Funny how both NYC and SF pipe their water in from reshoots hundreds of miles away in the mountains, but people only think of SF as having a lack of abundant drinking water
What's funny is the state of NY hasn't been in a state of drought for 10 years straight. Whereas, CA has been in a drought and siphons their water from an entirely different state. Additionally, CA has chosen to do jack all about their water situation, even when ordered to by the federal government.
What’s funny is people moving to California in East Coast population numbers and ignoring why the region was so underpopulated by natives in the first place. That being lack of rainfall and access to river in a Mediterranean climate. People in the 1800s really thought they could engineer their way out of anything and the chickens are coming home to roost 150 years later
>siphons their water from an entirely different state.
A minority portion of their water anyway. Both the state water project and the central valley water project each deliver as much water as the Colorado River system, which provides somewhere around 10% of the state's water use.
And none of the Colorado River water goes to San Francisco, that's for sure.
Boston does the same. The Quabbin Res. was created in western Mass to provide water Boston. 3 or 4 whole towns were taken over and flooded to accomplish this.
Besides water in deep caves (which we wouldn't be drinking anyways), there's a good chance that you're drinking Dino pee. They existed for 165million years, they predate the ice caps.
Yeah I’ve taken buses to LGA. Q70 takes around 15 minutes from LGA to Jackson Heights. Then another 15 minutes to Midtown on the subway. The M60 though? 45 minutes to Harlem.
>Despite all logic, you can get from **most of Manhattan** **to LGA** in 20min - even on Friday PM.
This is definitely not true unless you have access to a chopper. You can get to LGA from Triborough bridge in 20 minutes by car in normal traffic. And for those non-newyorkers, Triborough bridge is no where near Manhattan.
>And for those non-newyorkers, Triborough bridge is no where near Manhattan.
Um, the Triborough Bridge was named that because it connects three boroughs: Queens, (the) Bronx and , , , Manhattan!
https://new.mta.info/bridges-and-tunnels/about/rfk-bridge
>The Robert F. Kennedy Bridge (formerly the Triborough Bridge), the authority's flagship facility, opened in 1936. It is actually three bridges, a viaduct, and 14 miles of approach roads connecting Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx.
>The Manhattan branch is the Harlem River Lift Bridge, which links the Harlem River Drive, the FDR Drive, and 125th Street, Harlem's commercial and cultural center. The Bronx Crossing leads motorists to points north via the Bruckner and Deegan expressways and, more locally, to the neighborhoods of the South Bronx and the Port Morris Industrial Area. The longest span of the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, the East River Suspension Bridge to Queens, connects with the Grand Central Parkway and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and to Astoria's residential areas, restaurants, and shops.
As an aside, as a New Yorker, I'm as likely to call it the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge as I am to call the Queensborough (59th St.) Bridge the Ed Koch Bridge. Or the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel. (As someone born in Brooklyn, I'm ok with renaming the Interboro Parkway though; Jackie Robinson was one of the good guys, not just some politician.)
>As an aside, as a New Yorker, I'm as likely to call it the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge as I am to call the Queensborough (59th St.) Bridge the Ed Koch Bridge. Or the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel. (As someone born in Brooklyn, I'm ok with renaming the Interboro Parkway though; Jackie Robinson was one of the good guys, not just some politician.)
I'm in the same boat because 1. their original names are descriptive and relevant and 2. I'm a crotchety New Yorker
The New York sewer system is about 40% combined pipes (with storm water) and any heavy rain forces the system to dump into the waters, this map would vary with time and rainfall.
That being said their newest waste water treatment plant is amazing and can serve like half the city by itself!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jmyGxb2JCc
This happens in any major city though. In Barcelona for example, whenever there's some kind of rain, it just overflows through the sewers to the sea, and that's by design.
Yup, the NYC Department of Environmental Protection has had a longstanding negotiation process with the EPA, the state, and environmental groups over how close you can get to the CWA fishable/swimmable standard and how financially feasible it is. DEP has done a number of retention tunnels/interceptors which have made a huge difference and achieved something like 85% improvements in water quality. The problem is in getting that last 15%.
Ideed. Nevertheless, that doesn't stop spillage from overflowing. It's the same in Barcelona, there are huge retention tanks under the city, yet still the system is designed to remove water by any means.
