At 12:05 p.m. on October 5, 1950, a huge explosion rocked Greenpoint, Brooklyn. As shards of concrete and specks of tar flew like shrapnel, a ten-foot-wide hole was ripped out of the pavement, twenty-five heavy manhole covers shot into the sky, windows in over five hundred buildings were shattered, and residents stumbled about in an ear-ringing daze. There were a few minor injuries, but, remarkably, no one was killed. After examining the crater and interviewing residents, city investigators concluded that the explosion had been caused by petroleum and other industrial pollutants that had leaked from storage bunkers or deliberately been poured into the neighborhood’s soil and water, had pooled underground, and spontaneously combusted. The inspectors issued a report on the blast, noting that chemicals had been leaking from industrial sites in Green-point since the nineteenth century. Then they moved on to other things. Nothing was done to clean up the toxins.
The smell of hydrocarbons wafted through the neighborhood; clothes hung out to dry became stained; people and their pets suffered mysterious ailments. Yet, for decades, no one seemed to notice—or, at least, the residents of Greenpoint, who were mostly working-class immigrants from insular Polish, Italian, Irish, and Hispanic communities, never complained.
As the petroleum and other chemicals continued to seep, they tainted much of the soil and groundwater in Greenpoint undetected. Much more obvious was the rainbow-hued oil slick that floated down Newtown Creek, a 3.8-mile inlet of the East River that runs through the neighborhood and defines the Brooklyn/Queens border: it was slowly but plainly transformed into a winding, ink-black question mark in the heart of New York City.
By 2010, the oil spill beneath Brooklyn was estimated to contain at least 17 million to 30 million gallons of hydrocarbons and other toxic compounds, in pockets up to twenty-five feet deep, though the exact amount remains unknown. At the low end, this estimate represents 6 million more gallons of oil than the 10.8 million gallons of crude spilled by the Exxon Valdez in 1989, and 9 million more gallons than the oil spills that coated New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Until April 2010—when the drill rig Deepwater Horizon exploded, spewing 185 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico—the Newtown Creek oil spill was the largest in US history.
The contaminants that settled onto the creek bed are so thick and viscous that locals call the sludge black mayonnaise. The goop is composed of many different types of hydrocarbons, industrial solvents, and associated chemicals—such as naphtha, the chemical after which napalm is named. Some of the chemicals in Newtown Creek, such as benzene—a by-product of gasoline refining that is widely used by industry—or the gasoline additive MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether), are known carcinogens and can cause a host of neurological problems. Investigators have also discovered toxic metals, such as copper and zinc, and compounds associated with gas plants, asphalt companies, hazardous-waste plants, and paint manufacturers, in the water and soil.
Older chemicals such as benzene are referred to as legacy pollutants: compounds that were first manufactured years ago, often at a time when their malign effects were not well understood and regulation was an afterthought. Many legacy pollutants are chemically stable, meaning they don’t break down in the environment quickly. They are a festering problem around the world, and there is no simple, cheap way to clean them up. Newer compounds are also found in the creek, such as PCE (perchloroethylene), a colorless liquid used for dry cleaning, and TCE (trichloroethylene), an industrial solvent; both are suspected carcinogens that dissolve in water, and many treatment systems are not equipped to filter them. (PCE and TCE have been identified in the Queens water supply. Whether the Brooklyn spill is the source of the contamination is disputed.)
The longer toxins associated with hydrocarbons and industrial chemicals remain in the environment, the more likely they are to cause health problems. They can have short-term effects, causing nausea and dizziness, or long-term effects, such as developmental problems and cancer.
Since the 1990s, Brooklyn has undergone a renaissance to become one of the most popular places to live on the East Coast. As the Williamsburg neighborhood grew too expensive for artists and musicians, they began to migrate north, into Greenpoint. The city rezoned much of the area around Newtown Creek from light industrial to residential, and by 2008 the gritty neighborhood was rapidly gentrifying. Today, more than one hundred homes and dozens of businesses are built near, or on top of, the oil plume. While some residents worry about their health and property values, others ignore warnings and continue to boat, fish, and occasionally swim in Newtown Creek.
