NEW YORK—A roughshod industrial section of Newtown Creek in East Williamsburg just off a busy road rumbling with trucks and heavy rigs was the site of a strange discovery last week. An environmental patrol boat came across a neon green substance gushing out of a sewer drain, right into the waters of the creek—the official border between Brooklyn and Queens.
The patrol boat’s captain, John Lipscomb, was navigating through the waters for the environmental protection organization Riverkeeper. Lipscomb and several other eyewitnesses saw the water practically glowing green, but nobody knew exactly what had happened.
The green substance turned out to be a harmless dye used by the city’s Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) to test pipes. The agency regularly flushes the neon-green dye through plumbing to help identify where sanitary wastewater pipes are improperly (and often illegally) connected to storm sewer lines.
According to the agency, there are 7,500 miles of sewers throughout New York City.
DEP records of sewer pipe violators in the vicinity show that several nearby businesses were cited as recently as 2009.
According to a city worker who was at the scene when the dye was running into the creek, the green pool caused a ruckus among nearby construction workers.
“Everyone was looking down the pipes, trying to figure out what was going on—but it’s nothing, it’s like if you pour Kool-Aid down the drain,” said the worker, who was wearing a Dept. of Transportation vest but refused to identify himself or his agency. “The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.”
Part of what led to the confusion seems to be Newtown Creek’s notoriously polluted state. Patrol boat Captain Lipscomb said on his patrol alone, he had spent almost an hour untangling from a large piece of plastic that caught in his boat’s propeller. He said such delays are typical of his patrols in the area.
Later in the week, a close up view of the creek by Epoch Times revealed murky, dark water and several pieces of easily visible floating trash.
Though part of the purpose of Lipscomb’s bi-monthly patrols are to look for environmental threats to report—fluorescent green water was a first.
“The core mission is to just go look, and observe, and be a deterrent [for environmental violations],” said Lipscomb, who described the substance in Newtown Creek “extraordinarily bright green.”
He said it was the first time he had seen the green dye in Newtown Creek after running patrols twice a month there since 2002. He described the green color as covering roughly the size of a football field, and reported it to state and city environmental monitoring bodies.
Later, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection confirmed city workers were testing the crossed pipe connections. A spokesman for the department said that the green liquid is “totally harmless.”