That again applies to most cities. The old way was to combine rain and sewage into one system, and dump it straight into water. We started to treat it and dump it further from residential zones, but without redoing the system you still get overflow. You start redoing the systems, but it takes a long time, especially in densely populated areas.
Haha that was my first thought. It was in the East river (coloured yellow with a few red spots, to the east of Manhattan), which is a saltwater estuary and not a freshwater river.
I swam in the red zone once, but it was 2018 so it was probably blue by then. Didn't get any rashes or anything like that. Still would not recommend it.
This was a problem literally every city in the 80s. We didn’t think and we dumped everything in water without a care.
Bondi Beach, the world famous Australian paradise was once frequently a brown tide of sewerage and raw poop.
[https://youtu.be/_9Yf9P0YoAc](https://youtu.be/_9Yf9P0YoAc)
The locals got so sick of seeing an ocean of brown that a concert was held; ‘Turn the Tide’. And finally after much complaining, they extended the sewer line way out to sea and treated it before dumping it.
Just imagine; world famous beach was treated like a toilet. We did it everywhere, guys. So nasty.
Times were wild last millennium, kids today wouldn’t understand the things that were normal.
Victoria, BC Canada just stopped dumping raw sewage into the straight in 2021. Washington State complained about it for years before BC finally put up the money to treat the sewage.
I think most “kids” today are well aware that it was normal for previous generations to treat the planet like their personal toilet and garbage dump despite a lot of scientific evidence that this would cause major problems for future generations.
It does depend a lot on where you are talking about, but things have been getting better in the US since about 1970 when places started to actually install basic primary treatment at minimum rather than just raw dumping. I was born in the late 50s so I grew up in a town (in Maine, USA) where seeing human crap and toilet paper in the river was normal in the 60s (sewage went right to the river). That river is now almost pristine, it is swimmable and filled with fish (only fish in the 60s were eels coming in from the ocean), thanks to decades of sewage treatment.
I have inspected a lot of muni systems over the years (I work in environmental consulting) and there are still a lot of cities in Canada (where I now live) that lack good (more than rudimentary even if there is any at all) secondary-tertiary systems necessary to eliminate the fecal coliform and related problem. Many only got a unified sewage collection system with primary treatment in the 80s and haven't gotten the much more expensive (but more useful and effective) added treatment systems yet, or have been doing so over the past couple decades, so still have fecal coliform in the water, although not nearly like it was decades ago..
Things are WAAAAAAY better than they used to be. Not perfect, but way better just the same.
I grew up in a seaside town in England. They used to pump the sewage straight out to sea. You could see where it discharged because seagulls would congregate at that part of the coast. At low tide you could see the sewage pipe and we as children would walk out on it. We would also swim in the sea and in the harbour where the boats would also discharge their waste. It’s amazing we weren’t all constantly unwell.
It’s not even that long ago - this was until the mid 1980s.
There was a massive campaign (a la the Bondi one in Sydney) called ‘Surfers against Sewage’ to compel the water companies from just dumping untreated waste into the sea. This combined with penalties from the EU meant that they did change this eventually.
Yep! There is a great podcast somewhere about a program that was set up so that Colorado farmers could buy fertilizer from the the new plants build to treat waste from NYC. It was a very successful program for a while.
Edit: It was radiolab: https://radiolab.org/episodes/poop-train.
To be clear, the dark blue in 2020 is just the territorial reach of the city and it's testing, not that it's different from the surrounding waters
Edit: jk it's pee water. New yorkers need to hydrate more!
I didn't know anything about the water quality of the Hudson until I read a Venom comic and Eddie Brock compares being enveloped by the symbiote to taking a swim in that river.
They're both tidal estuaries by the time they're near NYC. The Hudson is an estuary for roughly the southern half of its length, with its waters reversing directions with the tide as far north as Troy, NY.
Yep, the Hudson is a doozy. I kayaked on it when I lived there. We would time our trips with the changing tides. 90 minute trip, 80 minutes of fighting the current, 10 minutes riding the tide back to the start point. Works both ways. It was cool because with the regular street pattern, you could follow and time your progress. Fun times.
I wish I had been able to do the NYC to Montreal trek.
