The US Environmental Protection Agency officially placed Gowanus Canal on its Superfund National Priorities List on Tuesday. It joins over 1,260 of the country’s most hazardous waste sites.
Completed in 1869, the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn was once a major transportation route and industrial waterway for gas plants, mills, tanneries, and chemical plants operating along the canal. It was described in 1893 as a disease-breeding, foul-smelling open sewer with floating animal carcasses. It continued to receive untreated industrial wastes, raw sewage and runoff for about a century.
The waterway is still used for commercial and recreational purposes, including sport fishing and canoeing. Today, the canal is punctuated at every bend by some archetypal imagery of urban decay: chain links and barbed wire, graffitied walls lining the banks, riveted metal bridges shaking loudly as trucks pass, metal cranes scooping up garbage strewn in rusted heaps, and floating vacuoles of oily film. A fruit tree hanging over the water is laden with marbled apples spotted with gray lesions. Environmental sampling revealed that the sediment in the canal is contaminated with a variety of pollutants, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, heavy metals, pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), metals, and volatile organic contaminants.
Since April 2009, when EPA proposed the listing, officials have reviewed more than 1,300 comments. “We have determined that a Superfund designation is the best path to a cleanup of this heavily contaminated and long neglected urban waterway,” said regional administrator Judith Enck (release).
This distinction means the government can force polluters to pay for its restoration (AP). But the city argued that the label could set off legal battles with polluters and prolong a dredging operation to remove much of the contamination (NYT). Mayor Michael Bloomberg—who criticized the federal program as too slow and preferred a city-supervised cleanup—“worried the Superfund label would scare away developers who had proposed new, luxury housing for the blocks surrounding the canal, which runs 1.5 miles through a narrow industrial zone sandwiched between some of Brooklyn’s wealthiest neighborhoods”, according to AP.
One developer, Toll Brothers, scraped their $250 million project with 450 housing units and retail space. “We’re extremely disappointed in the EPA’s decision,” said senior vice president David Von Spreckelsen (Dow Jones Newswires). “It’s unlikely you are going to see development there for many, many, many, many years.” But Gowanus Green, a $300 million project for 774 housing units and retail and community facilities, mostly financed by the city, is going forward (NYT).
The EPA will continue sampling the contamination in the deep sediments and will begin sampling the surface of the sediment, the water in the canal, and the air along the banks to provide information needed to complete an ecological and human health risk assessment.
Image: Janet Fang