Navigating the Troubled Waters of Newton Creek Means an Environmental Cleanup in Brooklyn and Queens That Will Cost At Least $3.3 Billion – Inside Climate News

Hazardous: Last in a series about the ongoing struggle to clean up Brooklyn’s Superfund sites.

Water has memory. I was told that once by Eymund Diegel, a co-founder of the Gowanus Community Advisory Group. The water that flows into New York City’s East River remembers that cigarette butt you flicked over the railing, the beer can you tossed after a bad first date, and the Ultimate Frisbee that fell into its depths and sailed away. 

This article, the last in a series that examines Brooklyn’s Superfund sites, will navigate the trials of Newtown Creek, but first I want to explain why I write about the environment and climate change and, particularly, pursued this “Hazardous” series.

I was born in San Marcos, Texas, during my mom’s final semester at Texas State University. She told me that her doctor turned off the air conditioning during my birth-– in 100-and-something-degree weather—because he thought the cold would harm me. So, I entered this world nearly 35 years ago in extreme heat. It was a sign, I think. But now I’m getting ahead of myself. 

When I was 17, I was a freshman at Texas State University. I already knew the campus like the back of my hand. I had attended a children’s writers’ camp there for years and in high school, with help from Kym Fox, a mentor at the university, I had joined meetings of the school newspaper. 

That first semester I became a news reporter for both the campus paper and radio station. I was so busy I never took the time to swim in the San Marcos River. Two years later, when I was 19, I walked past that river daily, watching people swim in its 70-something-degree waters in the afternoon and silently judging them for being lazy. At night the day-drinkers were replaced with nutria, large water rodents paddling under the moonlight.

By the time I graduated, I had spent four years writing about the ways that urban developers were polluting the river and harming those nutria along with the eight federally endangered species that called it home. With Kym Fox’s help, I carved out an environmental beat at the campus radio station and learned all about impervious cover (think of pavement, asphalt or artificial cover that can’t absorb rain or water), pesticides, and drought. And maybe a little about myself. 

Kym encouraged me to turn this interest to professional journalism. We didn’t always see eye to eye: she told me at one point that I should choose between audio and print journalism (which I never did and don’t plan to do any time soon), and I still hold a tiny grudge against her for not supporting my decision to apply for editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper. (I applied numerous times and never received and I’m sure she had a good reason). It’s not like Kym didn’t believe in me. I could wallpaper a house with the letters of recommendation she wrote on my behalf for fellowships, scholarships, and jobs. 

Kym died of cancer recently. She is one of those voices I hear when I think about why and how I write about the world around us. Dig deeper. Question everything. 

Over the past 12 years, I’ve dug into studies so nauseatingly dense I found vacuuming my apartment more interesting. I’ve read E.I. Dupont v. Train, 420 U.S. 112 and other environmental case law to prepare for interviews, just in case the person who I was interviewing thought I was unqualified to report on the environment. 

Kym taught me to understand what it feels like to think, and that really scared me as a teenager because I quickly found that I was wrong about a lot of things. She helped me feel comfortable swimming in my fear, that fear can actually make me a better journalist and a better person. 

A Chemical History

So, let’s start with a simple reality. There is no new water anywhere. That’s not my opinion, it’s a fact. The water in Newtown Creek is naturally recycled and reused. 

When I first read the history of Newtown Creek—the part of the Hudson tidal estuary that flows for about four miles between Queens and Brooklyn that was used as a dumping ground for dozens of industries beginning in the mid 1800s— I was irate. Don’t tell me that people in the 19th century didn’t know that dumping gallons of chemicals into the water was a bad idea. They just wanted to make money, which is not so different from today. 

Industry neglect and greed turned Newtown Creek from the “world’s most important waterway” into one of the country’s most polluted waterways and by 2010 a designated Superfund site. 

New York City’s population boom added another layer of woe over the centuries. More people meant more strain on the city’s water and sewer system. To this day, raw sewage spills into Newtown Creek when it rains, even as authorities, city, state, and federal, agree the creek deserves better.  

Newtown Creek has few places where you or I or anyone for that matter can easily even see the waterway, let alone access it. There are only two or three formal access points that have been created so far. 

