal, situated in affluent Carroll Gardens,

Overall, the data shows the richer, whiter areas of the neighborhood have become wealthier, while the southeast section of Gowanus is home to a growing number of low-income Latinos.

A third of the mostly African-American residents in the neighborhood's public housing developments live below the poverty line, according to the report.

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.

Mayor's Gowanus Canal Cleanup Plan Unrealistic by Daniel Bush - Downtown Star

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The city is relying on paying for a large part of its proposed Gowanus Canal cleanup with Congressional funding that the Star has learned is not available now or in the foreseeable future.

As an alternative to an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund cleanup, the Bloomberg Administration has proposed a cleanup plan to be carried out by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that would be partly funded by a Congressional appropriation awarded through the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA).

City officials have said their plan would rely on up to, or potentially more than, $100 million in WRDA funding, and would only work if Congress appropriates the funds for the canal.

But an investigation into WRDA guidelines, and interviews with Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez - whose district includes the canal and who has led efforts to plan for its cleaning since 2002 - and with the Army Corps (USACE), shows that a cleanup of the Gowanus Canal has not been authorized for any Congressional funding and is not likely to receive any for the next several years, if not longer.

If this is true, it puts into question the legitimacy of a city plan that Velazquez criticized as infeasible.

"The Gowanus Canal has never been included in WRDA and this is the vehicle the city is proposing to use," Velazquez said. "For the city to say that their plan relies on money that the federal government won't be able to provide is a disservice to the community."

In order for the Gowanus Canal to receive WRDA funding to help pay for a cleanup, as the city is suggesting, a specific project for the canal must first be authorized in a WRDA bill, Velazquez explained.

This is unlikely to happen anytime soon, Velazquez said, because WRDA already has a backlog of over 1,000 authorized projects with an estimated cost of $61 billion waiting for the necessary funding with which to break ground.

"The authorizing committee [in charge of WRDA projects] does not like to include new projects because there's already so many waiting in line," said Velazquez.

Considering that WRDA receives roughly $2 billion from Congress each year for USACE projects, Velazquez said it would obviously take "a very long time" for the already approved projects to be completed before new ones can begin. She added that it remains unclear when Congress might pass another WRDA bill. They are typically considered every two years, but in practice are passed on a rough average of once every four years.

Despite this, however, city officials, who were unavailable for comment on this story, are hoping to receive funding for an Army Corps cleanup within two years, a plan Velazquez said was wholly unrealistic.

"They don't know what they're talking about," she said of city officials who developed the alternative proposal.

The Water Resources Development Act was first signed into law in 1974. Since then, Congress has passed nine new WRDA bills, each authorizing appropriations to be made by the federal government for a new set of projects around the country.

After a six-year drought, Congress passed the most recent WRDA bill in 2007, after overriding, for the first time, a veto by former President George Bush. In a close reading of that bill (HR 1495), the Gowanus Canal does not appear among hundreds of projects listed for authorization.

However, the bill does include approximately $19 million for the continuation of an environmental remediation study of the Hudson-Raritan Estuary (HRE), encompassing the ports of New York and New Jersey, that was first approved by Congress in 1999 and which itself included a feasibility study of the Gowanus Canal.

Mark Lulka, USACE's Gowanus Canal project manager, said the corps began that $5 million study in 2002 and have roughly 18 months left of work. (So far, Lulka said, USACE and the city's Department of Environment Protection have spent a combined $3.8 million on the study).

Lulka said while the HRE project in the 2007 WRDA bill does authorize a continued feasibility study for the Gowanus, he agreed with Velazquez that for the city's plan to work the canal would need a new authorization afor the actual cleanup project itself, as well as an appropriation for additional funding.

"Right now there is not money," for a WRDA-sponsored Army Corps cleanup, Lulka said. He said the corps has temporarily slowed its canal investigation operations as it waits to see what government agencies assume control of the cleanup process.

"The corps wants to see it get cleaned up," said Lulka. "How it happens is outside our purview."

Velazquez said compared to the city's plan, an EPA-led Superfund cleanup appears to be the best option at this point.

"The more research we do," Velazquez said, "the more convinced I am that the best course of action is a Superfund designation."

