That's right, untreated wastewater, every bit as gross as you'd imagine – flowing directly into the waters all around us that support plant and animal life, provide a playground for boaters and fishers, and form a shimmering reflector for sunset and moonrise.
A legacy of early sewage infrastructure that drains bathroom waste and rainwater in the same pipe, New York City's 494 combined sewer overflow (CSO) pipes dump a brew of street trash, bodily fluids and dirty runoff whenever rain overwhelms the city's 14 wastewater treatment plants. Other old cities share this problem with New York, but younger metropolises like Los Angeles and Phoenix don't. The wastewater mix can harm aquatic life and put certain waterways off limits to any human contact. Federal and state agencies have pressed the city to reduce CSO releases for more than 15 years, and while progress has been made, the spills persist.
Now Mayor Bloomberg is targeting CSOs through his ambitious PlaNYC sustainability initiative, which seeks to make the city an ecologically healthier place by the time a million more residents live here in 2030 – all with showers to take, dishes to wash and toilets to flush. When he launched the sustainability drive last September, the mayor said the city seeks cleaner water "so that we can fish, swim, and enjoy the rivers that have always been the city’s most distinctive feature." Announcing his 127-point plan in April, the mayor spelled out his vision of a city that "opens virtually all of our rivers and creeks and coastal waters to recreation."
But amid the bold proposals in PlaNYC for reducing carbon emissions and using congestion pricing to ease car traffic, Bloomberg's goals for water quality, critics say, drift in the shallow end of the pool. The summer issue of City Limits Investigates, Deep Trouble: New York City's Silent Sewage Crisis, finds that the vast size of the sewage problem – and the limitations inherent in both traditional and "green" approaches to fixing it – seem to be constraining ambition for making the city's waterways as clean as they could be.
PlaNYC's goal is to capture at least 75 percent of the city's wet-weather flow—the water that can lead to CSO discharges—over the next 23 years. That's only marginally better than the 72 percent the city already attains, and well behind cities like Chicago and Boston that have also wrestled with CSO problems. In fact, the 75 percent goal is what the city is already required to meet under a 2004 consent order with the state—and could still result in some 24 billion gallons of releases each year. The plan holds out the possibility of doing more, but fails to define any more aggressive target.
PlaNYC also calls for opening 90 percent of New York City's tributaries (98 percent of all its waters, when you count the Hudson River and New York Harbor) to recreation. But the mayor's plan aims only for "secondary contact" —i.e., boating and fishing. While swimming in the East River is something most New Yorkers are bred to live without, the modest recreation target reflects limits on how clean the water will be by 2030. "We were looking for a more ambitious goal but we didn't get it," says Queens City Councilmember and Environmental Protection Committee chair James Gennaro.