Willis Elkins, the executive director of the nonprofit Newtown Creek Alliance, said he believes that was done on purpose to hide the sorry and even dangerous state of the river. “We feel like this lack of access has helped perpetuate a state of neglect, abuse, disinvestment in the waterway because people don’t see it, they don’t know about it, they don’t care about it, they don’t fight for it,” Elkins said. That’s what he and other community members are hoping to change. 

In a past article, I mentioned standing on the Pulaski Bridge and watching trash barges float down Newtown Creek. I had never floated down the San Marcos River, but for years I wanted to spend time on the creek. It’s not as easy as renting a kayak. So, I took Kym’s advice about digging deeper and found so much information about Newtown Creek that I created a podcast, Hazard NYC, that examines the creek and New York City’s other federal Superfund sites.

My dream of going up Newtown Creek (with a paddle) came true in 2023. I went on a boat with Elkins to interview him and capture nature sounds for Hazard NYC. 

That day, the creek changed colors like a muddy mood ring and the odors were pungent, a sort of olfactory map of nearly 200 years of human contamination. Along its banks, were the ruins of the oil refineries, the sawmills, and the factories that produced fertilizer and glue. Those industries belched poisons daily into the water. New York City too shares blame. It began dumping raw sewage directly into the creek in 1856. 

The area around the creek has retained some of its industrial character. But there are signs—fine feathered signs—that one of the country’s most polluted waterways may recover. 

I’ve seen egrets walking around the water. Still, it will take years–likely decades–for Newtown Creek to be more than an embarrassment if not a threat. 

Notably, the city continues to flush sewage into its waters through a combined sewer overflow (CSO) system, which was introduced in the 19th century and has had big trouble keeping up with the demands of this century. 

Over the years, the city has built and upgraded its wastewater treatment facilities but there are still parts of the 19th century system in place. In about 60 percent of the city, the sewer system’s pipes carry rainfall along with water that comes from people’s toilets, showers, and washing machines. During some downpours, untreated sewage and street runoff can overwhelm local wastewater treatment plants, and the most recent data shows that more than 1.2 billion gallons has flowed annually from the CSO system into the creek, according to the city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). 

“We don’t have a lot of strong currents, so anything that’s been dumped there, like petroleum products, tends to stay there, so water quality is a major issue that we need to figure out,” Elkins said during a community event at Greenpoint Library in July.

Here’s what may be the salvation of this stinky waterway. 

Over the years, the city has made upgrades to its Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, eight giant metal egg-shaped tanks, visible from the Koscieszko Bridge in Brooklyn, that process millions of gallons of sludge. But the city still has a ways to go to reduce the amount of untreated sewage in the creek. 

The DEP plans to address the effluent issue by building a 26-foot-wide underground tunnel that would stretch 3.26 miles to reroute and store sewage runoff, especially during storms, so it can be later treated at the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Greenpoint. 

That should reduce—not eliminate—sewage in the water. 

Fixing the problem is going to cost about $3.3 billion when the tunnel project is completed in 2040. The project will store up to 50 million gallons of sewage during each storm that would otherwise go into the creek. Even with that upgrade, 350 million gallons of untreated sewage will be added to the creek each year, according to the DEP. 

Mike Dulong, legal program director at Riverkeeper, an environmental nonprofit aimed to protect the Hudson River, supports the project. It is a start, he said, that he hopes will encourage further clean-up efforts.

“I don’t know a single person who’s against this tunnel,” he said. “We just wanted to be bigger from our side. We wanted to capture all of the sewage. But we still support this. We think this is a positive step for New York City.”

Delays And Cleanup Plans

Nearly 15 years ago, before I moved to New York City, Newtown Creek was listed as a federal Superfund site, an EPA designation that recognized the pollution in the creek and demanded a cleanup. The process has been maddenly slow and continues to be so.

The EPA’s work plan was supposed to be published in 2023, but has now been pushed to 2028. Its latest timeline estimates that the cleanup won’t begin until 2032 at the earliest. 

