New York’s dirty water
When I was a kid I used to hear stories about all sorts of creatures that mutated and grew to terrible proportions from being exposed to toxic radioactive waste. Giant alligators lived in the New York City sewer system, ferocious gangs of rats scurried underneath the Manhattan streets and packs of wild dogs roamed abandon buildings. Heck, it was the 80s – every week they were making a new movie about that kind of stuff.
Trash in the Hudson, photo by Saucy Salad (source: Flickr Creative Commons)
But what’s really going on in the sewers of the Big Apple? Something decidedly less fascinating, but no less dangerous: toxic sewage overflow. According to a recent report in the New York Times, the sewage system simply can’t cope with the amount of rain that falls on New York and this results in the regular flow of untreated human excrement and industrial waste into the city’s waterways.
“It happens anytime you get a hard rainfall,” said Bob Connaughton, one the plant’s engineers. “Sometimes all it takes is 20 minutes of rain, and you’ve got overflows across Brooklyn.”
–New York Times
The report, an installment in the Times’ ongoing ‘Toxic Waters’ series, reveals a state of affairs that no one living in or visiting the ‘city that never sleeps’ would find very comforting. Though the drinking water in NYC comes from upstate, the city’s waterways still pose health risks. Sometimes overflows of sewage can even flood streets and homes. Regulations included in the Clean Water Act are in place to safeguard against such concerns, but for a variety of reasons are all too often unenforced. Unfortunately this is the case in many cities across America, both large and small.
“The E.P.A. would rather look the other way than crack down on cities, since punishing municipalities can cause political problems,” said Craig Michaels of Riverkeeper, an environmental advocacy group. “But without enforcement and fines, this problem will never end.”
–New York Times
Hudson River, photo by JavierPsilocybin (source: Flickr Creative Commons)
Though perhaps not as weird as mutant crocodiles, New York’s water treatment plants ‘have been flooded with thousands of pickles (after a factory dumped its stock), vast flows of discarded chicken heads and large pieces of lumber.’ Evidently it is not just the inadequacy of the sewage system or a lack of funding, but irresponsible behavior on the part of local industries that is contributing to the problem. The policy seems to be one of containment – or no containment when it rains. According to city officials it would cost over 58 billion dollars (39 billion euros) to prevent all overflows, which would require an 80% hike in water bills.
A breakdown in water treatment plants could result in outbreaks of disease unimaginable in the United States for almost one hundred years. And despite admirable urban engineering projects proposed in some U.S. cities, what may be needed is an expensive overhaul of outmoded sewer systems.
‘New York’s system, for instance, was designed to accommodate a so-called five-year storm — a rainfall so extreme that it is expected to occur, on average, only twice a decade. But in 2007 alone, the city experienced three 25-year storms, according to city officials — storms so strong they would be expected only four times each century.’
–New York Times
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Tags: New York, New York Times, sewage, sewer, TOXIC, Toxic Waters
As far as sewage treatment is concerned, why do we keep on building centralised sewage treatment works when 60% of their cost is involved in the installation of the pipework to take it to a centralised location?
Centralisation of sewage works does not work. If sewage treatment was decentralised, as it is in Australian ECO towns, then these problems would not occur.