U.S. House Approves Funding for Gowanus Canal’s Sponge Park - Rep Nydia Velazquez

The U.S. House of Representatives has approved $300,000 in federal resources for the development of a “Sponge Park” splanade along Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. The project, spearheaded by the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, incorporates greenery to absorb and manage excess surface runoff and help improve the water quality of the Canal. Congresswoman Nydia M. Velázquez (D-N.Y.) applauded the effort for taking an innovative approach to improving the quality of life for neighbors of the Gowanus Canal.

“This project would create much-needed public space, while addressing ongoing environmental concerns. Cleaning-up the Gowanus Canal will never be effective if we don’t also come up with solutions like the Sponge Park that prevent future contamination,” Velázquez said.

In April 2008, the Gowanus Canal Conservancy unveiled its design plan for the Sponge Park. The proposal, created by dlandstudio in Brooklyn, includes a series of public waterfront spaces. The project uses two strategies to naturally improve the water quality of the Canal. First, vegetated swales will be built alongside the sidewalks and planted terraces will be incorporated to absorb storm water runoff. Second, specific plants will be chosen that can absorb and break down toxins, heavy metals and biological contaminants from sewage. Combined, these strategies will significantly decrease the amount of runoff entering the Canal and remediate contaminants already in the water.

“I am committed to securing federal resources for projects that make a real difference in the lives of working families. The residents of Brooklyn who live and work near the borders of the Gowanus Canal deserve better access to the waterfront and a place for outdoor recreation,” Velázquez said.

Over the past decade, Congresswoman Velázquez has worked to clean-up the canal and bring sustainable development to the area. She has secured more than $2 million in federal funding for the Gowanus Canal and Bay Ecosystem Restoration Feasibility Study to identify the best approach for restoring the canal. The study is being conducted by the Army Corps of Engineers and the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (NYC DEP) to assess current environmental problems. Using data collected during this study to fully understand and evaluate the extent of contamination, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently nominated the Gowanus Canal as a federal Superfund site. A public comment period on the nomination ends July 8, 2009.

“My top priority is protecting the health of the community and fostering local economic development through the remediation process. A complete clean-up of the Gowanus Canal will bring long-term benefits to this beautiful and vibrant Brooklyn neighborhood,” Velázquez said.

The funding for the Gowanus Canal Conservancy was included in the FY 2010 Interior and Environment Appropriations bill, which was approved today. The resources will be allocated through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s STAG Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Project. The legislation now goes to the U.S. Senate for approval.

Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn May Get Superfund Status by Mireya Navarro - NYTimes.com

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The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed to add the Gowanus Canal, in Brooklyn, to its list of Superfund sites, a step that advocates hope will revitalize a waterfront hobbled by environmental problems from its industrial past.

“The Superfund nomination is an important step toward reclaiming the canal for valuable community development and restoring contaminated waters to health,” Nydia M. Velázquez, who represents the area in Congress and helped obtain federal financing for a study to assess the extent of the contamination, said in a statement Wednesday.

The canal, extending about a mile and a half north from Gowanus Bay near the neighborhoods of Red Hook, Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, is one of 67 sites proposed for the Superfund National Priorities List, which steers federal money to contaminated areas for cleanups.

Elizabeth Totman, a spokeswoman for the agency, said that most sites proposed eventually got listed, depending on the volume and nature of the comments received during a 60-day public comment period, which began Thursday.

“E.P.A. has done preliminary assessments of the sites we propose, and we propose them because we feel that the listing is warranted based on what we’ve found,” she said.

Sampling at the Gowanus Canal has found a variety of pollutants, the agency said, including pesticides, metals and the cancer-causing chemicals P.C.B.’s. The contamination, agency officials said, stems from the canal’s history since its completion in the 1860s as a busy industrial waterway for the oil refineries, coal yards, concrete-mixing facilities and tanneries along its banks, and from being “a repository” of untreated industrial wastes and raw sewage and runoff.

Most of the industrial activity has stopped, and some community advocates say they are concerned that a Superfund designation could interfere with efforts already under way to build new housing and commercial developments in the area.

Salvatore Scotto, a founder of the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation, a neighborhood preservation group, said that some private developers had agreed to conduct their own cleanups in order to build, and the city had been working on a rezoning plan to allow them to do it.

“We want to make sure they’re not precluded from building,” Mr. Scotto said. “Can the government work with the private sector? This has to be worked out.”

A spokesman for Robert C. Lieber, deputy mayor for economic development, said the city was reviewing the Environmental Protection Agency proposal to make sure a Superfund designation would not slow existing cleanup plans or impede public and private investment.