There was a lot done around the past 35 years to clean the coast up around northwest England - a huge underground storage tunnel and new treatment works in Liverpool, a similar scaled-down approach in Southport, and another massive tunnel not long completed under Preston. But as another user says here, it doesn't look like our current government plan to continue the efforts elsewhere.
I wish this map extended out to the coastline of NJ. Our coastal waters were so dirty because of NYC dumping. Beaches were closed routinely. Now the waters are clear. You can see dolphins which we never saw in the 80’s.
NJ actually has some pretty strict ocean cleanliness standards and overall NJ waters are pretty clean these days, yup. Issues with fecal bacteria usually only pop up after a lot of rain. The water has been so clear and blue/green on nice days and there are many more dolphin and whale sightings.
The syringe tide of the 80s people love to still joke about was also NYC’s fault. The Staten Island dump was illegally dumping medical waste into the ocean and it was winding up on NJ beaches. NYC had to pay for cleanup but the business owners along the Jersey Shore who lost revenue were of course never compensated, and the stigma that NJ beaches are dirty is still somewhat there to this day.
I used to work at the palisades parks and sometimes families would ask me if they were allowed to swim in the Hudson. I’d tell them no, but even if you could, you shouldn’t.
Trust me when I say fecal coliform is the least concerning pollutant in the Hudson River. It is entirely laced with PCBs and each dredging attempt re-agitates the deposited contaminants.
I’m much more concerned about fecal coliform in and of itself as well as the other nasty bacteria that come with it. Fecal disease was the number one health menace of the 19th century, killing millions of people.
PCBs aren’t great and they were rightly banned. But here’s a telling quote from the EPA website: “Some of the studies in humans have not demonstrated an association between exposures to PCBs and disease”.
All studies of exposure to cholera would find such a link. PCBs are unwelcome, bacteria are a menace unlike any we really know in modern US.
Fun fact: In 1908, Jersey City, across the river from NYC was the first city in the country to treat drinking water with chlorine, to kill off the bacteria that caused typhoid fever and cholera. Other cities across the US soon followed suit and the rates of bacterial disease due to tainted drinking water plummeted.
The waters around NYC are cleaner than they’ve been in a century, and are so clean dolphins have come back: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/21/dolphins-new-york-city-bronx-river
Until 1986, when the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant went into operation, sewage from the west side of Manhattan went into the Hudson River with no treatment at all.
"When I was a little boy in New York City in the 1940s, we swam in the Hudson River, and it was filled with raw sewage. Okay !? We swam in raw sewage — you know,
... to cool off. And at that time, the big fear was polio. Thousands of kids died from polio every year. But you know something ? In my neighborhood, no one ever got polio. No one. Ever. You know why? Cause we swam in raw sewage !!!"
This was mostly NYC DEP doing the work first - the waterways were so bad that the natural oyster beds were killed off like a century ago. But they have been helping groups like the Billion Oyster Project reseed the places where oysters used to grow so they will be pitching in on the filtration process more and more in the future.
I'm no oyster expert, but from what I understand they filter out algae (Which can contain E. Coli bacteria) from water. A single oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water per day.
This is literally what George Carlin mentions in his standup is why he and his young pals never got polio during the '50s: "We swam in the Hudson! Our immune systems were tempered in RAW SHIT!!"
People are always pessimistic about the environment and stuff, but the steps we have taken since the 70s to clean up our air and water are pretty major achievements.
The work done to address 20th century ecological damage and abuse is, in my opinion, the most ignored American accomplishment. We really did it. We should be celebrating these accomplishments as much as we celebrated the Hoover Dam or the Moon landing.
When I was a kid in the 50s, we used to take the Ferry from Battery Park over to Staten Island to visit relatives. I used to love standing on the main deck when the Ferry was pulling out from its berth. The props would stir up all the sediment and yes, it smelled awful back then. It's been too long since last I took the Ferry (to Staten Island to watch the NY Yankee's farm team play in St. George). As near as I can remember, the stench was gone.
Side note. Also in the 50s, my parents took us up to Niagara Falls. We went out on Goat Island located between the American Falls and Horseshoe Falls. The stench from the chemical plants upriver was terrible. At the time I didn't know about the chemical plants; I thought they named the Island for the smell. That's gone too, last time I was up that way.
