Black Mayonnaise

A boat trip along Newtown Creek is a voyeuristic tour of the guts of Greenpoint. The waterway, which meanders through a motley assortment of industrial buildings aligning its banks, is not the healthiest. It’s a dark camouflage green, teeming with intestinal bacteria from the discharge of combined sewers, not to mention chemicals such as dioxin, from a now-demolished incinerator plant.

Newtown Creek was once one of the busiest industrial waterways in North America—and is now one of the dirtiest, according to Riverkeeper’s Seggos. If one were to pull up a glob of sediment from the ground, it would look like “black mayonnaise,” he says. And “the further you go up the creek, the dirtier it gets.”

He’s right. Upon reaching Peerless Importers, the old Paragon Oil site, the unmistakably pungent odor of oil taints the air. Here, behind a bulkhead, is one of the sources of petroleum seepage into Newtown Creek, although there is some debate among the oil companies regarding whether or not its source is the giant plume or a secondary, smaller one.

While the leaks had begun decades earlier, large amounts of oil didn’t begin seeping into the creek until the 1970s, when the neighborhood started using upstate water instead of local water pumped from underground. The groundwater table rose when local pumping ended, and “all of a sudden, this stuff [was] getting squished out in the creek,” says Hale.

The seepage is causing several interrelated problems. In addition to the vapors potentially reaching people near the water, some of the petroleum in the creek is dissolved in groundwater, which is also leaking out from the aquifer. Some of those dissolved chemicals such as benzene can seep into fish or crabs and effectually anesthetize them, according to Keith Cooper, a professor of biochemistry and microbiology at Rutgers University. Unable to move their gills in order to breathe, those creatures ultimately die.

Fortunately for people who catch their dinner from the creek, meat tainted with oil has a distinctive smell and taste, which can be a warning sign.

While the original seep at the foot of Meeker Avenue was stopped, another one appeared around 1991—this time coming from the bulkhead in front of Peerless Importers. Exxon Mobil began recovering oil there in 1993, but when investigations showed that some of the recovered petroleum was more characteristic of oil used by Paragon Oil, Chevron took over by entering into a consent order with the state DEC to identify the source of the seep and put a stop to its oozing.

Chevron has since deployed a system of booms and also completed a grout wall in late November, and the company has also installed a recovery system intended to extract oil from behind the bulkhead near the seep.

But no matter how many grout walls or boom systems are installed, stopping the seeps isn’t a cure-all—the leaks won’t cease until they’re traced to the source. For that to happen, though, there first needs to be a comprehensive removal of what’s inside the aquifer—not just of oil floating freely on the water table, but of the oil stuck to the sandy soil and gravel.

“They gotta sincerely think about cleaning it up, because I’m sure there are a lot of people who have the same feelings I do: ‘I’m not going nowhere’” says Bob McErlean, who lives on Hausman Street and who is president of the Neighborhood Block Association. “I’m gonna be your worst nightmare.”

It’s a muggy evening as dusk settles in around the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center. The Mets are home tonight, and there’s a community meeting about the Kosciuszko Bridge, so no one is sure how many people will attend this month’s gathering of the Newtown Creek Alliance. But gradually, the seats around the oval table in the conference room fill with attendees who are interested in what’s happening to clean up their neighborhood.

Katie Schmid, a 27-year-old New York University law student, sits on one side of the table next to Riverkeeper’s Seggos.

“This is pretty phenomenal progress for a year’s time for a volunteer organization,” says Schmid, referring to the various lawsuits, the EPA study, and the participation of the state Attorney General’s office. “Everyone should be pretty proud of themselves because this didn’t happen for 30 years.”

In 2004, Riverkeeper filed a federal lawsuit against Exxon Mobil for violating the Clean Water Act and the Natural Resource Conservation Act. The Newtown Creek Alliance helped to give the lawsuit the legal standing it needed in order to proceed because the group consisted of local residents, Schmid said. And the lawsuit helped get the attention of the state agencies, like the DEC.

Since they started cleaning up the spills—before the lawsuits—the various oil companies have recovered slightly more than nine million gallons of oil. Pumping out as much floating oil as possible is the overarching goal right now, and the state DEC is now looking at new options for future remediation. One is vacuum enhanced recovery. A project on the Peerless Importers site has tested this type of technology, whereby oil that’s harder to get to is sucked up with a type of vacuum. And Exxon Mobile has plans for another pilot project testing a similar system, according to Hale of the state DEC.

Up to now, though, the clean-up effort has centered on a more conventional approach. The main technology involves a dual-pump recovery system, which operates by creating a cone-shaped well in the ground water which draws the oil down and pumps it out. The water is also treated for dissolved contamination and, once cleaned, released back into Newtown Creek.

Pumping out floating oil—or free product, as it’s also known—takes a while, but it’s a necessary step in the path toward remediation, says Hale. Only after much of the free product is removed can workers begin to address oil that has stuck to the sandy aquifer. “It’s like an infected wound,” he says. “You gotta take out the nasty stuff first and then the body will heal.”

The pumping approach—which could take up to 20 years, and —doesn’t satisfy everyone, however. “It’s fatally flawed,” says Walter Hang, President of Toxics Targeting, a company that compiles information on toxic sites. “The longer you wait to alleviate and eliminate [the] hazard, the longer it has to migrate.”

But now that the Attorney General’s office is on board, there’s extra pressure to find ways of enhancing recovery. Having agreed to investigate Exxon Mobil’s remediation efforts to try to design a more thorough consent order, the Attorney General’s office will be working “hand-in-hand” with the state DEC, according to Hale. “We’ve got a very good relationship,” he says. “That was our goal…to get some of the politics aside” and handle things more scientifically, he says.

Indeed, the Attorney General’s team plans to address all aspects of the plume, from vapor intrusion in people’s homes to the extent of dissolved contamination to seepage into the creek. In addition, the EPA has begun to review past remediation efforts to make recommendations for the future.

“We’re trying to restore the environment to the community out there and get closure on these risks to them,” says Hernan. “They’ve been through a lot over the last 20 years out there, and they shouldn’t have to suffer this stuff anymore.”

Next door to where Manuel Bodón crabs for his supper is an old factory building where Bill Shuck, a member of the Newtown Creek Alliance, owns a loft. Shuck takes advantage of the water’s proximity to his door; he owns a rowboat and a kayak and has been boating on the waterway for about as long as Bodón has been crabbing there.

A participant in Riverkeeper’s lawsuit, Schuck has noticed an increase in awareness regarding the spill and attributes much of it to the environmental watchdog group’s involvement in galvanizing the community.

“People are more interested in the creek, and they’re interested in the pollution,” he says. And while he recognizes that clean-up may take a while, he’s hopeful that there will be a time when Greenpoint residents won’t have to worry that they’re living on top of a health hazard.

“I think we have a system that can do good things,” he says. “But sometimes it does take a lot of people making a really big stink.”

One that might, eventually, overtake that of the oil.

When originally, posted this story said Riverkeeper’s suit was filed against BP and Chevron. The correction was made on January 25, 2007 at 1pm.