But Marlene Donnelly, a member of another neighborhood group, Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus, said a Superfund designation would address the environmental plight of the canal in a more coordinated way.

“It’s an area-wide problem, and a piecemeal approach is not going to get to the problem,” she said.

Representatives Velazquez and Yvette D. Clarke, both Democrats from Brooklyn, will hold an informational forum on the Superfund nomination on Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the auditorium of Public School 32, 317 Hoyt Street.

70 Groups Agree on Cleaner New York / New Jersey Harbor

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NEW YORK, New York, April 4, 2008 (ENS) - After seven years of research and consensus building, a coalition of 70 stakeholder organizations working towards a more sustainable New York / New Jersey Harbor Watershed unveiled its final report Thursday.

The NY/NJ Harbor Consortium of the New York Academy of Sciences examined the causes of ongoing pollution to the harbor and developed management strategies for five important contaminants: mercury, cadmium, dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs.

The Harbor Consortium members, though representing diverse and sometimes competing interests, were able to achieve consensus on the industrial sources of contaminants in the harbor and ways to prevent them from entering the watershed.

Their report, "Safe Harbor: Bringing People and Science Together to Improve the New York / New Jersey Harbor," was presented and discussed at a New York Academy of Sciences gathering of scientists, engineers and other technical experts.

During his keynote address to the gathering, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the city is investing more than $10 billion in two critical strategies that will keep pollutants out of the harbor.

Rail barge crosses New York / New Jersey Harbor (Photo courtesy New York New Jersey Rail)

"The first is completing large capital improvements that will expand and enhance our sewers and wastewater treatment plants. Commissioner Emily Lloyd and our Department of Environmental Protection are constructing four holding tanks in Northern Queens and Jamaica Bay that can temporarily retain 118 million gallons of Combined Sewage Overflow until after a storm passes," the mayor said.

"At the same time," he said, "we will upgrade two of our pumping stations to prevent stormwater overflow from pouring into our most polluted waterways at the Gowanus Canal and Coney Island Creek. And to protect aquatic life even further, we've committed more than $820 million to upgrade four wastewater treatment plants along the Upper East River with new technology that will reduce by 50 percent the amount of nitrogen they discharge into Long Island Sound."

The consortium originated from a 1998 EPA proposal, and has been meeting to explore ways to identify the sources of the five contaminants in the watershed and make recommendations to reduce their environmental impacts.

Some recommendations have already been implemented. In May 2002, the NYAS Harbor Project mercury report recommended requiring dental offices in New York and New Jersey to install amalgam separators to trap mercury amalgam particulates.

In September 2002, New York State ordered the Department of Environmental Conservation to develop regulations for the proper disposal of mercury amalgam waste. In May 2006, a regulation was passed requiring amalgam separator systems in dental offices.

In October 2007, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection put in place a rule requiring dentists to obtain a permit to discharge mercury or to install an amalgam separator.

"A healthy harbor is a regional priority with national significance," said EPA Regional Administrator Alan Steinberg, who attended the meeting. "EPA is proud to have supported and partially funded this broad-based coalition of collaborative problem solvers, and even more proud to see final recommendations that will encourage others to seize those opportunities to be good environmental stewards."

"The harbor is not only an environmental treasure but the lifeblood of some of the most efficient aspects of our regional economy," said Charles Powers, the consortium�s chair for the life of the project.

"The harbor deserves concerted efforts from all of us - big institutions, small municipalities and families - to make it even healthier," said Powers. "Remarkably, key people from 70 institutions were able over seven years to agree on literally hundreds of ways - based on the data - to do just that."

R.M. Larrabee, director of Port Commerce for the Port Authority of NY/NJ, said, "The award winning pollution prevention strategies developed by the Consortium will lead to a cleaner and healthier Harbor and ultimately reduce the cost associated with maintaining safe navigation channels for the thousands of vessels calling at the port."

Most of the recommendations for mercury and cadmium have been adopted or are being considered for action. The consortium recognizes that recommendations can require years to implement and expects its recommendations in the three more recent reports on PCBs, dioxins, PAHs to be "executed in due course."

"As the Harbor Project comes to its conclusion, we expect that Harbor Consortium members and participants will continue to move the recommendations forward," the consortium said.