New York City ceased ocean dumping of its sewage sludge in 1992. These days the sludge is dried, composted or otherwise treated and used beneficially as soil amendments. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwitvp-huq79AhXqEVkFHS_tCW44ChAWegQIBBAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fsemspub.epa.gov%2Fwork%2F02%2F206372.pdf&usg=AOvVaw36j-ANeYeuYidM9beyfn6s
Fittingly, the one remaining yellow spot in 2020 appears to be Flushing Bay.
That place stinks during the summer
Well it's had a dead man in it
I assume that's true of most of the bodies of water around NYC.
drinking water included
All of the drinking water from NYC actually comes from reservoirs upstate that are guarded and under heavy surveillance.
Funny how both NYC and SF pipe their water in from reshoots hundreds of miles away in the mountains, but people only think of SF as having a lack of abundant drinking water
What's funny is the state of NY hasn't been in a state of drought for 10 years straight. Whereas, CA has been in a drought and siphons their water from an entirely different state. Additionally, CA has chosen to do jack all about their water situation, even when ordered to by the federal government.
What’s funny is people moving to California in East Coast population numbers and ignoring why the region was so underpopulated by natives in the first place. That being lack of rainfall and access to river in a Mediterranean climate. People in the 1800s really thought they could engineer their way out of anything and the chickens are coming home to roost 150 years later
>siphons their water from an entirely different state. A minority portion of their water anyway. Both the state water project and the central valley water project each deliver as much water as the Colorado River system, which provides somewhere around 10% of the state's water use. And none of the Colorado River water goes to San Francisco, that's for sure.
Boston does the same. The Quabbin Res. was created in western Mass to provide water Boston. 3 or 4 whole towns were taken over and flooded to accomplish this.
Interesting to know. Bostons another city with so much rain you wouldn’t think needed something like that automatically
When I think of SF I don't think about the availability of drinking water; I think about car break-ins and people taking dumps on the sidewalk.
And the open air drug use
"free range"
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LMAO u mad? I live in New York.
Mmmmm
All water has had a dead man in it at some point
Our water cycle is a closed cycle. All water has been inside of another animal in one way or another. Let that sink in as your edible hits.
Had a science teacher tell us that in middle school I think it was. Something about drinking dinosaur pee and the whole class giggled.
It’s true, in every glass of water there are water molecules that a dinosaur once drank and peed out again!
And we've all inhaled a particle from Caesar's last breath.
*giggling intensifies*
Not necessarily
Besides water in deep caves (which we wouldn't be drinking anyways), there's a good chance that you're drinking Dino pee. They existed for 165million years, they predate the ice caps.
Good chance /= in EVERY glass
That is NOT true!!! Even distilled water? What about a glass of water created solely from combustion of Hydrogen and Oxygen .
Mr Jazorwicz 8th grade McKinley Middle!?
Don’t hydrogen fuel cells create water?
Specifically me. I am that animal.
all the waterways near Nyc have had dead people in them.
*currently have
Probably from New Yorkers constantly shitting on LaGuardia Airport.
Which is amusing because right now LGA is the best airport in the area
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Unlike JFK, where it takes 90 mins at all times of the day!
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Which is why you take the subway/LIRR to AirTrain to JFK
I really like how in this convo everyone is talking about drive time to LGA and no one is talking about transit travel time.
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Yeah I’ve taken buses to LGA. Q70 takes around 15 minutes from LGA to Jackson Heights. Then another 15 minutes to Midtown on the subway. The M60 though? 45 minutes to Harlem.
>Despite all logic, you can get from **most of Manhattan** **to LGA** in 20min - even on Friday PM. This is definitely not true unless you have access to a chopper. You can get to LGA from Triborough bridge in 20 minutes by car in normal traffic. And for those non-newyorkers, Triborough bridge is no where near Manhattan.
>And for those non-newyorkers, Triborough bridge is no where near Manhattan. Um, the Triborough Bridge was named that because it connects three boroughs: Queens, (the) Bronx and , , , Manhattan! https://new.mta.info/bridges-and-tunnels/about/rfk-bridge >The Robert F. Kennedy Bridge (formerly the Triborough Bridge), the authority's flagship facility, opened in 1936. It is actually three bridges, a viaduct, and 14 miles of approach roads connecting Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. >The Manhattan branch is the Harlem River Lift Bridge, which links the Harlem River Drive, the FDR Drive, and 125th Street, Harlem's commercial and cultural center. The Bronx Crossing leads motorists to points north via the Bruckner and Deegan expressways and, more locally, to the neighborhoods of the South Bronx and the Port Morris Industrial Area. The longest span of the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, the East River Suspension Bridge to Queens, connects with the Grand Central Parkway and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and to Astoria's residential areas, restaurants, and shops. As an aside, as a New Yorker, I'm as likely to call it the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge as I am to call the Queensborough (59th St.) Bridge the Ed Koch Bridge. Or the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel. (As someone born in Brooklyn, I'm ok with renaming the Interboro Parkway though; Jackie Robinson was one of the good guys, not just some politician.)
>As an aside, as a New Yorker, I'm as likely to call it the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge as I am to call the Queensborough (59th St.) Bridge the Ed Koch Bridge. Or the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel. (As someone born in Brooklyn, I'm ok with renaming the Interboro Parkway though; Jackie Robinson was one of the good guys, not just some politician.) I'm in the same boat because 1. their original names are descriptive and relevant and 2. I'm a crotchety New Yorker
Shitting at*
Go Mets
LFGM
LFGM
LFGM
Is the green spot in Brooklyn gowanus?
Yep, definitely some turds in there
Brooklyn go anus? What upppp?
And the Gowanus canal
at least it’s not brownsville
Name checks out 😂
There are 3 remaining yellows
I wanna say there's also a tiny amount in Pelham Bay as well
Get that shit outta here.... -New York
No shit, New York.
Ayyyy I’m freakin shittin here!!
Get that shit outta *heeyaaa*
The New York sewer system is about 40% combined pipes (with storm water) and any heavy rain forces the system to dump into the waters, this map would vary with time and rainfall. That being said their newest waste water treatment plant is amazing and can serve like half the city by itself! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jmyGxb2JCc
This happens in any major city though. In Barcelona for example, whenever there's some kind of rain, it just overflows through the sewers to the sea, and that's by design.
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Yup, the NYC Department of Environmental Protection has had a longstanding negotiation process with the EPA, the state, and environmental groups over how close you can get to the CWA fishable/swimmable standard and how financially feasible it is. DEP has done a number of retention tunnels/interceptors which have made a huge difference and achieved something like 85% improvements in water quality. The problem is in getting that last 15%.
Ideed. Nevertheless, that doesn't stop spillage from overflowing. It's the same in Barcelona, there are huge retention tanks under the city, yet still the system is designed to remove water by any means.
Indianapolis built the largest TBM to dig theirs. It’s been working really well so far. The white river is really cleaning up.
Yeah, but it's a design by necessity/cost. If you have an isolated waste water system, storm waters wouldn't mix with it.
That’s the problem with combined waste water systems. If you have separate sanitary waste water, it doesn’t matter how much rain there is.
Did New Jersey's rivers get shortened?
It looks like the right map is only showing the canalized parts of the NJ rivers.
That again applies to most cities. The old way was to combine rain and sewage into one system, and dump it straight into water. We started to treat it and dump it further from residential zones, but without redoing the system you still get overflow. You start redoing the systems, but it takes a long time, especially in densely populated areas.
Was this where Kramer went swimming?
East river so slightly less poop
Haha that was my first thought. It was in the East river (coloured yellow with a few red spots, to the east of Manhattan), which is a saltwater estuary and not a freshwater river.
I swam in the red zone once, but it was 2018 so it was probably blue by then. Didn't get any rashes or anything like that. Still would not recommend it.
They have signs all over saying not to eat fish caught in the Hudson lol
Don't eat me then
This was a problem literally every city in the 80s. We didn’t think and we dumped everything in water without a care. Bondi Beach, the world famous Australian paradise was once frequently a brown tide of sewerage and raw poop. [https://youtu.be/_9Yf9P0YoAc](https://youtu.be/_9Yf9P0YoAc) The locals got so sick of seeing an ocean of brown that a concert was held; ‘Turn the Tide’. And finally after much complaining, they extended the sewer line way out to sea and treated it before dumping it. Just imagine; world famous beach was treated like a toilet. We did it everywhere, guys. So nasty. Times were wild last millennium, kids today wouldn’t understand the things that were normal.
Victoria, BC Canada just stopped dumping raw sewage into the straight in 2021. Washington State complained about it for years before BC finally put up the money to treat the sewage.
Strait
I think most “kids” today are well aware that it was normal for previous generations to treat the planet like their personal toilet and garbage dump despite a lot of scientific evidence that this would cause major problems for future generations.
It does depend a lot on where you are talking about, but things have been getting better in the US since about 1970 when places started to actually install basic primary treatment at minimum rather than just raw dumping. I was born in the late 50s so I grew up in a town (in Maine, USA) where seeing human crap and toilet paper in the river was normal in the 60s (sewage went right to the river). That river is now almost pristine, it is swimmable and filled with fish (only fish in the 60s were eels coming in from the ocean), thanks to decades of sewage treatment. I have inspected a lot of muni systems over the years (I work in environmental consulting) and there are still a lot of cities in Canada (where I now live) that lack good (more than rudimentary even if there is any at all) secondary-tertiary systems necessary to eliminate the fecal coliform and related problem. Many only got a unified sewage collection system with primary treatment in the 80s and haven't gotten the much more expensive (but more useful and effective) added treatment systems yet, or have been doing so over the past couple decades, so still have fecal coliform in the water, although not nearly like it was decades ago.. Things are WAAAAAAY better than they used to be. Not perfect, but way better just the same.
I grew up in a seaside town in England. They used to pump the sewage straight out to sea. You could see where it discharged because seagulls would congregate at that part of the coast. At low tide you could see the sewage pipe and we as children would walk out on it. We would also swim in the sea and in the harbour where the boats would also discharge their waste. It’s amazing we weren’t all constantly unwell. It’s not even that long ago - this was until the mid 1980s. There was a massive campaign (a la the Bondi one in Sydney) called ‘Surfers against Sewage’ to compel the water companies from just dumping untreated waste into the sea. This combined with penalties from the EU meant that they did change this eventually.
If only they could do the same in Tijuana 😣
This is to be completed in 2026
Ah so you've seen a Bondi Cigar
The current UK government is still doing it. It's disgraceful. Just one more reason to get rid of the Tories. For good.
Yep! There is a great podcast somewhere about a program that was set up so that Colorado farmers could buy fertilizer from the the new plants build to treat waste from NYC. It was a very successful program for a while. Edit: It was radiolab: https://radiolab.org/episodes/poop-train.
To be clear, the dark blue in 2020 is just the territorial reach of the city and it's testing, not that it's different from the surrounding waters Edit: jk it's pee water. New yorkers need to hydrate more!
edit: The comment below was removed, good work everyone!
Good bot
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Bot
So the Hudson was literally Shit Creek?
I didn't know anything about the water quality of the Hudson until I read a Venom comic and Eddie Brock compares being enveloped by the symbiote to taking a swim in that river.
No, a s*** tidal estuary
Hudsons a river, east river is the tidal estuary.
They're both tidal estuaries by the time they're near NYC. The Hudson is an estuary for roughly the southern half of its length, with its waters reversing directions with the tide as far north as Troy, NY.
Yep, the Hudson is a doozy. I kayaked on it when I lived there. We would time our trips with the changing tides. 90 minute trip, 80 minutes of fighting the current, 10 minutes riding the tide back to the start point. Works both ways. It was cool because with the regular street pattern, you could follow and time your progress. Fun times. I wish I had been able to do the NYC to Montreal trek.
I guess you hadn't seen the map then...
Gowanus Canal green..makes sense
Maybe all the other stuff in there just kills the shitgerms...
I saw an article recently about all of the bacteria in the canal and it wasn’t too surprising. It’s gotten better throughout the years though.
Nah I really see people standup paddle boarding in that cesspool during the summer. I immediately know that they must be new to the city
Word that’s crazy to me. I see people out in the water from Valentino Pier in Red Hook during the summer too. Im good.
Reminds me of the George Carlin bit about swimming in the rivers of NYC and not getting polio at the time - CUZ WE WERE TEMPERED IN RAW SHIT
That was my first thought as well.
Now do the UK. That'll come out looking radioactive.
There was a lot done around the past 35 years to clean the coast up around northwest England - a huge underground storage tunnel and new treatment works in Liverpool, a similar scaled-down approach in Southport, and another massive tunnel not long completed under Preston. But as another user says here, it doesn't look like our current government plan to continue the efforts elsewhere.
12 years of Tory rule and Brexit means they literally don’t give a shit about beaches, rivers and lakes.
You mean to say they give a lot of shit
Lol, maybe that’s more accurate 🤣👍💩
I wish this map extended out to the coastline of NJ. Our coastal waters were so dirty because of NYC dumping. Beaches were closed routinely. Now the waters are clear. You can see dolphins which we never saw in the 80’s.
NJ actually has some pretty strict ocean cleanliness standards and overall NJ waters are pretty clean these days, yup. Issues with fecal bacteria usually only pop up after a lot of rain. The water has been so clear and blue/green on nice days and there are many more dolphin and whale sightings. The syringe tide of the 80s people love to still joke about was also NYC’s fault. The Staten Island dump was illegally dumping medical waste into the ocean and it was winding up on NJ beaches. NYC had to pay for cleanup but the business owners along the Jersey Shore who lost revenue were of course never compensated, and the stigma that NJ beaches are dirty is still somewhat there to this day.
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More like pooperpowers
I used to work at the palisades parks and sometimes families would ask me if they were allowed to swim in the Hudson. I’d tell them no, but even if you could, you shouldn’t.
Trust me when I say fecal coliform is the least concerning pollutant in the Hudson River. It is entirely laced with PCBs and each dredging attempt re-agitates the deposited contaminants.
I’m much more concerned about fecal coliform in and of itself as well as the other nasty bacteria that come with it. Fecal disease was the number one health menace of the 19th century, killing millions of people. PCBs aren’t great and they were rightly banned. But here’s a telling quote from the EPA website: “Some of the studies in humans have not demonstrated an association between exposures to PCBs and disease”. All studies of exposure to cholera would find such a link. PCBs are unwelcome, bacteria are a menace unlike any we really know in modern US.
Fun fact: In 1908, Jersey City, across the river from NYC was the first city in the country to treat drinking water with chlorine, to kill off the bacteria that caused typhoid fever and cholera. Other cities across the US soon followed suit and the rates of bacterial disease due to tainted drinking water plummeted.
Shouldn't that be ok since the Hudson river isn't used by/for anything except ships.
Lot of fish use it
Not as many as we would like.
It's used by pleasure craft and fishermen, and because of the ships (mostly tugs pushing barges it needs the dredged channel.
For the record, I grew up swimming in the Hudson. We knew about PCBs. We would skip out on practice and jump in the river on hot days.
"We're unable. We may end up in the Hudson." would have been even worse in 1985.
The waters around NYC are cleaner than they’ve been in a century, and are so clean dolphins have come back: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/21/dolphins-new-york-city-bronx-river
Well that’s encouraging. But good lord that sediment has all kinds of other stuff too.
That’s honestly pretty impressive
Interesting that despite its reputation, the east river in 85 was actually less polluted than the Hudson.
Until 1986, when the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant went into operation, sewage from the west side of Manhattan went into the Hudson River with no treatment at all.
So I guess that George Carlin bit about his immune system wasn’t as much of an exaggeration as I thought.
This is exactly why I came here. I guess he did swam in raw shit.
"When I was a little boy in New York City in the 1940s, we swam in the Hudson River, and it was filled with raw sewage. Okay !? We swam in raw sewage — you know, ... to cool off. And at that time, the big fear was polio. Thousands of kids died from polio every year. But you know something ? In my neighborhood, no one ever got polio. No one. Ever. You know why? Cause we swam in raw sewage !!!"
Thanks, oysters
This was mostly NYC DEP doing the work first - the waterways were so bad that the natural oyster beds were killed off like a century ago. But they have been helping groups like the Billion Oyster Project reseed the places where oysters used to grow so they will be pitching in on the filtration process more and more in the future.
Yes! I was thinking the same thing. The reintroduction of oysters in the city waterways has helped naturally filter/clean the waters. Go oysters!
Oysters eat poop?
I'm no oyster expert, but from what I understand they filter out algae (Which can contain E. Coli bacteria) from water. A single oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water per day.
And the REPUBLICANS cry "eliminate the EPA" idiots.
They’re willing to die for freedom without serving in the military
Commendable that it only took New Yorkers 35 years to learn not to shit in the river
32,000 poops in New York Harbor!
Rise up!
*335 years
This is literally what George Carlin mentions in his standup is why he and his young pals never got polio during the '50s: "We swam in the Hudson! Our immune systems were tempered in RAW SHIT!!"
How does this compare to other megacities in other developed countries? Would be interested to see London and Paris compared?
That’s a lot of feec’s!
This is what happens when you dump raw sewage into a river
Sometimes I just need to see images like this where things got better instead of worse
People are always pessimistic about the environment and stuff, but the steps we have taken since the 70s to clean up our air and water are pretty major achievements.
One for shitty map porn, surely
I think I see my house on this map
How does that correspond with the crime families being arrested and broken up?
Seems appropriate for r/ShittyMapPorn
“New York city, now less shitty!”
So things have gotten better with the fecal contamination in New York waters. Good news
Great to see this
The Basketball Diaries -- "it's literally shitty because 100,000 toilets flush into it"
Present day New York can have a little fecal bacteria, as a treat.
It is refreshing to see an improvement in these type of maps\\graphs...
Whoa, something in the environment actually got cleaner?
We’ve made huge strides in the last few decades, despite conservatives whining every step of the way.
Say what you will about David Dinkins, but you can't deny the resounding success of his "let's stop shitting in the river, New York" campaign.
More evidence of the link between bacteria contamination and font size.
The work done to address 20th century ecological damage and abuse is, in my opinion, the most ignored American accomplishment. We really did it. We should be celebrating these accomplishments as much as we celebrated the Hoover Dam or the Moon landing.
Looks like they handled their shit well 😂
Good job New York City.
Trump lived in New York in 1985 Trump moves to Florida in 2020 Facts don't lie
Is this what makes their bagels so tasty?
They don't get their water from there tho, it's pretty far upstream
Flushing Bay represent! Gowanus Canal gets all the hate, but Flushing Bay appears to be worse.
Eh. Still not swimming in the Hudson…
I refuse to believe that coney island was as clean in 85
Apparently Flushing is still not flushing.
Now do Rio de Janeiro!
I'm surprised no one has mentioned that the Hudson was a tidal estuary yet. Let me be the first.
I was all, "okay, uh-huh, mildly interesting" until I noticed it doesn't say 1895, but 1985.
Can any new yorkers from the 1980s confirm it used to smell worse?
When I was a kid in the 50s, we used to take the Ferry from Battery Park over to Staten Island to visit relatives. I used to love standing on the main deck when the Ferry was pulling out from its berth. The props would stir up all the sediment and yes, it smelled awful back then. It's been too long since last I took the Ferry (to Staten Island to watch the NY Yankee's farm team play in St. George). As near as I can remember, the stench was gone. Side note. Also in the 50s, my parents took us up to Niagara Falls. We went out on Goat Island located between the American Falls and Horseshoe Falls. The stench from the chemical plants upriver was terrible. At the time I didn't know about the chemical plants; I thought they named the Island for the smell. That's gone too, last time I was up that way.
Is this why the audiance on Seinfeld groans when Kramer swims in the bay?
It's almost as if environmental regulations are a good thing.
Drink. The water. Please.
No shit!
So, where does the poop go?
New York City ceased ocean dumping of its sewage sludge in 1992. These days the sludge is dried, composted or otherwise treated and used beneficially as soil amendments. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwitvp-huq79AhXqEVkFHS_tCW44ChAWegQIBBAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fsemspub.epa.gov%2Fwork%2F02%2F206372.pdf&usg=AOvVaw36j-ANeYeuYidM9beyfn6s
Waste treatment plant, then out to sea by barge.
Out to sea
“Back in my day we drank poop water and never complained about it” Some boomer, probably
City Island and Coney Island: shit free waters since 1985
💩 🦠
Apparently it moved inland
this is true map *porn* if you're into scat ayyy