Ten millions of toxic gunk are hiding in the aquifer under Brooklyn, NY.
From New York Magazine:
The OozeGoing into the history of the area and how the 'blob' came into being:
Ten million gallons of toxic gunk trapped in the Brooklyn aquifer is starting to creep toward the surface. How scary is that?
On a foggy October day in 2002, Basil Seggos first saw the sheen on the surface of the water. He and his colleagues had launched an old wooden-hulled oyster boat from the Dyckman marina in Inwood, and headed south, down the Harlem and East rivers. They were on a mission to document fishing and crabbing spots on the riverfront so that local anglers could be warned not to eat their catch. When Seggos�s boat reached the mouth of Newtown Creek, the finger of water that separates Brooklyn from Queens, they decided to sail into the creek to check out its unnatural landscape�miles of waste-processing plants, gasoline-storage facilities, and abandoned refineries. The boat passed floating auto parts, crumbling bulkheads, and rusting pipes spewing filthy-looking water. Then, about a mile in, Seggos saw it: oil coating the surface of the water from shore to shore and extending upstream for another half-mile or so. �It was everywhere, all over the shoreline.� Officially, Seggos was running an outreach program for Riverkeeper, RFK Jr.�s environmental organization, and the organization�s protocol in situations like these is to stop and call the state Department of Environmental Conservation hotline. The call is supposed to provoke an immediate reaction, but no one showed up. The next day, Seggos called again. �We�d never even heard of a spill there before,� says Seggos. �But they told me they already had an open case on it and they were handling it.�
What Seggos discovered�or rediscovered�wasn�t an oil spill, exactly. Rather, it was a mix of gasoline, solvents, and associated poisons bubbling up from the very ground: a thin dribble that betrays the presence of a supertanker�s worth of the stuff submerged in the age-old geology of Greenpoint. It�s actually more than a century�s worth of spills, leaks, and waste dumped by oil companies that has pooled into a vast underground lake, more than 55 acres wide and up to 25 feet thick. First discovered by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1978, the Greenpoint spill has been estimated at anywhere between 17 million and 30 million gallons�three times more oil than the Exxon Valdez spill. That makes it the largest known oil spill in American history.
Seggos had stumbled upon a long-forgotten industrial accident, decades in the making. It soon became an obsession. Over the next thirteen months, he dug through old news clippings and contacted state and local officials. He attended community meetings and organized local activists into the Newtown Creek Alliance. And he tried to understand how it was that a giant oil spill remained so little known in the thriving neighborhood right above it. What he learned, mostly through Freedom of Information Act requests, was that Mobil�the company that had likely spilled most of the oil�had quietly agreed with state officials to assume responsibility for the necessary cleanup. In return, the state wouldn�t make any more demands: no timetables, no fines, no set outcomes. Both sides could avoid a bitter, costly, and potentially embarrassing court battle. And by keeping it quiet, there would be no public panic�or costly liability.
During the industrial boom of the 1890s, local activists calling themselves the Fifteenth Ward Smelling Committee paddled up the creek seeking the polluters responsible for the foul stenches wafting from the once-pristine waterway. They had plenty to choose from: glue-makers and fertilizer processors produced plenty of noxious by-product. But the oil refineries were the worst offenders: Workers transferring oil and solvents from one part of the plant to another inevitably spilled; storage tanks leaked; and the process of distilling oil to make kerosene, paraffin wax, naphtha, gasoline, and fuel oil left all sorts of junk. �If roughly 5 percent of the initial crude petroleum consumed by the refineries ended up as coke residue, gas, or other loss, as the contemporary literature suggested,� writes historian Andrew Hurley, �each of New York�s petroleum districts would have produced the equivalent of 300,000 gallons of waste material each week during the 1880s.� What couldn�t be resold or burned up was simply dumped on the ground or into the water. There were more than 50 refineries in Greenpoint in 1870, and by 1892, Standard Oil owned most of them.Yikes -- no wonder Mobil is keeping quiet on this...
At the time, Newtown Creek was one of the busiest waterways in the country, and the most hazardous: Fires routinely broke out at the refineries, sometimes burning down entire factories and leaving the chemical remains to soak into the soil. In 1919, twenty acres of the Standard Oil refinery, storing 110 million gallons of oil, went up in smoke. The oil that didn�t burn sunk into the ground. Given the natural order of things, one would expect this oil eventually to drain into the creek and escape into the ocean�but it didn�t. Instead, it slowly moved away from the creek and backed up into Brooklyn. That�s because until about 60 years ago, Brooklyn relied on its own wells for drinking water. And the borough pumped so much of its groundwater to the surface that it reversed the natural slope of its underground water table, tilting it away from the creek and toward the Brooklyn Navy Yard, near where the municipal water pumps were diligently sucking. And so the oil, slinking above the water table, flowed with it, filling the interstitial spaces where the groundwater had once been. By the forties, the aquifer was so depleted that seawater had begun to infiltrate it, making it useless. So in 1949 Brooklyn switched to water piped down from the Catskills.
One year later, on October 5, a vast underground explosion centered at Huron Street and Manhattan Avenue sent 25 manhole covers shooting into the Greenpoint sky, where they reached elevations as high as three stories. This was the first clue that anything was amiss. An investigation revealed that gasoline was leaking into the neighborhood�s sewer system, but at the time no one thought to measure the amount of manhole propellant that had not ignited. Meanwhile, with the municipal water pumps in mothballs, Brooklyn�s aquifer slowly started filling back up. By the late seventies, the water table had rebounded to its natural level. And the oil that floated on top of it reversed its flow. It now moved toward what was once again the lowest point: Newtown Creek.
Then, in September 1978, a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter noticed an iridescent glaze spreading out over the narrow waterway. The oil under Greenpoint had reemerged. That sparked the first investigation into how much oil from the refineries had leaked into the ground over the years. The Coast Guard�s 1979 study is the source of the 17 million�gallon, 55-acre estimate. From the condition of the oil, the Coast Guard also figured that most of it dated to around 1948, and its high concentration of naphtha, a solvent used at the Mobil refinery until it closed in 1965 but not used by other oil companies in the area, suggested that the primary source of the spill was Mobil Oil. Mobil is a direct descendent of Standard.