Results and recommendations from this research have been published and released in stages beginning in 2002 and ending in 2007 with the publication of the final report on PAHs and the final report. The reports and their many recommendations are online at: http://www.nyas.org/programs/harbor.asp

Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2008. All rights reserved.

Parks Commish Weathers Storm by Victor Mimoni - The Queens Courier

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Queens Parks Commissioner Dorothy Lewandowski takes storms in stride, like the recent blow, after which neighborhoods all over the borough were littered with huge branches, and trees that crushed cars and took down power lines.

In addition to managing 7,000 acres of parkland, from tailored playing fields to wetlands and wilderness areas, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (DOPR) maintains the tens of thousands of street trees in Queens.

“We’re the borough of trees,” Lewandowski said, expounding on the Borough’s official moniker as “The Borough of Homes.”

To add to the burden, for the last few years DOPR has been forced to collect fallen timber down to twigs half the size of a quarter, due to the invasion of the tree-killing Asian Long Horn Beetle.

“We’ve been very fortunate that under the Bloomberg administration, we’ve added 116 full-time park workers, gardeners, maintenance workers and ‘climbers & pruners’” she explained.

The latter are the agile souls who, as the title implies, scamper up the borough’s green giants and keep them trimmed and healthy.

As the existing tree stock ages, and the mayor’s “million tree” program advances, the need for experts in the field will increase. “Unfortunately,” Lewandowski laments, “The standard pay scale for horticulturists may be attractive in Montana, but it isn’t here in New York.”

Still, she’s upbeat. “When I took over in the Borough we were on a 10-year pruning cycle for municipal trees - we’ve got that down to seven years,” she said, “so we can respond to some requests before they become hazardous.”

There are other storms brewing.

In the southwest corner of Queens lies the Ridgewood reservoir, which long ago ceased to be a water source. Much of it has grown over into a wilderness, and many residents surrounding it are advocating loudly, for a wilderness, or for playground space.

Naturally, the loudest advocates are taking Lewandowski to task for what they see as a lack of progress. “There are so many civic and park-related community groups,” she observed, “You can’t please everybody - so you just try to keep the dialog open.”

Lewandowski explained that the old reservoir is divided into three basins, more or less east to west. “Basin one is really valuable woodland which borders on the national cemetery and two is an incredible water body. They should be permanently left alone,” she said.

However, Lewandowski explained, “left alone” has its limits. “The area has to be fenced and made safe,” she said. That means fences and paths which have to comply with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). “ADA compliance is a mandate,” she said.

“People have been using the area for paint ball games and All Terrain Vehicle (ATV) use,” she revealed. During the recent warm weather, two ATV operators got summonses and one ATV was confiscated.

The third basin is where the most work would be done. “There are wetlands in the southern end - the rest would be good for passive recreation with a small area of active recreation [ball fields] at the northern end,” Lewandowski observed.

“The thing is that we’re very early in the process,” she said. DOPR must seek public input, not just from the immediate neighbors, but everyone within a reasonable distance. “That includes some people from Brooklyn,” she said.

Lewandowski said she’d love to see a park conservancy group spring up, “not just for the reservoir, but for the area including Highland Park.”

She has drawn fire from some circles who claim she was somehow “favored” with promotion, but it’s hard to discern that from her record.

Lewandowski, who has a degree in Horticulture and a Bachelor’s in Business, was in the very first group of “Urban Park Rangers,” college-trained experts the city recruited in 1979 to rescue the parks from their decline.

A photo of that “first class” shows a smiling Lewandowski in her ranger hat, standing in front of classmate and current New York City Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe.

After eight years in the Rangers, where she rose to be their Director and set in motion the revitalization of Crotona Park in the Bronx, Lewandowski took the title of Bronx Park and Recreation Manager, where she supervised the borough’s pools and Orchard Beach.

In 1990, Lewandowski was promoted to Deputy Chief of Operations in Queens, where she worked until returning to the Bronx in 1994 as Chief of Operations and, in 2002, was appointed Bronx Parks Commissioner by Benepe.

Lewandowski returned home to Queens, where she was raised and currently lives with her husband and son in Middle Village, as Borough Parks Commissioner in 2004.

“My job is to service the parks and stay focused on the job at hand,” she responds to detractors.

Queens Ledger - In Good Times a Boon, In Bad a Bust by Shane Miller

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City Comptroller William Thompson discusses a report assessing the environmental and economic impacts of airport congestion on the three New York City area airports. (Photo by Marla S. Maritzer)

In Good Times a Boon, In Bad a Bust

By Shane Miller

Delays at the metropolitan area's three major airports are increasing, and according to a report released over the weekend the problem is only going to get worse if major changes aren't made.

