By Jordan Gass-Pooré, Inside Climate News
The EPA has been working for 12 years on two huge underground tanks to keep sewage overflows from polluting the canal. The city’s DEP, which for years has done little to speed the process, announced late last month that it’s now ahead of schedule.
NEW YORK—I stared at my computer on another dreary December night as a tic-tac-toe board of residents from Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood appeared on my screen alongside various environmental officials. I’ve been attending these community meetings, either on Zoom or in person, for nearly three years and most of the squares were filled by someone I knew, someone I’ve interviewed before.
There’s Peter Reich, who moved to Gowanus in 1983 after reading a listing in The Village Voice that promised a large air-conditioned artist’s loft. In those early years, Reich remembered the terrible odor from the nearby Gowanus Canal.
Tonight’s meeting was all about odors in the neighborhood that have plagued residents for more than a year. The cause? A long-awaited project to build two underground tanks to help prevent sewage from overflowing into the Gowanus Canal when it rains. This will eventually help reduce the stench from the canal, but in order for that to happen, excavators at one tank site had to dig 200 feet into soil contaminated with coal tar, a hazardous byproduct of gas manufacturing, which happened in the neighborhood for nearly 100 years.
For more than a century, the Gowanus Canal has been a symbol of industrial pollution.
Paper mills, tanneries and other industries in the area began dumping a chemical slush into the canal in the 19th century. The canal was placed on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund list—federally designated areas known to be hazardous to human and environmental health—in 2010, and about a decade later the agency got to work removing the canal’s noxious sediment, known as “black mayonnaise” because of its color and consistency.
The EPA identified the City of New York, which fought against the designation of the canal as a Superfund site, as one of six parties most responsible for the contamination in 2009. What that means is the city’s on the hook for building the retention tanks as part of the canal’s cleanup.
In 2021, New York City Council moved ahead with rezoning the area from industrial to residential, knowing that by the time the tanks went online, some of the estimated 19,000 new people would have moved in. There’s a fear by some current residents that this influx could strain the neighborhood’s already overwhelmed sewers.
The city’s study at the time on the rezoning’s impact on the environment raised eyebrows at the EPA.
According to an August 2021 EPA letter, the study used outdated data and inconsistent modeling to predict the impact rezoning would have on the neighborhood’s sewer system.
Because of the rezoning, 7,383 new apartments are already under construction, with more projected to be built by 2035—five-to-six years after both tanks are scheduled to be built.
The excavation work—part of the EPA’s and the New York City Department of Environmental Protection’s cleanup of the canal—unearthed smells so overwhelming at times that residents said they were unable to leave their homes, and a few people reported getting migraines and feeling physically ill.
Residents reported smelling something like mothballs in the air shortly after the DEP started digging the hole where the Red Hook tank will sit in March 2023 along Nevins Street in Gowanus. A second, smaller tank, called Owls Head, will be built at 2nd Ave. and 5th St. in Gowanus.
Naphthalene, a chemical found in coal tar that smells like mothballs, has a strong odor that can still be smelled in the air even at levels far below what would constitute a health hazard, said Dr. Lora Smith, an EPA human health risk assessor, on another December Zoom call, this time with the Gowanus Canal Community Advisory Group.
“It’s, unfortunately, a very tricky contaminant. It’s very smelly … and it can cause health effects at low concentrations,” Dr. Smith said.
DEP officials repeatedly said that based on ongoing air sampling data, the odor never rose above the EPA’s health limits.
Numerous complaints over the odor were documented by the DEP, EPA and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation since construction started on the tanks in fall 2023. In response, the DEP applied non-toxic odor-suppressing foam over the dig site, added more tarps and began misting scented deodorizer similar to those found in bathrooms from sprayers attached to the fences lining the area. The DEP later swapped the spray for an unscented version since the agency said “many of the odor complaints were related to the fragrance in the misters themselves.”
The DEP stopped these measures in March when the agency completed excavation of the first tank.
Some residents believed the best solution was a large tent over the entire project.
But DEP officials said a tent wasn’t feasible due to “site constraints” and would delay construction of the tanks by more than a year. Even with a tent, odors could still escape. Case in point: A nearby tented construction site at 545 Sackett Street that’s being developed by the real estate company Domain, which had nearly the same amount of odor complaints to the untented DEP site.
