The Water Log

Our Town downtown
October 23, 2006

An ever-renewable resource is about to be tapped

One day in the not-so-far future when you boot up your computer, its screen may be brightened by power that comes from one of the darkest places in this city: the murky, mucky bed of the East River.
High tide in the East River, a channel between the Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean, is particularly strong, reaching over five knots or almost six miles per hour, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It’s said that if you jump in you’ll be at the Statue of Liberty in no time. Last week, the drowned body of a 16-year-old boy who went into the water near Pike Slip was found near Pier 17.
Verdant Power is determined to tap into that force by installing an approximately 37-acre field of turbines between Roosevelt Island and Queens that will extend from the Roosevelt Island Bridge to the northern tip of Roosevelt Island. The field will have three to four hundred turbines and will generate 10 megawatts, enough to power about 8,000 homes.
The 16-foot diameter turbines, which look like underwater windmills, will be bolted to steel pipes filled with mortar and socketed to rock in the riverbed, and will swivel with the tide. Each turbine will have three blades which will rotate at the speed of the water, between 32 and 35 revolutions per minute, which the company claims is slow enough to avoid harming fish passing through the turbine field.
Fish safety has been the subject of a three-year discussion between Verdant Power, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and a handful of local environmental groups. The result of the back-and-forth is that Verdant Power has just finished installing two million dollars’ worth of fish surveillance equipment in the river.
Because the water is extremely cloudy, two different fish monitoring systems will be used in lieu of cameras: hydroacoustic transducers, which uses the echoes from when fish swim through an acoustic beam, and a high-definition sonar system called Didson, used specifically to observe and count fish in turbid conditions.
“We think it’s overkill,” said Trey Taylor, president of Verdant Power, but “we’re anxious to get this right.” Taylor believes that the surveillance equipment will provide empirical evidence that the slow-moving, blunt-edged turbines do no harm to the fish or the environment. If that can be proven, it will pave the way not only for the Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy project, but for four or five other potential sites in the tri-state area as well.
The going is slow because this field of free-flow turbines is the first of its kind. Similar systems from England to Scotland have relied on one massive energy-generating unit or a dam.
In 2003 Verdant Power tested a single turbine, suspended in the East River from a barge, for about five weeks. Its next step is to install six more – first two, then an additional four. Because the project is experimental, the company was granted permission to install its “six-pack” without obtaining a full hydropower license, but it will have to apply for a license based on data collected from the six-pack before going ahead with the full turbine field.
Drilling is scheduled to begin next week, and the first two turbines should be installed the week of November 6. Once the state Department of Environmental Conservation gives the thumbs up, another four turbines will go in, completing the “six-pack.”
Verdant Power seems to be good at making partners of potential adversaries. The company gave Riverkeeper access to its state-of-the-art equipment and asked the group to help monitor fish traffic. Riverkeeper was one of four environmental groups that said the company had not done enough research assessing the project’s environmental impact.
Verdant Power is also in close communication with Con Edison, because the six-pack will be supplying power to two Con Ed customers: a Gristedes supermarket and the Motorgate Parking Garage, both located on Roosevelt Island near the on-shore control room connected to the six-pack via cables.
When the tide gets strong, Verdant Power will take over from Con Ed as power supplier to the garage and grocery store. The companies will use computerized communications to transition seamlessly. “You won’t even see the lights flicker,” says Taylor.
Roosevelt Island maintenance workers park and plug in their battery-powered golf cart-like vehicles in the Motorgate garage. Taylor seems tickled to point out that an emissions-free power source will be charging emissions-free vehicles.
Verdant Power has spent $3 million to date on this project, and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority has kicked in $2 million. The final price tag will probably be around $20 million, says Taylor, and the date of completion, 2008.
The next step for Verdant Power is to get costs down from well over $4000 per kilowatt to between $2000 and $2500 per kilowatt “from water to wire.”
One priceless advantage of locally-produced power is that it doesn’t have to go through the overloaded power grid, which is susceptible to blackouts and terrorist attacks. The state requires that eighty percent of the city’s forecasted peak load be home-grown. In 2003, a task force of power companies and government agencies projected that in order to meet that requirement, the city would need to generate 3780 more kilowatts by 2008. The turbine field will produce ten thousand kilowatts.
“During the next blackout,” says Taylor, “Roosevelt Island will be all lit up.”