According to City Comptroller William Thompson, the benefits of New York's access to air connections are being quickly diminished because of longer waiting times at all of the area's airports.

"This advantage is now being degraded by the declining reliability of air travel into and out of New York," said Thompson.

According to the comptroller, on-time performance at all major New York airports - LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark - was about five percentage points below the national average in 2003. That has since risen to 13 points.

Additionally, the time between when a plane boards and actually takes off has increased several times more in New York compared with the rest of the country, and the three area airports have the highest flight cancellation rates.

Thompson claims this can be attributed to several factors, including an antiquated air traffic control system, mismanagement by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and over-scheduling of flights during peak hours.

Thompson warned that a decline in reliability could begin to harm the city's economy.

"It could discourage employers from locating new jobs and facilities in New York and encourage some firms to relocate jobs elsewhere," he said.

A Citizens Budget Commission study in 2001 placed the city nearly last in economic competitiveness out of the 13 major metropolitan areas, based in part on poor airline on-time performance. Thompson said that situation has only deteriorated.

Not only affecting passengers, flight delays also have a negative impact on businesses shipping cargo by air through New York, the comptroller added.

Thompson called on the FAA to prioritize area airports for a new air traffic control system. The agency is installing new GPS-based systems, which will help controllers track aircraft more efficiently, in four regions by the year 2010. New York will have to wait until 2013.

Thompson also urged the FAA to solve long-standing disputes with the air traffic controllers' union so that more controllers can be employed.

Environmental Impacts

The area's airports aren't only adversely affecting business and vacation plans, they are also taking their toll on the environment.

Between 2000 and 2006, the three big airports added 70,000 additional takeoffs and landings, which in turn produced significantly higher levels of organic compounds that create ozone. New York City already exceeds the federal air quality standards for ozone.

"The entire city should be concerned about the impact of more chemical deicers and other pollutants flowing into Jamaica Bay because of the increase in flights at Kennedy Airport," warned Thompson.

The comptroller supports market-based landing fees, which would charge airlines - and ultimately customers - more to operate and take flights during peak hours. While some flights may cost more, Thompson said that market-based fees, as revealed in a 2005 study, could result in savings of $256.8 million per year at JFK alone.

The fees, Thompson added, could be structured to encourage the use of lower-emission aircraft as well.
Queens undoubtedly benefits the most, but also suffers proportionately, from being home to both of the airports within New York City limits. Borough President Helen Marshall praised the comptroller for issuing the report.

"I have always been a champion of the airports," she said, "however, I have demanded that attention be paid to the needs of Queens residents who live near airports and under flight paths."

Marshall said that she supports capping the number of flights, as well as encouraging more environmentally friendly aircraft.
"Aircraft noise has been at least as significant a problem as aircraft emissions, and we have to try to keep the number of flights soaring over communities at a reasonable level," she said.

New York Press - Brooklyn's Life Aquatic by Matt Cowan

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BROOKLYN'S LIFE AQUATIC

How oysters may save the Gowanus

By Matt Cowan

Photo courtesy of NYPress

Standing on the bank of the grimy Gowanus Canal, aphrodisiacs don’t automatically spring to mind. However, lodged among the car wreckage, sewage and Gambino body parts, lies a thriving colony of oysters, chilling, eating, procreating and staying close to home—not unlike many street corners in various popular Brooklyn neighborhoods.

Before there’s a run on cocktail sauce, lemon wedges, these bivalves are not exactly bound for the ice trays of The Oyster Bar at Grand Central. No, eating an oyster from the bottom of these waters would be gastronomic Russian Roulette. Think instead of little Al Gore mollusks: maybe gobbling up a little too much as they work but, along the way, making the environment a cleaner, safer place for the rest of us.

Most of us think of oysters merely as odd-looking appetizers and slow, but steady pearl producers. But in reality, they play a crucial role in the health of the bodies of water in which they reside. Each oyster by its natural functions cleans and builds and contributes to the life around it. So it goes that, the dirtier the water, the less edible the oyster. And the present day Gowanus—a grimy stretch of Brooklyn with chain-link fences and a dilapidated squat house called the Bat Cave across the way—is a pretty messy home.