No comprehensive health studies have been done on the neighborhood. Although Greenpoint has a lower overall cancer rate than much of New York City, it has among the highest incidence of certain kinds of cancer, such as leukemia in children and stomach cancer in adults. Anecdotal evidence suggests unusual cancer clusters are nearby. Tom Stagg, a retired police detective who lives there, told New York magazine that he had counted thirty-six people with cancer on the block he was raised on. “It’s not normal,” he said. “I’m sure it’s because of the oil spill.”
Awareness of the toxic stew in Brooklyn has grown, and anxiety about its effects—on human health, the ecosystem, and property values—has ratcheted up, leading to numerous investigations, new regulations, a record settlement, and two class-action lawsuits. But the enduring mystery of Newtown Creek is, how could such a disaster occur in the heart of the nation’s most densely populated city and remain hidden in plain sight for over a century?
To put this question in context, it helps to understand that Americans did not have a reliable supply of clean water, or even a legal right to it, until the twentieth century. For most of the nation’s history, people drank whatever water could be found and suffered the consequences.
Water quality refers to the concentration of different constituents found in water, such as oxygen, sediments, nutrients, organisms, toxins, organic matter, and the like.
Freshwater comes from two main sources: surface water (rivers, lakes, and reservoirs) and groundwater (wells or subterranean aquifers). The quality of surface water depends on the composition of the river or lake bed it is in, what substances are washed into the water, and how the water is used. The quality of groundwater depends on the nature of the aquifer from which it is sourced, and what flows into it from the surface. Many other things can affect water quality. The rate of water flow, for instance, affects the physical and chemical aspects of water. Temperature is a key factor: if water becomes too warm or cold, plants and animals die, and as they decompose, water quality is affected—one reason why climate change will affect the purity of drinking supplies almost as much as it will their availability.
Water pollution can be naturally occurring—from microorganisms in soils and wildlife; radionuclides in underlying rock; and fluoride, nitrogen, and heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, arsenic, and selenium. But in many cases, water quality is most affected by what human beings put into it.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries towns grew up along lakes or rivers, and by 1860 a dozen large American cities had substantial water systems, often fed by wooden or clay pipes. But overcrowding and lack of drainage led to outbreaks of lethal diseases such as dysentery, typhoid, and yellow fever. Water supplies became contaminated with sewage and garbage, or bacterial disease; in some cases, the contamination was so severe that wells and pipes had to be excavated and replaced.
As cities rose, engineers became obsessed with building efficient waterworks to supply them. Chicago, for example, was established on the shore of Lake Michigan and grew rapidly, but contaminated water collected beneath its streets, while the city’s effluent was dumped into the lake, which was also its drinking supply. Typhoid fever and dysentery broke out, and in 1854 a cholera epidemic wiped out 6 percent of the city’s population. (Cholera is a bacterial disease caused by feces in water.) The crisis forced a major overhaul. Municipal leaders installed water pumps, built a new sewer system, and reversed the flow of the Chicago River to carry waste out of Lake Michigan, and the city was much healthier for it.
By 1920, most American cities had efficient water systems, and by 1940 outbreaks of naturally occurring waterborne diseases had sharply fallen. But man-made pollution was another matter, and there were few quality standards to protect people.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Americans, consumed with sending rockets to the moon and coping with the social turmoil of the Vietnam War, paid little attention to what they were pouring into waterways. Twenty-eight chemicals were banned from tap water by federal guidelines in the 1960s, but environmental regulation was mostly left to the states, which were more interested in attracting jobs than in policing agricultural, industrial, and municipal polluters. Between 1961 and 1970, according to the EPA, one community a month suffered from waterborne disease: forty-six thousand people were sickened, and twenty died.
Even so, it took a series of dramatic environmental disasters to focus the nation’s attention on water pollution. Among these, the most notorious was the day the Cuyahoga River, near Cleveland, Ohio, burst into flames. The Cuyahoga had grown so polluted with oil and trash that it was lifeless in sections: it “oozes rather than flows,” Time magazine reported; it was a toxic sump where a person who falls in “does not drown. He decays.” The river’s surface became coated with a film of industrial waste, which, on June 22, 1969, ignited. The flames rose five stories high and burned out of control until fireboats from Lake Erie doused them.
This was not the first time that a Rust Belt river had ignited, but the Cuyahoga fire galvanized scientists, legislators, and citizens to push Washington to clean up American waters.