Celeste LeCompte, a Gowanus CAG member, said it was important to find a plan to mitigate the neighborhood’s odors that wouldn’t further delay the construction of the tanks.
Gowanus resident Samir Cekic said neighborhood concerns were dismissed by EPA and city officials. I met up with him and another local, Katherine Buckel, to discuss what was going on in the neighborhood at the time.
They talked about the monthslong email chain started by Samir to help inform the community and get answers about the noxious odors, and how one agency would either refer them to another agency or not answer their questions.
Or, an agency would send somebody out as soon as the smells were detected and those people didn’t smell anything. And sometimes the agencies would share reports with them that read like an engineering manual.
So, they kept contacting the DEP, EPA, and the city’s 311 non-emergency hotline and reporting the odors.
Between January and September 2024, the DEP received 14 odor complaints attributed to work at the tank site. In comparison, 13 reports were attributed to that private tented construction site at 545 Sackett St.
The agency noted that any odor complaints received in October and November 2024 are not related to work at the tank site because construction had temporarily stopped.
“I’ve gotten a couple of headaches and can’t take my kids outside; we don’t open our windows, we have a roof that we do not hardly ever use anymore, and I got sort of looped into this email chain,” said Buckel in August. She’s lived on Nevins Street since 2012. “The health effects are concerning, but also just having to limit our lives so we aren’t exposed to those health effects is also just frustrating.”
The DEP and EPA said since December, the agencies have received no odor complaints that were attributed to the tank site.
Strange odors aren’t new to Gowanus. But the community became suspicious about the recent smells from the ongoing construction of the tanks after the DEC started testing properties throughout the neighborhood to determine if chemicals from contaminated soil and groundwater were entering buildings through openings in the foundation and walls.
There are hours of Gowanus CAG meetings where state and federal officials are telling residents they actually aren’t smelling what they claim to be smelling, instead of empathizing and reassuring them that the smells they experienced were not dangerous to them.
Since mid-October, the EPA and DEP have operated eight real-time air monitoring stations around the retention tank site. The EPA expanded its air monitoring program in the neighborhood to include a Trace Atmospheric Gas Analyzer Bus, one of only two in the U.S., to measure the amount of naphthalene in the air for two weeks each month from December until the middle of April.
I got a chance to go inside the bus during a February event hosted by the Gowanus Canal CAG. Reich and I happened to be in the same small group packed into the bus, where an EPA scientist briefed us on the very loud equipment that was housed behind us that’s monitoring the air quality around the Gowanus Canal.
The screens at the front of the bus showed the real-time data, which is shared directly with environmental officials to provide a more detailed supplemental report. This information is then analyzed and reported to the public through the Gowanus Canal CAG on an ongoing basis.
So far, the EPA said there haven’t been any significant exceedances from the tank construction site.
While odors from the tank construction still exist, they’re much less intense and frequent, thanks to the state’s plan. The monitoring has also put some residents at ease because they now know what risks those smells represent.
The second phase of that project, completed in March (six months ahead of schedule), included removing roughly 1,500 tons of soil per day, this time only going 60 feet down, and loading it onto trucks, secured by tarps, to be transferred to designated waste facilities in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio, depending on the level of contamination. DEP officials said that “based on extensive soil sampling” they expected to encounter cleaner soil that wasn’t contaminated with coal tar, which is usually found deeper in the ground.
In May, DEP will start bringing in trucks loaded with concrete and rebar to start construction on the Red Hook tank. This work’s expected to be complete by fall 2026. Construction of the Owls Head tank is scheduled to be completed summer 2027.
DEP officials said the Owls Head and Red Hook tank will come online in 2029 and 2030, respectively—about six-and-a-half years behind schedule.
The final phase of construction at both sites, which includes 3.6 acres of public waterfront space on top of the tanks, will be complete in 2030.
Sewers and Climate Change
Years ago, I was working on a grad school journalism assignment where I had to cover a speed dating event. I made it clear I was a journalist and not interested in finding my soulmate, but the organizers still asked me to announce to the crowd my hobbies, which included walking around cemeteries and touring wastewater treatment plants. I wasn’t making any of that up.
Sewers fascinate me, and the issues that are going on with the sewers in New York City aren’t unique; climate change is messing with sewers all across America.
