BY KEVIN DUGGAN
Barge-mounted excavators
will start dredging the Gowanus
Canal in mid-November,
scooping out more than a century’s
worth of contaminated
sediment from the channel bed,
the federal cleanup’s project
manager said at a meeting with
local watchdogs of the project
on Sept. 22.
“We are on schedule for mid-
November start of dredging,”
said the Environmental Protection
Agency’s Christos Tsiamis
at the Sept. 22 Gowanus Canal
Advisory Group meeting. “We
have made a lot of progress —
we’re getting ready.”
As part of the Superfund
program, Uncle Sam is working
with six parties the feds previously
identifi ed as primarily
responsible for historically polluting
the fetid waterway — National
Grid, Con Edison, the
Hess Corporation, Honeywell
International, the Brooklyn Improvement
Company, and the
City of New York — which have
6 COURIER LIFE, OCT. 2-8, 2020
been gearing up for the fi rst
portion of the canal’s cleanse.
The scrub was initially supposed
to launch in September
but got pushed back a monthand
a-half due to the pandemic,
according to an EPA spokesman.
“The impacts of the
COVID-19 pandemic have
caused unscheduled and unavoidable
delays in the cleanup
process,” said Stephen McBay.
“Nevertheless, EPA is working
with all stakeholders to move
forward as quickly and safely
as possible.”
The parties have been assembling
their barges and hydraulic
excavators off the coast
of Staten Island to get them
ready for deployment to Brooklyn’s
Nautical Purgatory, while
also setting up a transfer point
at the Public Place site at Smith
and Fifth streets, where the
smaller local boats will move
the muck to larger vessels to
ship it out to New Jersey.
The federally-supervised
cleanup is split into three
phases — dubbed Remediation
Target Areas, or RTAs — starting
with the scrub of the upper
third from the canal head
at Butler Street to the Third
Street Bridge, which EPA anticipates
lasting until July 2023
and costing $125 million.
The cleanup group and private
developers along the Gowanus
have been installing bulkheads
at the water’s edge to
prevent erosion.
Then, they will start dredging
the heavily-contaminated
soft sediment, known locally as
“black mayonnaise,” that has
built up on the bed of the waterway
from more than a century
of industrial use and hundreds
of millions of gallons of combined
sewer and storm runoff
fl ushing into the Gowanus annually.
Over the years, inspectors
have found the channel to
contain high amounts of toxic
chemicals and heavy metals,
such as mercury, lead, and copper,
The EPA will begin dredging the Gowanus Canal in November. File photo
along with traces of dog
poop and even gonorrhea.
Cleaners will then inject cement
into the native sediment
below to stabilize it, before
dredging the remaining dregs
of black mayo and installing
several layers of sponge-like
material and caps to catch any
toxins seeping through.
The fi rst phase, known by
bureaucrats as RTA 1, also calls
for the restoration of a defunct
offshoot of the canal, called the
First Street Turning Basin,
which will be dredged, decontaminated,
and revitalized as a
wetlands area.
Barges will ship out the gunk
from the canal and excavated
material from the First Street
Turning Basin, necessitating
draw bridges around the canal
to rise more frequently, causing
road delays. The agency will
manage traffi c in partnership
with the city’s Department of
Transportation, EPA reps previously
told the CAG.
Over the last months, both
the Agency and the responsible
parties have been preparing
for the second phase of the
cleanup, or RTA 2, which covers
the stretch between Third and
Ninth streets.
Can you dig it?
Gowanus Canal dredging to start mid-November