--By Becca Tucker

Posted by Tucker at 1:38 PM | Permalink | Comments

Our Town downtown
October 2, 2006

When wind and tide conspire, a 10-foot rowboat fights to break even

Bronya Weinberg pulls two oars through the choppy Hudson with all the might her petite body can muster. The fiberglass dinghy starts forward, then slows until the next stroke drags it northward again. Soline McLain, Weinberg’s rowing partner, keeps the course using a harness and yoke the two have rigged up to the rudder. For twenty minutes Weinberg keeps it up, face glistening and triceps straining, while McLain holds due north, altering course to northwest every few minutes to avoid being swamped by wakes from ocean liners.
The ten-by-four-foot dinghy gets frequent visits from concerned coastguards because it’s by far the smallest vessel on the water. But “they like our life jackets,” says Weinberg, and “they like that we’re not far from home.”
“Home” is Pier 40, located where West Houston Street meets the Hudson River. When McLain turns the boat back toward the pier so they can switch rowers in the quieter waters, they are still exactly parallel with Pier 40. Like a high school physics text book problem with a too-neat answer, the fat little boat’s forward momentum has been completely negated by the pull from the south-running tide and the push from the wind, coming from north-northwest at ten miles an hour.
Weinberg and McLain expected this: Weinberg had copied the expected hour-by-hour levels of the tide onto a pink index card, along with the direction and strength of the wind and the time of sunset (to make sure they’d be back before dark). They knew the tide would be at its strongest at five in the afternoon, when the water from lakes and mountains to the north would be rushing down to the ocean. Still, they had to get their daily workout in between four, when McLain, a 26-year-old paralegal at a small law firm, was able to slip away from work, and 6:49 p.m., when the sun would set. What’s more, they relish the struggle with the elements.
In an only-in-New-York moment, Weinberg – who gives her age as “over 40” – and McLain struck up a friendship a year and a half ago when they met through Floating the Apple, a nonprofit with a boathouse at Pier 40 that takes people out rowing, and discovered that in addition to an interest in rowing, they shared a passion for aerial dancing.
Weinberg had been an aerial dancer for thirty-five years, specializing in the Spanish Web. She once “danced up and down the S.S. Peking,” she says, spinning around as high as 60 feet above the deck, attached to the rope only by her own limbs. McLain, who studied English and Anglo Saxon languages and rowed crew at Oxford, had just gotten into aerial dancing on a fixed trapeze through her roommate.
The two started rowing together on a little skiff up in Nyack that had been sitting unused on land for years. They converted it from a sailboat, named it the Cape Dames, and outfitted their rig with thole pins and thole rings in lieu of oarlocks, fastened collars onto two plastic oars so that they wouldn’t slip, and fashioned a harness and yoke which would make it easier for the coxswain to control the rudder.
Two months ago their boat was delivered to the 79th Street Boat Basin. They got it to the dock on Pier 40 in fifty minutes, and their daily routine of rowing for as many hours as possible began. These sessions are serious – equipment onboard includes a strobe light, radio, and miniature fog horn in an aerosol can – and they are also seriously chatty. The two women have a million things to talk about, like the case McLain is working on, which coastguards are cutest, and their joint ambitions, of which they have many.
One of their plans, still in the “conceptual stage,” is an aerial dance performance that would take place in a boat, with audiences looking down from various bridges. “Imagine seeing a boat come by with aerial dancers,” says Weinberg, who considers it the most natural idea in the world for a performance piece.
Another of their plans – to circumnavigate the island of Manhattan – is less nebulous. In fact, they’ve both done it a handful of times in eight-person boats through Floating the Apple, but this was to be just the two of them in the little boat they built. McLain wrote up a press release peppered with exclamation points announcing that their “Power Row” would take place on Saturday, September 23.
At 7 a.m. on that gray morning, the two set out from Pier 40 on what they hoped would be a five-hour, twenty-six mile trip. They rowed south against tide and wind, past the financial district, almost to the tip of the island. The wind from the south kept getting stronger until the women were struggling just to keep from being pushed backwards. What’s more, the wind speed was supposed to double from nine or 10 miles an hour to nearly twenty by the afternoon. Tired and disappointed, the Cape Dames turned back – but so did the much sturdier Floating the Apple boats on the same mission, which made them feel better.

