A creek in a Staten Island park turned green on Wednesday. Very, very green.
Visitors to Clove Lakes Park compared it to the Chicago River on St. Patrick’s Day, when kelly-green dye tints the waterway to mark the holiday. But this was no celebration.
The green hue came courtesy of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. Workers from the agency had put green dye in the park’s toilets to see if the waste from users of the restroom was sloshing into the creek — as long had been suspected. The result of the test was unmistakable. As far as the eye could see, the creek had turned green, with the dye coloring the sewage in what’s known as a flush test.
“They are allowing poop in our public ponds and lakes,” said Estefania Brambila, 32, who works for nonprofits and was walking her dogs in the park when she came across the emerald stream. “I figured it was already getting fixed, but clearly not. This is horrifying.”
Jennyfer Gomez, 27, a graduate student who jogs in the park, said that she was worried about the ducks and turtles who made the waterways their home.
The extent of the contamination is still murky, but one matter is clear: Sewage is infiltrating at least one stream and one lake in Clove Lakes Park, which borders the neighborhoods of Sunnyside and Westerleigh, among others, and is close to the Staten Island Zoo. The toxic situation has been happening for years, according to neighbors who live in the area.
Most of Staten Island processes its waste water and storm water separately. Much of New York City has what is called a combined sewer system, in which storm water and sanitary sewage use the same pipes that then flow into wastewater treatment plants.
On Staten Island, while most storm-water runoff flows into wetlands or waterways, only the sanitary sewage ends up at treatment plants, or is collected from septic tanks.
At least it’s supposed to work that way.
In Clove Lakes Park, facilities have not been updated much since the 1930s, according to a city employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of not being authorized to speak publicly. This means that toilets in one maintenance building on park property were never connected to the sanitary sewer system, much of which expanded throughout the borough after World War II amid a population boom.
The city’s Department of Parks and Recreation said that the waste from the building, which is used only by park workers and not park visitors, ends up in a retention tank. But the city employee said that the sewage, from about a half-dozen toilets, goes directly into a storm drain that empties into a nearby stream, which feeds a lake. One toilet on the premises has a dedicated septic tank, according to the city employee, who added that there was no proof that the tank had been serviced recently or certainty about where it was. On Wednesday, visiting city officials could not find it.
Later that afternoon, workers in vests and hard hats stood around two open manholes near the park facilities and winced as they tried to clear out the green sludge. The stench was fetid. A spokeswoman for the Department of Environmental Protection said that it was up to the city’s Parks Department to connect the toilets to the sanitary sewer system or to expand its septic tanks. After learning about the results of the flush test, the Parks Department said that it immediately discontinued all water use at the building to address the plumbing issues.
The fraught scene on Wednesday attracted a chaotic mix of curious onlookers, maintenance workers in coveralls and representatives from city government wearing windbreakers and carrying clipboards, amid a cluster of trucks, hoses and work equipment. At one point, matters grew heated when a park worker drove a front-end loader toward city officials, telling them that they didn’t belong there.
Ms. Brambila, the dog walker, expressed outrage that Staten Island did not get enough attention or resources from the city.
“I wish that the city would invest resources as much as they do in Central Park and all throughout the other boroughs,” she said. “When it’s the most humid in the summertime, you see foamy, poopy, yellow, brown, disgusting debris.
“It’s nasty, it’s gross, and it smells.”
Hilary Howard is a Times reporter covering how the New York City region is adapting to climate change and other environmental challenges.
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