By 1970, studies showed that almost half of US drinking water was contaminated. Shocked, millions of citizens demanded the nation’s water supplies be protected on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970. A few months later, Congress and President Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In 1972, Congress overrode Nixon’s veto to enact the Clean Water Act (CWA)—which limits pollution, sets water quality standards, and penalizes violators—into law. The CWA established federal water quality standards that, for the first time, aimed to eliminate toxins and ensure that waters were pure enough to be “fishable and swimmable.” In 1974, the CWA was supplemented by the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), which requires communities to deliver clean tap water to residents.
William Ruckelshaus was named the first administrator of the EPA, and one of the first things he did was to fine three large cities—Atlanta, Cleveland, and Detroit—for violating the Clean Water Act; he quickly followed that by prosecuting a number of high-profile industrial polluters, such as Dow Chemical. “I knew that the job of the EPA would be far more contentious in the future if we didn’t establish its credibility and its willingness to take forceful—and symbolic—action right from the start,” Ruckelshaus recalled forty years later. “The American people had to know we were serious.”
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter declared a federal health emergency in the neighborhood of Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, when it was discovered that twenty-one thousand pounds of industrial waste had been buried under land on which a school and homes were built. The toxins in Love Canal, which included 248 chemicals such as benzene and dioxin, resulted in miscarriages, birth defects, epilepsy, and retardation. The federal government eventually removed or reburied much of the toxic waste, relocated more than eight hundred families, leveled houses, and sealed the most polluted sections with a barbed-wire fence.
In response to Love Canal, in 1980 Congress passed CERCLA, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act—commonly known as the Superfund law—to clean up hazardous-waste sites and hold polluters responsible for the damage. (Using this law, the EPA sued Occidental Petroleum, a subsidiary of which had been responsible for contamination in Love Canal, and in 1995 Occidental paid $129 million in restitution.)
While celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the SDWA in 1999, then EPA administrator Carol Browner announced that, for the first time, municipal water suppliers were required to provide consumer confidence reports, which explained where consumers’ water was drawn from and what was in it. This was hailed as a major victory for consumer groups. But a year later, the EPA revealed that 45 percent of the nation’s lakes and 39 percent of streams and rivers were “impaired,” meaning they were unsafe for drinking, fishing, or even, in some cases, swimming.
The turn of the twenty-first century saw a shift in the US economy, from dirty Industrial Age works to relatively clean businesses such as information technology. Yet many of the nation’s waterways remained haunted by their rusty, chemically tainted past. Legacy contaminants from the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries have persisted across the country and continue to impact human and environmental health—from hexavalent chromium (an industrial compound that gained infamy in Erin Brockovich’s prosecution of Pacific Gas & Electric) in California groundwater, to perchlorate (used in rocket fuel) in Iowa, uranium in Colorado, perfluorochemicals (PFCs) in Minnesota, and dangerous levels of rust and lead in pipes in Washington, DC.
Even the Potomac—the “nation’s river”—was so heavily polluted in the sixties that it was said you could smell the river before you saw it; people were told not to swim in it and to get a tetanus shot if they did. The Potomac has been partly cleaned since then, but it flows into Chesapeake Bay, a famously rich aquasystem that continues to suffer from monstrous algae growths fueled by pollution, and fish diseases worthy of science fiction, virtually at the feet of the Environmental Protection Agency, Congress, and the White House.
What is happening in Chesapeake Bay has national and global implications. But before I investigated that big story, I took a look at what has happened in my local waters, including Newtown Creek, in Brooklyn. I was surprised by what I discovered in my own backyard.
Newtown Creek is a tidal estuary that once ran through a rich wetland populated by many kinds of birds, animals, and aquatic life. In the early nineteenth century, farmers barged their vegetables to market along Newtown Creek, while aristocrats fished and hunted along its marshy shores. In Greenpoint, named after the broad, wet grassland on the Brooklyn side, land was cheap and taxes were low. As the city expanded, the marsh was filled in, paved over, and built up. By 1860, New York was the nation’s leading manufacturing center, and over fifty businesses along Newtown Creek processed kerosene, coal, paraffin wax, naphthas, chemicals, fertilizers, glue, glass, and lumber. In 1867, Astral Oil built America’s first large, modern oil refinery there, and as Newtown Creek became the center of New York’s petroleum-refining business, it was soon joined by others.