“Oysters are native to the Gowanus,” explains Katie Mosher-Smith, a young Vermont native and mother of two who now lives in the neighborhood. She’s also the program director for the Gowanus Oyster Stewards. "They’re native to all of the East Coast. In fact, the Gowanus had tons of oysters—food for the rich and food for the poor. They were big back then—the size of dinner plates, it’s said.” According to Mosher-Smith, when the Gowanus was a navigable channel, the oysters would clean the water and formed an ecosystem, like building reefs, that provided natural filtration. “But all the harvesting and the dredging kind of wiped out the oysters,” she explains. She says it will take a “hybridization of remediation” to clean up Gowanus and other bodies of water like it, but history has taught us that oysters are cheap and effective labor.

Mosher-Smith coordinates a cadre of neighborhood residents who come down to this stretch of the Gowanus Canal most Saturday afternoons to haul out their oyster nets and count, measure and clean the oyster population. Sitting around with this earnest group of urban environmentalists, scrubbing shellfish and learning about the seals that used to navigate this stretch of water and the squatters and gentrifiers that do now, the experience is a combo of a day at the dog park, an afternoon planting trees and a symposium on the evolution of Brooklyn.

There’s a familiar, jokey aspect to the Saturday gatherings. Everyone puts on thick rubber gloves and cleans, counts, measures and chats. Kids and dogs pad about the water and rustle around with the stacks of kayaks that belong to fellow activists, the Gowanus Dredgers. It’s like a staff retreat of mostly thirtysomething, mostly white professionals are a mixture of neighborhood activists, environmental enthusiasts, grad students and educators all feeling like they’re doing their part to get the city’s water a little cleaner.

This oyster renaissance is thriving beyond Gowanus—like the Harbor School, a high school in Bushwick, which is devoted to maritime studies. During a recent party on Pier 40 organized by the River Project, a couple of Harbor School students explained to curious adults all about their atypically Bushwickian forays along New York’s Waterway. Jeriel Stafford is a 10th grader from Brownsville who inherited his fascination with the life aquatic from his father who worked on a sailboat back in his native Granada.

Young Stafford explains how he goes a couple of Saturdays out of every month to collect oysters, measure them and see if they’re actually growing. He makes sure to point out that “in Harlem, the oysters grow slowly because of the CSO.” That’s the oh-so-appetizing “combined sewage overflow.” Enough said.

Teachers in Carroll Gardens/Gowanus (more of a generational than spatial distinction from what I understand) are using this project to connect with their students in a multitude of ways. Keith Wynne teaches upper elementary science at the Carroll School in the neighborhood. He describes working with Mosher-Smith and the Gowanus Oyster Stewards to teach his students: how to take care of oysters, why you’d want to be an oyster gardener and what benefits oysters have for our environment. Along with the intrinsic preference kids have for mucking around outside, Wynne’s students also “share stories with their parents and grandparents who grew up in the neighborhood, who can remember playing around the canal. It’s a real way to build bridges between generations.”

Then again, those lessons from the past may not be as distant as some may think. As one young woman who grew up in Howard Beach said, “Fuck a hundred years ago, people I grew up with in the neighborhood were eating oysters out of the water 10 years ago. Yuck.”

There’s also a social aspect to the oyster project: Saturday oyster gatherings, parties, meetings, art projects, T-shirts. New York can be such a paradoxically overcrowded, isolating place to live, people seek out little niches in which to band together and coexist—not unlike groups of oysters—in small societies based on common interests. As much as it may seem that Brooklyn oyster gatherings would be fertile soil for a wacky mélange of characters, it’s actually an impressively earnest, professional and dedicated crew. The strangest comment to come out of the oyster party was from a young woman who said that she felt like “a fish trapped in a human’s body,” but that didn’t mean that she wandered around Union Square with papier-mâché gills and anti-hook propaganda. No, instead she’s devoted herself to marrying art and the environment and developing naturally-powered coral reefs to clean waterways and protect under-sea populations.

It’s a somewhat peculiar (if currently trendy) calling, to be an urban environmentalist. A common theme among the people involved in this project—and the related maritime projects connected together by common goals and crossover events—was that they had come to New York like many others, for work, change of lifestyle, social opportunities and all that, but missed the easier connection to nature that exists in less paved-over parts of the world. “There were some environmental issues I got involved in near a place we have Upstate,” recalls Mosher-Smith. “And that’s probably what took me in this direction. Also, I wanted to teach my kids that when you see a problem, you can figure out a way to get involved and make it better.”

