Gowanus Cleanup Update: Time and Money
Last night Community Board 6’s public safety/environmental protection committee held a public meeting about the Department of Environmental Protection and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Gowanus Canal Ecological Restoration Study. The $5 million partnership to study and spur cleanup of the canal has been going on for six years, and the good news is that…
Last night Community Board 6’s public safety/environmental protection committee held a public meeting about the Department of Environmental Protection and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Gowanus Canal Ecological Restoration Study. The $5 million partnership to study and spur cleanup of the canal has been going on for six years, and the good news is that it’s starting to result in concrete plans for revitalizing Lavender Lake. The bad news is that the plans the DEP and Army Corps have come up with aren’t exactly going to be implemented tomorrow, and they ain’t gonna come cheap.
Kevin Clarke, the DEP’s chief of Wastewater and Water Infrastructure and Support, gave a presentation about the department’s $125 million water quality improvement plan, which the state is likely to approve and set in motion sometime next year. The DEP intends to modernize the canal’s flushing tunnel and pumping stations so they process a lot more water on a daily basis and reduce the impact of sewer overflow into the waterway; the department projects that updating the two pieces of infrastructure will take almost four years, and they want to start that work by next fall. The plan also calls for preliminary dredging of the 1.8-mile-long Gowanus and periodically sending a boat onto the canal to engage in floatable skimming (floatable is DEP lingo for street garbage that’s made its way to the canal and decided against sinking). The dredging and garbage boat plans probably won’t come into play until sometime next decade. Mark Lulka, the Army Corps’ project manager, called the canal a puzzle, and said the Corps’ preliminary recommendations for ecosystem restoration involved dredging and capping sediments, possibly with wetlands creation. The Army Corps hopes to finish a final feasibility report about the measures by 2009 and begin work in 2012 or 2013. Update: Gowanus Lounge has additional coverage of last night’s event here.
The only way to fill in the canal and deal with the drainage it presently provides, would be to fill it in all the way from the top of Prospect Hill to the top of Court street. If we just filled in the canal itself, all that drainage will overtake Bond Street to 5th Avenue–just a much wider and flatter canal condition.
But if we did fill in the canal with wetlands vegetation, we could have our area wide drainage along with natures filtration systems to cleanup the yuck we spill into it.
The concrete factories have enough work without filling in the canal with concrete. Lets give some work to the gardeners and make a real sustainable fix to this problem.
PLANT THE THING UP!
If everyone doing renovation in bklyn can just take their concrete/dirt/ rocks over to the canal it would be a done deal in a year.
just a thought.
I agree. Fill it in and fix the sewers.
I’m sorry but modern cities should not be dumping untreated waste water into public water ways. Spend the money correcting that shit storm run off problem… seperate the waste and rain water lines but stop entertaining ideas that the Gowanus is anything other than a third world ditch. They are talking about a future where the water will be able to “possibly” sustain life. What kind of goal is that. As for it being the natural drainage area for the Slope, everything below 4th Avenue is practically infill. What’s natural about that? Hell all of lower Manhattan is land fill in one way or another. This Gowanus should be filled in and built over, or make it a greenway or greenbelt park for pedestrians and cyclists. The Mayor wants to plant trees here’s a great place to start. FILL IT IN! FILL IT IN! FILL IT IN!
1:18, Buttermilk Channel, between Brooklyn and Governors Island
Where does the flushed water go? Jersey?
lets put a powerplant here. it wil keep the industrial nature and keep jobs. in fact we could put a power plant on some of the canal and could put a waste transfer station at the end of teh canal.
the city is in dire need of both and if everyone thinks the canal is worthless we should just find a better use.
that wasn’t really serious (in case you couldn’t tell)—-
really you could fill it in and create a gowanus greenway. a continuous park over a large tunnel that connects all of the over flows and dumps it at the head of the canal.
I think if you voted for a wide greenway or a waterway you know which way it would go.
Is this the same Army Corps in charge of the levees in New Orleans? Dang, I feel confident now!
It doesnt need to be filled in – it simply needs to have a proper flushing tunnel (the barely working one now is no where near adequate) and some limited dredging. The water will never be ‘clean’ but if you got fresh water in there constantly, nature would take its course and make reasonably clean.
These 5yr plans however are simply a ‘never get done’ project. If enough pressure was placed the canal could be upgraded in 2yrs.