In 1872, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company arrived in Green-point. Originally based in Cleveland, Rockefeller built Standard Oil into a monopoly by acquiring and merging with other companies, including Astral Oil. By 1880, Standard controlled 90 percent of the nation’s refinery capacity. Along Newtown Creek, Rockefeller controlled over one hundred stills, which employed two thousand workers and consumed 3 million gallons of crude oil each week.
Pollution around the creek was rampant. When petroleum was transported from distillery to holding tank to wharf to schooner, spillage occurred. Oil evaporated from storage tanks into the air, or leaked into the creek. To maximize profits, companies discarded their unwanted byproducts, which included gasoline in the days before the automobile, in the most expedient way possible—by dumping them into the creek or pouring them onto the land, where they seeped into the soil. By one estimate, three hundred thousand gallons of gas, coke residue (carbon let over from coal or petroleum and used for steelmaking), and other waste was produced along Newtown Creek every week in the 1880s.
“On warm sunny days, a quivering envelope of nauseous fog hangs above the place like a pall of death,” the New York Times reported in 1887.
Alarmed, the Fifteenth Ward Smelling Committee took a scouting trip aboard a tug up the creek in September 1891. As they worked upstream, around manure scows and cargo ships, they noticed mysterious liquids pouring from factories and saw signs that fertilizer companies were dumping their waste directly into the waterway. Passing the dog pound and sausage factories, they were revolted to see heaps of flesh baking in the open sun. Sludge acid, a tarlike substance produced by refineries, emitted an odor that could “nauseate a horse.” The smell grew worse and worse, until they reached the refineries themselves, where “the stenches began asserting themselves with all the vigor of fully developed stenches.” The wind blew these odors over neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, prompting people to flee.
In 1919, twenty acres of the Standard Oil refinery burned (allegedly due to arson), releasing millions of gallons of oil. But rather than leak into Newtown Creek, the goop seeped underground, tainting Brooklyn’s drinking supply. This happened because residents had pumped so much freshwater from wells that the natural slope of the aquifer (an underground supply of freshwater) had been reversed: it now tilted away from the creek. The oil followed the slope, into the groundwater. By the 1940s, the Brooklyn Aquifer had been pumped so low that seawater had infiltrated and polluted the aquifer further. In 1949, Brooklyn abandoned its aquifer and began to rely on city water, piped from reservoirs over a hundred miles away.
The following year, 1950, the chemical vapors spontaneously combusted underground, signaling that something had gone very wrong. By then, Greenpoint was no longer green: it was a gray Dickensian cityscape of smoke-belching kerosene stills, snaking pipelines, giant petrochemical storage tanks, and greasy wharves. Thousands of people lived in and around the industrial tangle. Newtown Creek was one of the most polluted waterways in the country, but only a few people seemed to care.
In September 1978, a Coast Guard helicopter pilot on a routine patrol over Brooklyn noticed a huge black oil plume emanating from the Meeker Avenue bulkhead along Newtown Creek. He filed a report, and a containment boom—a string of yellow plastic floats designed to restrict the oil to the shoreline, preventing it from washing downstream into New York Harbor—was set. In six months, the boom collected over a hundred thousand gallons of degraded gasoline, fuel oil, and industrial chemicals, some of which dated to 1948. New Yorkers were shocked. A Coast Guard investigation revealed that the entire length of Newtown Creek and a large swath of Greenpoint’s soil—an area of roughly fifty-five acres—was saturated by toxic industrial chemicals.
That summer, not long after the Coast Guard’s discovery, a city bus driver noticed oil oozing out of the pavement on Manhattan Avenue, a wide industrial street in Greenpoint. He mentioned it to a local nun, Sister Francis Gerard Kress. Sister Francis began to ask people in the neighborhood if they knew anything about the mysterious oil. She was surprised to learn that almost every resident had a story about the black mayonnaise. “Toxic fumes stained their clothes drying on the line outside,” she recalled. “It gave people headaches. It made children agitated. The people hated it, but they learned to live with it. They didn’t want to cause any trouble.”
