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COURIER L 4 IFE, NOV. 20-26, 2020
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
Senior Environmental Protection
Agency offi cials fi nally
kicked off the long-awaited
dredging of the Gowanus Canal’s
Superfund Cleanup on
Monday, marking a new milestone
in the decade-long battle
to cleanse Brooklyn’s Nautical
Purgatory.
“Today we mark the offi cial
start of a historic cleanup to
address a legacy of hazardous
waste and urban pollution that
dates back to the 1800s,” said
EPA Regional Administrator
Pete Lopez on Nov. 16.
The environmental gurus
and elected offi cials celebrated
the launch of the canal dredging
at the Gowanus waterfront
esplanade near First and Bond
streets — watching along as an
excavator heaved the noxious
black sediment into a container
at the opposite shore side.
The feds tasked a group of
historic polluters with dredging
and capping the industrial
waterway at an estimated cost
of more than $1.5 billion — including
the City of New York,
National Grid, Con Edison, the
Hess Corporation, Honeywell
International, and the Brooklyn
Improvement Company.
The responsible parties
will scoop out some 72,400 cubic
yards of the fi lthy sediment
known locally as “black mayonnaise”
during the fi rst phase of
the cleanup, which covers the
stretch of the canal from its
head at Butler Street down to
the Third Street Bridge, and is
slated to wrap by mid-2023, according
to Lopez.
The launch comes 10 years
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
The Dredgers welcomed
the actual dredgers.
Members of the Gowanus
Dredgers Canoe Club gathered
early Monday morning
at the Carroll Street Bridge
to celebrate the start of a decade
in-the-making cleanup
effort of the waterway.
“I’m really overjoyed,
not just because it’s nice out
here, but because we actually
are seeing action over
here on the canal — it’s real,”
said Captain Brad Vogel. “It
seems like that impossible
dream is fi nally beginning.”
Formed as a volunteer
effort in 1999, the Gowanus
Dredgers had pushed bureaucrats
in Washington for
years to take action on the
contaminated canal, which
is polluted by more than a
century’s worth of industrial
use and hundreds of
millions of gallons of sewage
that fl ush into the waterway
during storms each year.
“What better way to do
that than direct contact,”
said Owen Foote. “Some
people criticize it, ‘You’re
inviting people to canoe
a fi lthy, disgusting, contaminated
waterway?,’
and we’re like, ‘Absolutely.
That’s the plan.’”
“If you canoe it you’re
going to see what happens
when it rains, what overfl
ows, everything from trash
on our streets goes into our
waterway as well as anything
from people’s homes,”
Foote said.
Once the waters are
cleaner, the third-year
Dredger hopes more Brooklynites
will join her on canal
expeditions.
“The dredging is a real
move in the right direction
that hopefully it will bring
more of our neighbors out
onto the waterway and make
people feel safer and more
comfortable,” said Celeste
LeCompte.
For now, however, much
of the Gowanus will be offlimits
to recreational boaters.
EPA bigwigs announced
last month that recreational
boating would be banned for
the duration of the cleanup
anywhere north of the Ninth
Street Bridge, so smaller vessels
don’t interfere with the
heavy machinery.
Vogel, for his part, remained
optimistic that the
Dredgers can work with authorities
to allow limited access
in the coming years.
“We’re going to fi nd a
way,” he said. “The Dredgers
are a pretty scrappy and intrepid
crew and I think we’ll
fi nd something creative no
matter what happens.”
The boaters wrapped
up their crack-o’-dawn gettogether
with a toast, using
a regular sign off at the
end of their boating events:
“Let’s dredge!”
Barge-mounted excavators just south of the Carroll Street Bridge.
Canal canoers
celebrate dredging
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