One of my biggest concerns about the giant Atlantic Yards project is sewage. Yes, sewage. Let me tell you why. Brooklyn's sewage system is way below the level needed for the current population. The sewage system is being updated to some degree, but is it keeping pace with the growth in population? My personal, awful experience has been that Brooklyn's sewage system is grossly overtaxed as it is. My wife and I moved to Park Slope about 6 years ago. We could barely afford it and find it hard to afford now as maintenence and other costs have climbed, but we wanted a good school for my step-daughter and the neighborhood was perfect for that. So, we found a good deal and took the plunge. We bought a ground floor apartment. For years our wonderful, expensive building in a prime neighborhood as been plagued with massive, dramatic and damaging sewage backups every time there is a heavy rain after a dry spell. Simply put, the sudden flood of rainwater into the sewage system is more than the system can handle and it backs up. It has fountained from under the toilet, fountained up from the bathtub drain, ran in through the access ports in the floor...flooded our apartment to a depth of a few inches. At times the moisture under our floor never dried up from the frequent sewage backups, leading to a black mold problem in our apartment. The building explored all solutions to the problem. The city upgraded the sewers a few blocks away a couple of years after we moved in, but it made no difference for us. It turns out that each building has to solve the problem itself. The only solution for a building is to install expensive pumps that FORCE the sewage into the system. My building finally did that, solving the problem and is now step by step fixing the years of damage to our apartment. The last sewage backup we had occurred when my wife was pregnant with our son. You can imagine our horror all along, but particularly while my wife was pregnant. I wish this situation on no one. Problem is, for each building that installs the pumps, that just makes matters worse for ALL the buildings downstream. You can imagine that the poorest neighborhoods will be least able to afford the pumps, so they will be worst hit by the insufficient sewage system. When I first heard about the MASSIVE development planned by Ratner right in the heart of Brooklyn, I immediately wondered, "what about the sewage??" An arena and 17 sky scrapers plopped down right in the middle of Brooklyn's brownstones is going to create a large amount of sewage. I certainly assume that Ratner's Atlantic Yards project will certainly install sufficient sewage system to handle the sewage at their end. But...what about the neighborhoods downstream? Will the city simply continue the policy of each building dealing with the problem on it's own? I can't imagine that Brooklyn, already overwhelmed with its own sewage, is ready for Ratner's project. Traffic is already a problem. What about the increased traffic? Sewage is already a problem. What happens with the wave of new sewage? I have not heard anything but vague assurances from the city and from Ratner that suggests that these issues are being taken seriously. This, on top of the corruption that has accompanied the project and the threatened misuse of eminent domain, is why I am so against it. I am not alone. The March 20th Park Slope Courier reports:

...mitigating the expected increase of raw sewage stemming from the proposed Atlantic Yards project remains, along with the increased traffic, a nuts-and-bolts issue to be addressed for the project to proceed... ...the Atlantic Yards project, which will include a 19,000-seat arena and up to 7,000 units of housing, will sorely [the] treatment plant and the Gowanus Canal. Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) spokesperson Ian Michaels testified that developers currently simply connect to the city's sewage system. The [treatment] plant operates well below capacity on dry-weather days, but it is completely overwhelmed when it rains, Michaels says..."

Ummm...yeah. I could have told them that!!!! The article continues to decribe the gobs of raw sewage already in the Gowanus Canal, which runs through residential areas. Current DEP plans are to reduce the sewage in the canal by 20%...but that doesn't really take into account the increased sewage from the Atlantic Yards project. The Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), which is supposed to oversee development projects, assures us that the Atlantic Yards plan addresses all potential impacts of the project. But since, as Submitted by mole333 on 19 March 2006 - 9:33pm.
Community | Corruption | Economics | Sanitation | Urban Development | Brooklyn