Although Newtown Creek was viscous with oil, some residents swam there on scorching summer days or ate the fish or crabs they pulled from its murky waters. Sister Francis worried that the spill would endanger people’s health, so she mentioned it to the local community board, politicians, and to practically everyone she met. Few of them paid attention.
“They told me I was a nuisance,” she said. “But I have Viking blood and decided to look into it anyway.”
With the help of sympathetic coastguardsmen, Sister Francis dressed herself in a hazardous-materials suit, climbed over barbed-wire fences into vacant lots, and skirted packs of wild dogs to inspect the creek. The more she saw of it, the more concerned she became. But when Church elders learned that she was agitating for a cleanup, she recalled, they immediately warned her to desist. “The Church banished me from Greenpoint!” Sister Francis declared in a loud voice when I visited her at a church-run nursing home on Long Island, in 2007. She was ninety-two, and wheelchairbound, but recalled every detail of her mission to save Newtown Creek.
Sister Francis continued her activism in secret, but even Greenpoint residents didn’t want her to “stir things up.” While she made inroads with local politicians and helped individual families, her efforts were largely met with stubborn disengagement. “I’ve never seen such a community. They still need to clean up my creek!” she thundered, insisting that I call her Sister Newtown Creek, as some of her friends still do in Greenpoint. “Think of all the young families living there that could be polluted!”
One of those families, the Pirozzis, lived on Devoe Street, not far from the site of the 1950 explosion. The family’s youngest son, Sebastian, was energetic and spent much of his time outside, playing tag and stickball; he played near the creek but not in it. Many of his “old-school Italian neighbors” raised vegetables in their backyards, where the soil and water used to tend the plants may have been contaminated, he recalled.
In the 1970s, five of Pirozzi’s neighbors contracted osteosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer. (It is unclear what causes osteosarcoma, but it is associated with exposure to chemicals. According to the American Cancer Society, osteosarcoma “is not a common cancer,” and only nine hundred new cases of the disease are diagnosed annually, on average, in the United States. The New York Post reported that in 2006, in New York City, only twenty-four new cases were diagnosed compared to an average of ten thousand new cases of breast cancer diagnosed annually in the city at that time.) Two of Pirozzi’s osteosarcoma-stricken neighbors had their legs amputated, and one of them had an arm amputated; a teenage girl whose leg was not amputated died; a friend nearby developed bone cancer in his shoulder and died. Pirozzi’s father contracted colon cancer but survived. After the Pirozzis moved from their Devoe Street apartment, the woman who replaced them contracted bone cancer. She fought it for a decade, but the cancer killed her at age sixty-two.
In 1977, when he was fourteen years old, Sebastian Pirozzi was diagnosed with osteosarcoma. The doctors said that his was an extremely grave case. After a year of chemotherapy, his right leg was amputated, and he began an arduous recovery. Since then he has undergone surgeries on his shoulder and knee, had part of his lung removed, and had to cut short a promising career on Wall Street to tend to his health. Pirozzi no longer works and now lives on Staten Island with his wife and three children.
“I used to think my cancer was an act of God. But now that I know more about the pollution, I’m rethinking that,” he said. “I’m coping, I guess. But I still have sleepless nights.” Although he lacks conclusive epidemiological evidence, Sebastian Pirozzi believes the oil spill and Greenpoint’s cancer cluster are linked. “Bone cancer is very rare,” he said. “To have all this rare cancer in one place? It’s just too much of a coincidence.”
The oil underground was invisible and easy to overlook, he said, and no government or oil company officials explained the possible health consequences of industrial pollution. In the 1970s Greenpoint residents “didn’t even know what an oil spill was,” Pirozzi said. “No one was savvy enough to connect the chemicals to all the sickness. No one was up in arms. You just didn’t hear about it.”
Pirozzi first learned of the oil spill in 2006, when he read a small newspaper article about it and showed it to his neighbors. “People were amazed—‘How can there be so much oil under our houses and nobody told us?’ That really pissed me off,” he said. That year, he joined a $58 billion class-action lawsuit brought against ExxonMobil, BP, and other alleged polluters of Newtown Creek by the law firm Napoli Bern Ripka LLP. Most are suing for the loss of their property values, but a few, including Pirozzi, are claiming the spill affected their health.
