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March 4, 2006
Study:Yards feces to canal; Buddy: Developers’ poop stinks
Brooklyn Papers:
No matter how glistening Ratner’s 17 skyscrapers and Frank Gehry-designed basketball arena will be, the sewage created in its bathrooms will flow into an antiquated, city-run sewer and waste treatment system — which gets overloaded when rainwater mingles with untreated sewage during heavy storms.As a result, 27 billion gallons of untreated wastewater drains into waterways around the city each year.
On the Gowanus Canal, there are 13 spigots spewing the bile after storms — burying that fetid corpse of water under more fecal bacteria.
Fixing the problem — by ripping up all the old sewers — would cost billions, city officials say.
Atlantic Yards Report offers a more in-depth report of Thursday's Brooklyn Borough Board Atlantic Yards Committee meeting:
The acronym to learn is CSO: Combined Sewer Overflow. CSOs, says Riverkeeper, are occur "[a]bout half the time it rains in New York City, once a week on average, raw sewage and polluted runoff combine in sewer pipes and overflow – without treatment – into the City’s surface waters." Hundreds of such CSOs are triggered simultaneously in the city during steady rainfall, leading to the discharge of about 27 billion gallons of this untreated wastewater annually into bodies of water like the still-foul Gowanus Canal.
Posted by amy at March 4, 2006 11:40 AM