Sewers in Gowanus can’t handle heavy rain, so more than 300 million gallons of raw sewage and polluted runoff is poured into the canal every year. That’s why the EPA’s 2013 plan to clean up the canal called for, among other things, the construction of two combined sewer overflow (CSO) retention tanks to temporarily store most of the sewage until it can be pumped to a treatment plant and discharged.
The EPA initially suggested an eight-million-gallon tank—called the Red Hook tank—be built under the Double D Pool at Thomas Greene Park, since it had to be dug up anyway to remove soil contaminated with coal tar. But the DEP rejected their $46.4 million proposal, citing the need to preserve existing park space, and chose to build the Red Hook tank and a smaller tank called Owls Head on privately owned land near the canal for nearly $1 billion.
For years, the DEP insisted on building the tanks on privately owned land they would acquire through eminent domain, even though the agency and the EPA agreed in 2013 that the tanks would be built on city-owned land to speed up the project and reduce costs. (Thomas Green Park is owned by the city).
As of 2022, newly developed or redeveloped public and private properties in New York City are required to manage stormwater more effectively on-site under the Unified Stormwater Rule to help reduce flooding and pollution from entering public waterways. That could mean retrofitting buildings with rain gardens or installing a plant-filled roof.
That same year, both CSO tanks were supposed to be online, but that didn’t happen. Now, the tanks are behind schedule and over budget because of the city’s modifications. If the tanks aren’t constructed before the EPA’s completed its cleanup of the Gowanus Canal, there’s a fear that the canal’s waters will get polluted again.
“Until the tanks are built … the cleanup is inadequate,” said Brian Carr, a lawyer with the EPA, during a 2022 Gowanus Canal CAG meeting.
Eymund Diegel, co-founder of the Gowanus CAG, said the whole situation is a mess. He believes the DEP is “deliberately sabotaging” the EPA’s cleanup by dragging out the construction of the tanks.
“Right from day one, we’ve known that the city has been deliberately trying to sabotage the whole cleanup,” said Diegel. “There was a deliberate attempt to slow down the CSO construction process, including putting forward crazy schemes like, ‘Oh, let’s build a huge tunnel underneath the Gowanus Canal.’”
In 2018, the DEP proposed an alternative to the underground tanks in Gowanus that they agreed to build in an agreement with the EPA in 2016: a CSO storage tunnel that would run beneath the upper part of the canal (similar to the one built in Indianapolis and the proposed tunnel at the Newtown Creek Superfund site in New York City).
After the DEP spent nearly two years designing this tunnel, the EPA ultimately rejected the project after officials spent a year evaluating the plans.
Peter Lopez, the EPA’s New York regional administrator at the time, cited a number of “significant concerns” over additional costs and construction delays, among other issues, in a 2019 letter to then-DEP commissioner Vincent Sapienza.
EPA Inspector General Sean O’Donnell wrote in a report in March 2024 that during heavy rainstorms, sewage and polluted runoff is still flowing into the parts of the Gowanus Canal that the agency’s already cleaned up, potentially exposing people to contamination and increasing the likelihood that those parts will need to be cleaned again.
“New York City will incur additional expenses if already dredged portions of the canal need to be redredged to remove sediments deposited by CSOs that would have been contained in the CSO,” O’Donnell wrote in the report.
Because of the DEP’s construction delays, the EPA already had to re-dredge—scrape off newly contaminated sludge from the bottom of the upper segment of the Gowanus Canal—in May 2024.
Two months later, the EPA completed the dredging and installation of a protective cap on that portion of the canal, which started in late 2020. The agency started working in June on a multi-year cleanup of the middle section of the canal, again, before the CSO tanks are online. That work is estimated to cost $369 million.
Some Gowanus residents are concerned about the dredging and capping taking place before the completion of the CSO tanks—a crucial part of the Superfund’s cleanup plan that’s been repeatedly delayed. Part of the cleanup is ensuring the canal’s waters aren’t polluted again by building the two underground storage tanks.
O’Donnell added that delays to the construction of the tanks could cost taxpayers an additional $50 million.
He recommended the EPA closely monitor the construction of the tanks and take action if the city doesn’t meet the project’s requirements and misses any future deadlines.
LeCompte was one of the community members that advocated successfully for the EPA and DEP to find a solution that wouldn’t slow down the project timeline.
“The Gowanus Canal is a famously smelly place, and it was great to see the agencies actually work with our community to find a solution that addressed both the short-term and long-term reasons for the stink,” she wrote in an email.