So far, it’s unclear how effective this cleaning effort will be. The toxic output of the city is a formidable foe. But perhaps, someday, maybe even when the third graders of Mr. Wynne’s class at the Carroll school are all grown up, they’ll sit on the bank of the Gowanus Canal, sucking down fresh oysters to prime themselves to create yet new generations of urban environmentalists. Like Brooklyn, oysters are an acquired taste. And like New York, environmentalism can be a pain in the ass.

Courier-Life Publications: Urban Divers Investigate Mysteries - Beneath the Toxic Sludge of the Gowanus, Oxygen-free Environment Holds Life...

The Urban Divers Estuary Conservancy and a team of science students from New York City College of Technology, led by professors Dr. Nasreen Haque and Dr Niloufar Haque, joined forces to explore the bottom of the Gowanus Canal to investigate a mystery in the abyss of toxic sludge that lies beneath.

The participants suspect a thin layer of mucus-like substance and host microbial colony, which apparently thrives in the completely anaerobic bottom of the Gowanus Canal where there is zero dissolve oxygen.

“We are presuming that 100 of years of habitual industrial toxic chemical dumping along with years of residential waste and storm water discharge in the canal is creating quite a concoction of toxic soup, that along with new chemical compounds we have introduced to the system makes the canal an ideal condition where new bacteria and viruses can develop. Getting to the bottom of this is what inspired this research project. In order to reclaim this battered natural resource and protect public health, dredging the canal to remove the toxic sediment is a crucial part of its restoration. There exist sediment decontamination technology today, whereby toxic sediment is being decontaminated to create safe EPA approved bi-products, such as top-soil, glass and cement. This should make cleaning up the Gowanus Canal quite feasible. There is even such an existing Federally funded sediment decontamination project in New Jersey…well what about one for NY State, on the Gowanus Canal? A strong environmental and coastal policy regulating development along the Gowanus Canal is also another crucial factor, both for the future of our environment as well as to protect public health and that of existing and the future property owners. Our last northeaster showed significant signs of the impact of water rising in the region, as the Gowanus Canal flooded 50 feet onto land at 2nd and Bond streets. These new developing conditions deserve close attention. Getting our students engaged and making available our unique skills and resources to the local academic and scientific community as well as developing new leaders for the environment is a sentinel component of our work. We hope it begins to seed a sustainable environment for the future of our children and all living things,” said Ludger K. Balan, founder and environmental program director.

The Urban Divers Estuary Conservancy is a not-for-profit environmental and cultural organization that has worked in New York Harbor for close a decade. The organization is committed to active participation in the restoration, conservation, protection as well as public education for our coastal resources, with a special focus on the urban estuary and the community to lives, learns, works and plays in and along its shores.

Scientific diving and conservation support is only a segment of their mission. They also host various environmental education through recreation activities, offering opportunities for New Yorkers and visitors to come to come the waterfront get on the water in a safe and convenient way to explore and discover the ecological significance of the urban estuary, and at times to also investigate the cost of human impact. They host an annual eco-cruise series, Get On The Water NYC!

Urban Rivers Tours aboard their unique 32-foot human powered vessel that is culturally and historically significant and offer the public an opportunity to take a virtual exploration of the underwater environment beneath NY Harbor, through their unique and original live underwater video exploration, with live underwater narration and audience participation.

Through their robust environmental education program, “Estuary Ecology Field Trip and Workshop,” they offer schools, and summer day camp program opportunities for expeditionary learning in a living environment. Each field trip provides fun and hands-on activities, such as water quality monitoring, seining and catch and release fishing for environmental investigation, scientific exploration, inquiry and discovery.

These programs are commonly offered both along the Red Hook Waterfront at Valentino Park and on the Gowanus Canal. Though the Gowanus Canal is one their most environmentally challenging project sites, they also host programs on Jamaica Bay, East River, Coney Island and Gravesend’s Bay, Canarsie Fresh Creek, and the Upper Bay along Red Hook and Sunset Park’s waterfront.

The Urban Divers Estuary Conservancy also offers volunteer and membership opportunities. To find out more information about these programs and how you can get involved, call 718-802-9874 (downriver) or 718-901-3331 (upriver).

©Courier-Life Publications 2007