Out of Time in NYC

By Andy Willner, New York/New Jersey Baykeeper

You hardly ever hear New Yorkers asking the unseemly but important question: “Where does the waste go when I flush?” If they think about the question at all, most would assume it goes to a sewage treatment plant for proper treatment. After all, this is America in the 21st century. Few would believe that New York City’s waste goes straight out a pipe into the harbor. But during and after even as little as a quarter inch of rain, that’s exactly where it goes. Millions of gallons of raw sewage flood the rivers and bays of New York Harbor, the Hudson River and the Long Island Sound, bringing the waters surrounding the city alive with disease-carrying organisms.

Each time New York City flushes its waste into our waterways it commits an act of open defiance of common sense and hygiene. The city is also violating the law. But even since the passage of the Clean Water Act, the NYC Department of Environmental Protection – the agency that runs the city’s sewage treatment plants – has done very little to correct its combined sewer overflow problem. Combined sewers are primitive systems that move raw sewage and stormwater together through the same pipe. This system works all right in dry times. But in wet weather sewage treatment plants are overwhelmed by the rush of stormwater. Operators ‘bypass’ the system, flushing human and industrial waste directly into our waterways.

U.S. EPA admits that combined sewers are a major source of diseases ranging from stomachaches and throat infections to cholera, salmonella, typhoid fever and hepatitis A. The agency also agrees that combined sewers pose the greatest threat to water quality and public health in the New York City region. But New York City has long pleaded poverty for not solving this problem and federal and state regulators have turned a blind eye. A 1992 court order demanded that the city bring its sewer system into compliance with the law. But sewer system operators begged state officials for a multi-year extension, and recently got it – continuing not only New York City’s defiance of the spirit of the law, but a slap in the face to the many citizens who believe that everyone has the right to use our commonly held natural resources, but no one has the right to use those resources to the detriment of anyone else.

In the waters surrounding New York City, Riverkeeper, Soundkeeper, Baykeeper and our allies have worked patiently with New York City to solve the city’s sewage problems, but to no avail. When our government won’t stop the primitive practice of using our commonly held waterways as a toilet, then citizens must compel them to do so.

Thanks to irresponsible federal, state and city government, the next time you hear rain on the roof, you shouldn’t be comforted by the sound. For the foreseeable future, stormy weather will mean millions of gallons of sewage flushed into the New York Harbor – polluting swimming beaches and wildlife resources from the Tappan Zee to the East River, Long Island Sound to Jamaica Bay. It’s an uncivilized, unhealthy travesty that shouldn’t be sanctioned by our state or federal officials. Nor, as citizens, can we allow the intolerable practice to continue.