Why the delays? It depends on who you ask. EPA employees have told me much of the long wait has been rooted in process. The agency needs to get nearly 30 parties—and counting-–that are responsible for polluting the creek to work together to pay for the cleanup. Cleanups are often very complicated and expensive, and some smaller companies cited by the EPA have balked at payment costs.  

I wouldn’t be one of Kym’s mentees if I didn’t read the reports, call sources on the weekends and yes, dig deeper. Question everything. 

It turns out the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation commissioned a study, published in 2023 and updated in 2024, that found 8 of the 43 locations sampled on properties along Newtown Creek, mostly owned by private entities or the city, were potentially seeping contaminated groundwater from 2021 to 2023 into the creek. That triggered more discussions and delays.

In an attempt to accelerate Newtown Creek’s cleanup, the EPA has carved out a section of the creek-–the East Branch—as a starting point.

The cost of all work and related studies at the Superfund site will be mainly split among New York City and five companies, collectively known as the Newtown Creek Group, that have been cited in legal agreements since 2011 as major polluters: ExxonMobil, Phelps Dodge, Texaco, BP, and National Grid. 

The amount of money from each has yet to be determined. 

“It’s really important to get this right, because this is also the first step in the full cleanup of the entire creek.”

— Willis Elkins, Newtown Creek Alliance

The Newtown Creek Group, under its settlement with the EPA, spent years on studies to figure out how to repair the creek. A former EPA official told me that the city and the big companies “worked sort of together, often pointing fingers at each other, but they sometimes did cooperate.” 

In January, the EPA released a plan for the East Branch cleanup. That work does not yet have a scheduled start date. The plan, broadly, aims to dredge up contaminated sections of the East Branch and then seal some parts of the water bed. Community members have been vigilant about monitoring its potential—and setting a high bar for quality.

“It’s really important to get this right, because this is also the first step in the full cleanup of the entire creek,” Elkins said. “So, we want to make sure that it’s really done well, that it’s addressing existing pollution, and that also it doesn’t allow for recontamination.”

It’s really important to get the creek’s cleanup right. And it’s really important for me and others who cover Newtown Creek to ask the right questions to make sure that happens. 

Most people can ask questions, but it’s really important to ask the right questions, Kym told me on more than one occasion. After all these years, I’m still learning to do this. 

For instance, I asked someone I was interviewing to define a “tributary.” Not because I didn’t think that person knew, but because I realized at that moment that maybe I didn’t know. 

The East Branch is a 2.8-mile-long tributary, one of five that branch from Newtown Creek. It borders Brooklyn and Queens and passes by neighborhoods with warehouses, concrete suppliers, recycling centers and a fuel storage facility.

Chemicals, including lead, copper, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), have been found in the sediment at the bottom of the East Branch and in the soil on its banks. Those chemicals were dumped for decades by industries that operated on the creek’s shores.

This toxic cocktail has been linked to some cancers in humans ,and studies of long-term exposure show that immune, reproductive, nervous, and endocrine systems can be affected.

The EPA plans to scoop or dredge at least three feet of the contaminated sediment to protect human health and the environment. Once the material is removed, the agency will place a cap over the dredged areas or contaminated sediments that remain in place to prevent recontamination.

If dredging is not sufficient, a cement mixture may be injected into the contaminated sediment to seal it into place, a process called in-situ stabilization, according to the EPA plan. The agency also plans to install sealed bulkheads along the creek’s banks to prevent chemicals from some nearby properties from seeping into the water. 

The EPA’s purview only includes the creek, not the land beyond its banks. The state is responsible for that. Separately, the DEC is identifying areas where contaminants are or may be seeping into the creek. The DEC will pursue cleanups, when necessary, under the state’s brownfield or state Superfund programs. 

Under the federal plan, the EPA will monitor the East Branch in perpetuity, with mandated five year reviews, for possible recontamination. If all goes well, the agency could advance a similar cleanup for the rest of the creek. 

Whatever happens, it’s going to take a long time. But saving Newtown Creek is worthwhile, not just for the health of the city but for the enjoyment of its residents. I imagine a day when people are floating along Newtown Creek like swimmers do in the San Marcos River. I may even join them. 

The project was produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York.