Opinions & Observations: Gowanus Rezoning DEIS is a propaganda statement obscuring massive health and safety impacts on our community
The Gowanus Canal, once a crystal-clear creek named after Chief Gowanes, has long served as a dumping ground for toxic chemicals and other hazardous pollutants. In 2010, this inky, noisome waterway was finally designated an EPA Superfund site. Although clean-up and containment efforts have only just begun this past November (and are slated to continue for at least a decade), private equity backed corporate developers are already seeking to transform this ancient estuary basin with the construction of luxury apartment towers, loading vast new environmental burdens on top of a century of unaddressed environmental harm. The de Blasio Administration is working to deliver for these developers over the will of the community and despite grave concerns voiced by an EPA engineer and scientists studying sea level rise and flooding, by imposing an 80-block rezoning that would bring 20,000+ new residents into a FEMA Flood Zone A.
On April 19th, the Department of City Planning finally released a draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the proposed Gowanus rezoning. The unveiling of this document followed a decade of city government and community debate over the environmental impacts of building housing on deeply polluted soil along the banks of a floodplain next to a toxic waterway—a decade when we saw the sea submerge this same community in 12-feet of ocean water during Hurricane Sandy; a decade that saw increasingly intense rainstorms; a decade when world temperatures hit new highs, pushing up sea levels.
Sadly, the City’s DEIS is deeply flawed and flagrantly inadequate, filled with 1,000 pages of contradictions and evasive, faulty analysis that lead to dangerously convenient conclusions. One particularly egregious example is its utter failure to assess the cumulative impacts of development on the shared sewershed; instead of addressing overcapacity, the City attempts to hide the strain on the aging system by relying primarily on “dry-weather analysis” in its projections, leading to the preposterous conclusion that 20,000+ new toilet flushers “are not projected to affect CSO discharges or water quality in the Gowanus Canal,” which as of this writing, continues to have no limits on the amount of pathogen that can be dumped into its waters. The City is itself the worst active polluter, diverting more than 360 million gallons of raw sewage and overflow into the Canal annually.