ExxonMobil took the position that a dense layer of clay beneath Greenpoint stops the oil vapors from rising to the surface. This assumption has been contested by independent geologists, who believe the clay is porous and allows toxic vapors to filter into the air and people’s homes. ExxonMobil also argued that it was being held responsible for actions taken decades ago, by people who may not have realized how toxic the pollutants were, in an era when regulation was limited. While that may be true, it does not explain why the spill has yet to be cleaned up.
On a foggy day in October 2002, Basil Seggos, who worked as the chief investigator of the Hudson Riverkeeper—an environmental group for which Robert Kennedy Jr. is the chief prosecuting attorney—plowed up Newtown Creek in a wooden boat. He was there to discover where people were fishing and warn them against eating anything from the water. As the boat nosed through filth and past abandoned fuel refineries, Seggos noticed oil coating the creek’s surface as well as the rocks and old pilings along its edges. “It was thick. It was everywhere,” he said, as we retraced his course in the Riverkeeper’s thirty-foot motorboat, in 2008. “It was unbelievable to me that a thing this big could be kept a secret for so long.”
Intrigued, Seggos dug through old newspaper clippings, contacted city officials, and talked to Greenpoint families. Though he, like Sister Francis, found some residents taciturn at first, the story slowly emerged. What he learned, with the help of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for documents, was that Mobil Oil—which was descended from Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and which merged with Exxon in 1999 to form ExxonMobil—had allegedly worked out an agreement with the state. If the company assumed responsibility for cleaning up the spill, Riverkeeper charged, then state officials would not subject Mobil to fines or onerous remediation schedules: that way, both sides could avoid a public outcry and a costly legal battle.
Riverkeeper’s FOIA requests then turned up ExxonMobil documents they maintained showed that the company was aware that benzene had been leaking into the ground and water for at least a decade, and that the company had dragged its feet on cleaning it up.
In 2004, Riverkeeper and several Brooklyn politicians filed a lawsuit against three oil companies: ExxonMobil, BP, and Chevron. They charged that toxic fumes from the spill had endangered people’s health and property. Riverkeeper also alleged that ExxonMobil violated federal environmental laws. Girardi & Keese, the law firm made famous for collaborating with Erin Brockovich to sue PG&E in California, filed a separate case on behalf of five hundred plaintiffs. (These cases were later consolidated.) The oil companies denied the allegations. In 2006, the state’s then attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, announced he would investigate the Newtown Creek oil spill. In 2007, his successor, Andrew Cuomo, sued ExxonMobil to force a cleanup. In 2008 the EPA agreed to test four industrial sites along the creek for toxic chemicals.
As in the case of the potentially toxic dust generated at Ground Zero on 9/11, no one really knows how the chemicals polluting Newtown Creek have affected people’s health. There is no conclusive link between the oil and chemical spill and human sickness in Greenpoint.
An ExxonMobil spokeswoman pointed out that the company has had no active refinery operations in Greenpoint since 1963 and no terminal operations there since 1993. ExxonMobil’s lead counsel on the spill, Peter Sacripanti, said it was not clear where the pollutants originated from, or who was responsible for them, and maintained that ExxonMobil should not be held liable for an environmental mess created at a time when standards were less stringent than they are today. “We do not believe we should be required to compensate the City of New York for someone else’s contamination,” a company statement read.
After a 1990 consent decree, the company agreed to remediate a portion of the oil beneath Brooklyn by 2007. To do so, ExxonMobil used a system of recovery wells, storage tanks, and groundwater monitors. The wells use a dual-phase recovery system, in which a pump draws down the water table in a specific area while oil is sucked up. The water that is pumped out is treated and emptied back into Newtown Creek; the petroleum recovered is shipped to a refinery in New Jersey, where it is reprocessed for use. (BP ran four additional wells in Greenpoint.)
Environmentalists characterized the remediation efforts as “rudimentary.” By 2007, the oil companies had removed a total of nine million gallons of oil. A containment boom at the Peerless bulkhead allowed for the skimming of twenty-eight thousand gallons of oil from the surface of Newtown Creek, but it is hardly an oil-tight barrier—as I witnessed when I toured the creek with Riverkeeper in 2008, and on other visits in 2009 and 2010. Thick, iridescent patches of oil float on the water, especially along the edges, and the smell of hydrocarbons is unmistakable.
In a related but separate case, the city sued oil companies for contaminating groundwater in Brooklyn and Queens. The city’s water utility, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), has long searched for extra sources of freshwater to supplement its supplies from upstate. The Brooklyn-Queens Aquifer (BQA) could provide a valuable supply for the city in case of drought, a major water tunnel failure, or widespread fire—except that it is contaminated.
In 2007, the DEP issued the “Brooklyn-Queens Aquifer Feasibility Study,” which outlined a massive multiphase cleanup of the soils and water beneath Brooklyn and Queens; it envisioned adding some 100 million to 200 million gallons of BQA water per day to the city’s drinking water system. (Currently the city uses 1.3 billion gallons of freshwater a day, of which the BQA provides less than 1 percent.) The project has not been funded, but the city has used the tainted aquifer as a legal tool to go after polluters.
In 2003, the city sued twenty-three oil companies over MTBE contamination of the aquifer. MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether) is an additive used to oxygenate gasoline, which helps cars burn gas cleanly and reduces tailpipe emissions. MTBEs are highly soluble in water, have leaked from storage tanks across the country, and are suspected carcinogens. The city reached settlements totaling $15 million with all of the companies but one: ExxonMobil.
The city sought $250 million in damages to underwrite a new treatment plant to clean the water in five wells in southeastern Queens. The oil giant denied it was responsible for polluting the BQA, but in 2009 a federal jury found ExxonMobil liable for contaminating the aquifer and said the company knew of the potential for MTBE pollution but had failed to warn the public. The court awarded the city $104.7 million, and New York declared “total victory.” Yet even that rich payout is nowhere near enough to clean up the site or compensate Greenpoint residents.
Today Newtown Creek remains mostly lifeless. Experts have deemed it “severely stressed” and say that it is no longer a functioning ecosystem. Seagulls, cormorants, and the occasional heron are seen along its banks, but the water and mud they wade in is noxious. When a dolphin was spotted swimming upstream in the spring of 2010, biologists worried about its health and were relieved when it turned and swam downstream into the relatively clean water of New York Harbor.
Newtown Creek is part of the New York–New Jersey Harbor Estuary, which the EPA lists as an “estuary of national significance.” The agency has been sampling the creek’s water since the 1980s; when EPA scientists tested the creek bed in 2009, they found sediments along its entire length were impregnated with toxic contaminants.
By 2010, the oil companies ExxonMobil, BP, and Chevron had removed 11 million gallons of oil from the contaminated zone. Depending on which experts you believe, another 20 million gallons of oily pollutants could remain beneath Greenpoint; it is even possible that the vapors trapped underground could explode again. ExxonMobil estimates it will take twenty years to pump the remaining oil out of the ground and water there. But even then, the soil will remain saturated with other toxic compounds, such as xylene, toluene, and methane.
In October 2010, the creek was designated a Superfund site, meaning the federal government will mandate a rigorous cleanup. While the Super-fund law allows for the use of federal funds for remediation—which the EPA estimates will take at least fifteen years and cost over $400 million—most of the cost will be borne by the polluters. Numerous companies are likely to be on the hook, and five of them—ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron Texaco, Phelps Dodge, and National Grid—have already volunteered to underwrite the remediation. A Superfund designation requires years of environmental study of a site before work can begin. Once under way, the cleanup might consist of a light dredging of contaminated soil, which would be replaced with clean fill, or it might require a much deeper cleaning, to thoroughly scour out the contaminants. Either way, the cleanup will only remove toxins from the shoreline and sediments of Newtown Creek. It does not address other, equally pressing, water quality issues, such as storm-water runoff and raw sewage spewing into local waters, which aren’t eligible.
As with thousands of other contaminated sites across the country, the only way to completely remediate the black mayonnaise is to excavate the entire polluted zone, including the creek bed, the shoreline, and much of the neighborhood, and replace it with clean fill. This would be massively expensive and would require the government to condemn a large swath of Greenpoint. It will never be practical to entirely rid Greenpoint of industrial pollutants.
