After reading a part of Joseph Alexiou book about the whale and actually having him come in was a great opportunity as he informed us a lot of the past of the Gowanus and how hundreds of years of development has lead up to the Gowanus we know now. What I found most interesting was some of the sources of the pollution and how has this pollution still deeply embedded within the Gowanus. And will effect the future of the Gowanus in terms of development and cleanup.
During the peak of the industrial era the Gowanus had many plans to be this amazing place of opportunity and to bring in development of housing and all types of businesses. As many large industrial and plants moved into the area for easy access of movement of material thanks to the canal. We found that although the plants gave the area activity it was heavily polluting the area. Of course at the time many regulations of waste dumping or disposal of toxic material were not properly handled by the city.
As a result raw sewage was essentially pumped and dumped into the canal without being rerouted to some treatment plant which is why today we still see drains that bring sewage still directly into the canal and this was pretty much due to the fact that it would cost significantly more for them to have made separate pipes for rainwater and sewage so it was merged. Also many of the industrial buildings just dumped the waste into the ground or into the canal. For example factories that produced gas they had a process of coal carbonization where the coal was heated and the gas was collected what was left was a tar substance in which they merely dumped into the surrounding area or into the canal because of lack of regulation at the time and not to mention it would cost way more for them to properly ship the matter out of the area.
The issue now is the tar is in the ground with toxic oils most people would say well it wouldn’t matter because it’s far underground however the issue is that these material are still very toxic and as people develop some of these toxic waste may be brought to the surface and inhaled many of these pollution contain harmful chemicals and are carcinogens which can cause many ailments such as cancer. Also it is highly possible due that these toxic material may also seep into the drains which go straight into the canal. The plans to remove this toxic layer of material is pretty difficult the plan to create a composite layer which cannot be defeated by the toxic layer is very difficulty and includes various material absorb and block the toxic layer from seeping through.
I found that the pollution despite being hundreds of years old and the plans that created the infrastructure of the Gowanus still affect us today and will continue to affect us in the future. However the plans to remove the polluted layers in the canal is very promising and I can see that it will bring success in bringing the Gowanus one step closer to being pollution free in the future.