-- Becca Tucker

Posted by Tucker at 1:36 PM | Permalink | Comments

Our Town downtown
October 16, 2006

From your toilet to the Hudson

Sewage overflow is a phenomenon we’re all too familiar with.
You flush the toilet. Instead of going down, the water level begins to rise. In horror you watch the porcelain bowl fill, hoping beyond hope that the water will recede. The contents circle the bowl, bumping against the lip, looking for a way out. You step back, helpless. Then it happens: water rushes under the toilet seat, and the current carries the bowl’s contents over the seat and onto the floor. You flee the bathroom and jam rolled up towels under the door.
What most New Yorkers don’t know is that’s what happens in our sewer system every time we have a heavy rain. Approximately seventy times a year, storm water fills our sewage pipes, and the system overflows directly into our waterways, raw sewage and all, through 450 combined sewer outfalls around the city. In an average year, about 27 billion gallons of untreated waste water pour through those outfalls into the city’s surface waters, according to Riverkeeper, an environmental advocacy group.
If this system seems incredibly archaic, it is. Construction of our combined sewers began in 1850, before sewer treatment plants existed, when dumping untreated sewage into the river was considered the proper method of disposal. Now the 746 communities around the country that use combined sewers have to figure out how to improve a system built for another era – and shutting down the system for repair is not an option.
The toxic overflow, which carries bacteria and viruses, pesticides, fertilizers, oils, litter and sediment into the rivers encircling Manhattan, is the major contaminant preventing them from being “swimmable,” an ambiguous term whose definition varies from one organization to the next.
A map released by the New York City Department of Environmental Conservation in 2000 as part of its “Urban Watershed Use and Standards Attainment Project” classifies the waters bordering Manhattan as appropriate for fishing, but not for bathing, while the Hudson River north of Manhattan is classified as okay for bathing, as are the waters off the southern shorelines of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.
Even so, the contamination of our waterways has been reduced ten-fold in the past thirty years, according to the Hudson River Foundation’s Health of the Harbor Report. “This decrease,” the report states, “is due mainly to… a strict permitting system for the discharge of these chemicals into our waterways, and improved sewage treatment.”
And it’s got to keep getting better, says the state. A 1994 state mandate orders all cities that use combined sewage systems to establish nine short-term measures, including ensuring that nothing is flowing into the water during dry weather, culling floating matter out of the water, and alerting the public of where the outfalls are, presumably so we can avoid swimming in raw sewage.
The city Department of Environmental Protection now has twenty-three floating barriers and 130,000 catch basins to pick up debris, which is then removed by skimmer vessels, and it has three boats that monitor the outflows on the shoreline. Construction is underway on three massive new tanks that will hold excess sewer outfall until it can be treated, at a cost of $757 million, and three more are being planned. Some of the projects are already done; others, like a storage facility for combined sewer overflow at Newtown Creek, are not scheduled to begin until 2015.
But the required public notification system, if it exists at all, leaves a lot to be desired. Take, for instance, three Hispanic fishermen on the East River esplanade a few blocks above South Street Seaport. They fish most nice days, they say, and they catch blue crabs and all sorts of fish, including bass and perch.
“What kind you want?” one fisherman asks.
Often, they throw the fish back, but sometimes they’ll clean and eat them.
“It’s clean,” the most talkative of the three fishermen asserts. “There’s no more raw sewage coming in here.” He motions upriver. “Not like before.”
According to the State Department of Health, it’s okay to eat the fish you catch in the New York City area, with the exceptions, varying from area to area, of certain types of catfish, eel, shad, perch, and the green “mustard” in lobsters and crabs. It is, however, dangerous to eat more than one river-caught meal a week, the department warns, because they contain contaminants that can build up in your body and, in worst-case scenarios, cause cancer and birth defects. It’s also a bad idea for women of childbearing age or children under 15 to be eating fish from the river at all.
The fishermen don’t know about those warnings. They have no idea they are standing on top of an outflow, or that there are dozens more to their north and south.
In addition to nine short-term stop-gap measures, the city is required by the state to develop a long-term plan to deal with its combined sewer overflows. According to Mark Klein, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, the department is “fifty percent of the way through the long-term plan.” A PowerPoint presentation given at a recent meeting of the Citizens Advisory Committee of the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program listed the city’s long-term goals, whuch include the vague pledge to “reconcile water quality standards to highest reasonably attainable uses.”
Does that mean we’ll be able to swim in our rivers? Anyone?