More likely, the polluted zone will be partly cleaned, and the remaining pollutants will be capped and left alone. This solution is far from perfect—it will allow toxins to continue to leak into the water and the soil—but it is a pragmatic compromise similar to those instituted in New York Harbor and the Hudson River. Wildlife has returned to those waterways, which remain polluted by PCBs and mercury, making their fish and ducks unsafe to eat.
As the seriousness of Brooklyn’s environmental pollution became clear in the first decade of this century, Greenpoint residents, local environmental groups, Riverkeeper, the borough of Brooklyn, and Attorney General Cuomo increased pressure on ExxonMobil to accelerate and expand its cleanup efforts. Finally, in mid-November 2010, the company agreed to settle with Cuomo (by then the state’s governor-elect); speed the cleaning of the water, soil, and air in Greenpoint; and pay $25 million in penalties, damages, environmental restoration fees, and future costs. It was the largest single payment of its kind in state history.
ExxonMobil officials said they were “pleased” that the settlement resolved numerous legal actions and vowed the company would “remain in Greenpoint until the remediation effort is done—and done right.” Paul Gallay, the Hudson Riverkeeper’s executive director, hailed the settlement as “an historic turning point,” which it was. Yet it did not resolve the two class-action suits, in which residents such as Sebastian Pirozzi are seeking billions of dollars’ worth of restitution for harm to their property values and for potential health costs related to the oil spill.
“After all we’ve been through, I hope we can [resolve] the lawsuit soon,” said Pirozzi. “It’s taken so long. But whatever happens, it’s not going to change my cancer. I still have some bitterness about that.”
On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, a drill rig contracted by BP to prospect for oil miles beneath the Gulf of Mexico, suffered a catastrophic blowout and exploded in a giant fireball that could be seen from thirty-five miles away. The disaster killed eleven men, sank one of the world’s most sophisticated drilling platforms, and spewed at least 2.5 million gallons of oil per day into the Gulf—equivalent to an Exxon Valdez spill every four days. Eighty-six days later, BP managed to cap the well. The Coast Guard predicted it could take years to remediate the giant oil slick, which threatened seashores in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, and freshwater supplies as it entered tributary rivers. The Justice Department initiated a criminal investigation to determine if environmental laws had been violated, and BP’s CEO was forced to resign.
The BP oil spill has been widely described as “the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history.” Given the gravity and magnitude of the calamity, it is tempting to accept this headline, but it is not entirely accurate.
We tend to think of oil spills as dramatic events—crude carriers impaled on Alaskan rocks, a blowout shooting geysers of oil into the Texas desert, a burning platform sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. But these cases are the exception rather than the rule. Spectacular disasters such as BP’s Gulf spill divert our attention from slower-moving, nearly invisible disasters, such as the pollution of Newtown Creek, which can prove even more insidious in the long run because they are less likely to be cleaned up.
The worst oil pollution caused by humans originates not in a single giant disaster but in millions of tiny leaks from the cars, trucks, motorcycles, lawn mowers, boats, planes, snowmobiles, and other machines we use every day. Gasoline that spills during refueling, or oil that drips from an engine, falls to the ground, where it is eventually washed into sewers or creeks that flow into rivers, lakes, or the ocean. The cumulative effect of these millions of tiny leaks is even worse than that of the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon.
According to Oil in the Sea III, a respected 2003 report by the National Research Council, humans spill more than 300 million gallons of oil into North American waters every decade, which is nearly double the highest estimate of the BP spill. Worldwide, the report said, some 4 billion gallons of oil leaks into the world’s oceans every decade, more than twenty-five times the highest estimate from the BP tragedy. (Natural seepage of oil is another major problem and could be as much as 493 million gallons a decade in North American waters alone, according to the report.) Neither government nor industry track such small-scale spills, and woefully little research has been done on their health and environmental impacts. What is known is that small amounts of oil-based products contain toxic compounds that kill marine life and cause cancer in humans.
Likewise, it is easy to forget that across the country, thousands of industrial spills, many let over from a less regulated time, continue to poison groundwater, leak toxins into rivers and lakes, and impact human and environmental health in ways that are difficult to define or even to imagine.
These cases are reminders of the unintended consequences of man’s progress, moral lessons about our long-term impact on the environment for short-term gain. Yet, in an ironic twist, and in defiance of easy categorizing, some of the nation’s most polluted rivers and lakes contain the promise of rescue and redemption.