Fishing for Pollution on the Bronx River
Citizen Science: Part of an ongoing series about everyday people adding to our knowledge of the world around us.
Tori Swedin cuts the motor on her dinghy. Aside from a few mallards perched near the water's edge, New York City's Bronx River is empty this afternoon. It's quiet as Swedin leans over the side of the boat and dips her French-tipped nails into the murk. She fills a series of tubes and glass vials, then hands them to her mentor, Addy Guance.
Their water thermometer reads 52 degrees Fahrenheit, but neither Swedin nor Guance look cold. They're bundled into thick tops and wearing work boots, with life jackets adding an extra layer of insulation. Swedin works quickly, though, collecting water samples that will be used to measure oxygen levels and sediment suspended near the river's surface.
At 19, Swedin (in photo, right) is a program assistant and one of Guance's former students at Rocking the Boat, a nonprofit environmental group. It's located in Hunts Point, an industrial section of the South Bronx. Unemployment in the neighborhood is rampant, the crime rate is among the highest in New York, and more than half the population lives below the poverty line.
In Hunts Point, you won't find many kids going fishing or skipping stones after school -- most of the waterfront property here belongs to expressways, commuter rails, and waste transfer stations. Many of the students at Rocking the Boat barely knew the river existed until they signed up for the program, which conducts workshops for local teens, teaching them to row, build boats, and study the river's ecology. Guance has been the group's on-the-water instructor for 10 years.
But this backyard ecology program does more than just provide an after-school educational experience. It's a way to keep track of the health of the river itself -- and through that, the health of the community and the entire city. The readings that Swedin and her mentor take this afternoon will go to the Bronx River Alliance, which has kept records on the condition of the river since 2001. The students at Rocking the Boat collect samples twice a week, and if they find anything fishy -- a strange smell or sheen or a toxin in the water -- the alliance will report it to the city's parks department or various environmental agencies.
As collectors of pollution, rivers are among the best barometers of the environmental health of a city -- or the countryside, for that matter. The charts kept by the Bronx teens at Rocking the Boat show evidence of waste from the cement factories and sewage treatment plants that line the riverbanks. But as the students are discovering, refuse also flows into the river from street grates far across town. As in nearly 800 other municipalities across the country, New York City's rainwater runoff, household sewage, and industrial wastewater all run through the same pipes. And in a city as dense as New York, it only takes a tenth of an inch of rainfall for these pipes to back up and spew their grimy load directly into local waterways.
The result is more than 27 billion gallons of raw sewage and polluted storm water pouring into New York Harbor each year, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Under the Clean Water Act (the federal law that governs pollution in our streams, lakes and estuaries), cities and towns with combined sewer systems are required to report overflows. But the law doesn't require them to seek out and find these discharges, says Nancy Stoner, a former co-director of NRDC's water program who is now the deputy assistant administrator for water at the Environmental Protection Agency. As a result, officials tend to ignore the problem, Stoner says, rather than investing in monitoring systems that would detect water pollution.
New York City officials have estimated that it would take a minimum of $58 billion to prevent routine sewage overflows -- money they don't have. But as programs such as Rocking the Boat proliferate across the country, giving average citizens a glimpse at what's going on in their waterways, cities are starting to feel more pressure to do something. A recent New York Times series on widespread drinking water pollution, which has been documented by government agencies but allowed to continue without penalty, is leading to questions on Capitol Hill and elsewhere about the need for tougher enforcement of clean water laws.
It's not that hard to find problems if you look for them. On this particular day on the Bronx River, Guance and Swedin are seeking signs of an oil spill that took place about 12 miles upstream. In the early morning on November 4, a Con Edison power station in the Dunwoodie section of Yonkers went up in flames. The fire consumed a tank containing 30,000 gallons of transformer fluid, a mineral oil used for electrical insulation and cooling.
About half of the oil either burned up in the fire or bled into the Bronx River via storm sewers, says Thomas Panzone, a spokesman for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. A cleanup crew from Con Edison then spent three weeks working on the river, sopping up residual oil and raking up contaminated leaves floating on the surface. Panzone estimated that the oil had traveled about seven miles downstream.
But Guance worries that the spill made it farther than that, into her territory. Shortly after she heard about it, a herring washed ashore in Hunts Point. Guance wondered if the spill was to blame. "It could have just been me speculating, but it's a little too coincidental," she says.
Out on the boat, while Swedin collects the water samples, Guance picks up her clipboard and starts recording the day's data. "Weather, dense cloud cover. Algal blooms -- do you see any algal blooms?"
Swedin shakes her head no. An algal bloom could be a sign of contamination, sometimes a result of run-off that raises the river's nitrate levels, which in turn feeds an overgrowth of algae.
"Sometimes you can see it with your eyes, some sticky stuff coming out of the water," Guance says. It happened just last summer, she adds, when a brown tide washed over the river and the oxygen levels collapsed a short distance from a fertilizer plant in Hunts Point.
Although Guance, 31, can recall plenty of algal blooms and pH spikes in her decade with Rocking the Boat, she says the Bronx River has come a long way. Since 2001, groups like hers have pulled auto parts and appliances out of the river by the tens of thousands. They've turned an old concrete plant into a park, successfully introduced a school of herring into the river, and created colonies of filter-feeding oysters along the banks to help clean out the toxins.
"I remember having to dodge cars," Guance says, referring to the junked autos that used to block her way as she paddled downstream. "And washing machines and stoves."
Today in Hunts Point, Guance's figures are checking out OK. The pH meter reads 7.6 -- just slightly basic. The river's plants and fish are still breathing. The oil spill hasn't done the kind of damage that she feared.
"It's a little hard to swallow sometimes," Guance says. "For something like that to happen, you're taking three steps forward and two steps back."
But Linda Cox, executive director of the Bronx River Alliance, says just the fact that more people are aware of the river and looking out for pollution represents major progress.
"The more eyes on the river, the better," she says. "It helps us build up a sense of what's happening over time. Things flow to rivers. They'll show you the evidence of where mistakes have happened."
Though Guance is modest about her role, Cox says it is people like her, with her test tubes and her bi-weekly boat rides, who are keeping watch on the polluters upstream and helping to reclaim the river as part of their community.
Out on the water, a call comes over the radio. Guance holds it to her ear and listens to the voice over the speaker. "There's a tug coming towards us," she says, and points a finger south. "We need to get back."
Swedin starts the dinghy's motor and turns upstream.
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