-- Becca Tucker

Posted by Tucker at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Comments

Our Town downtown
October 9, 2006

You still can’t eat ‘em, but the oysters in our rivers are good for us

Next time you’re walking along the Hudson or East River, take a deep breath. On these between-seasons days when it’s warm in the sun and cool in the shade, the wind coming off the water sometimes carries a brackish scent that smells almost balmy. It may not compare to the sweet breeze the Dutch wrote of when they landed in the New Netherlands in the early seventeenth century, but it’s startling nonetheless to be reminded that nature surrounds us even here.

New Yorkers are used to the idea that we’ve killed everything in our rivers with industrial and human waste. We no longer rely on the shipping or fishing industries and we’ve got twenty bridges and dozens of subway lines crossing over and under the river and connecting us to every borough, Roosevelt Island, Ward’s Island and Jersey. Our rivers have lost their significant and we’ve lost interest.

“Of the many odd things about New Yorkers, there is this,” writes Mark Kurlansky in the preface to his latest work of nonfiction, “The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell.” “How is it that a people living in the world’s greatest port, a city with no neighborhood that is far from the waterfront, a city whose location was chosen because of the sea, where the great cargo ships and tankers, mighty little tugs, yachts, and harbor patrol boats glide by, has lost all connection with the sea, almost forgotten that the sea is there?”

Kurlansky tackled the question in his book, through the lens of the decline and fall of New York’s once-great oyster industry, and he addressed it again at a lecture last week at the Museum of the City of New York.

The story of the fouling of our rivers begins in 1609 when Henry Hudson sailed into New York Harbor on a Dutch vessel and thought maybe the river that would take his name was the mouth of a passage to China. They settled in and immediately began commercial relations with the Native Americans.

Even back then, “New York was always New York, and New Yorkers were always New Yorkers,” quipped Kurlansky. He was referring not only to the early settlers’ love of a good deal and inclination for investing in real estate, but also to the tendency of this island’s natives to create untenable situations and then deal with them when they become unavoidable rather than planning in advance.

Aside from slaughtering a whole village of Native Americans, the first notable instance of our lack of foresight was the wall that Peter Stuyvesant – a gruff, irritating guy who reminds Kurlansky of “a seventeenth-century Rudy Giuliani” – built on what is now Wall Street to protect the colony from invasion by the British. First of all, it was a stupid place to build a wall because it didn’t guard against invasion from the sea (the British would eventually take the city without firing a single shot). But the immediate effect of the wall, which separated the village from a picturesque lake called the Collect, was that people could no longer see the lake and so they immediately forgot about their former favorite picnic site and started dumping their garbage – including sewage and animal carcasses – over the wall. The place started to stink and townspeople started getting sick, which worried lawmakers a little bit, but certainly no one had the foresight to realize or care that their stinking pile of shit was running straight into the rivers.

“No one thought about the fact that these ditches ran into the Hudson River and the East River, which flowed over oyster beds,” Kurlansky wrote. “It was the rivers of the New York area that gave the oyster beds their life, and in time the rivers would kill them.”

The out of sight, out of mind mentality was so engrained that it was not until 1987 that the city passed a law against dumping sewage in the harbor. By then, the last of the oyster beds that once produced half the world’s oysters had long been contaminated by bacteria and shut down by the city.

But somehow, even when the Gowanus Canal was releasing black bubbles the size of basketballs and fish from the bay were found laced with PCBs and their fins were falling off, the thick-shelled oysters never fully disappeared from our rivers. Diseased, yes; extinct, no.

Today there are groups like Baykeeper and Riverwatch that are actually growing oyster gardens on private piers and then moving the oysters to existing oyster reefs. They’re not edible and won’t be for a long time, but they’re the best thing in the world for the water because they filter and clean the water, so much so that one environmentalist, quoted in “The Big Oyster,” estimates that “if the oysters were here in the numbers they used to be, they would clear the water in the harbor in a few days.”

It’s a pleasant daydream, but the reality is that there are probably too many of us doing too much polluting to re-create an environment in which juicy, edible oysters can thrive and reproduce. “Perhaps it is not just unnatural but a threat to nature,” wrote Kurlinsky of Manhattan. “There’s an argument to be made,” he added the other night, “that it’s not exactly sane to park eight million people on the estuary of a river.”

-- Becca Tucker

Posted by Tucker at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments