By Erin Delmore
Correspondent
Rosa Montemarano and Angela Gallina live in Cliffside Park, overlooking the Hudson River. And while they’ll look, they won’t touch.
“You can tell. It’s like murky, it smells, it’s not clean,” Gallina said.
“They used to swim, but now it’s way too polluted,” Montemarano said.
According to a new report by the Hudson Riverkeeper, some of the most polluted areas of the Hudson River lie between northern New Jersey and New York City. Nearly half of the samples taken from this area failed the EPA’s safe swimming guidelines. That’s more than twice the failure rate river-wide.
“At certain times and at certain locations, it varies quite a bit from location to location. It can be very poor water quality, so that’s what we want to work on,” said Hudson Riverkeeper Water Quality Program Manager Dan Shapley.
The culprit? Outdated sewer systems where sewage, en route to a treatment plant, mixes with storm water and overflows into the river. The EPA estimates 23 billion gallons of raw sewage and other pollutants flow into New Jersey’s waterways every year.
“Sewage contamination, other fecal contamination could make you sick immediately from going swimming. Stomach illness is the most common, ear and eye infection are common. There are more serious types of illnesses that can result but those are the most common things,” Shapley said.
Legislators passed a bill in January to increase public awareness on how polluted the water is at any given time. Sewage system operators would be required to notify the state Department of Environmental Protection within an hour of a spill and the DEP would have to notify the public. But Gov. Chris Christie allowed the bill to expire without signing it.
In March, the governor’s office required 25 municipalities and wastewater authorities, mostly in urban areas, to develop long-term strategies to combat combined sewer overflow.
The Executive Director of the Bayonne Municipal Utility Authority tells NJTV News that the challenge is twofold: upgrading the system so that storm water can be collected and stored until it can be treated, and then treating so it’s clean when it is returned to the environment.
“Even in New York City and New Jersey, we see thousands of people taking part in public swim events — the triathlon, other events of that kind, and then a lot of informal swimming. Just today someone sent me a video of kids swimming in the Harlem River. This is the beach. This is our public beach, and particularly for people who don’t have the means to go away for the summer, don’t have the means to go to a pool, this is where they’re swimming,” Shapley said.
The Hudson Riverkeeper report includes recommendations for the public, like don’t flush anything down the toilet except toilet paper, even if it’s marked “flushable.” If you don’t rely on the public sewage system, inspect your septic tanks regularly, conserve water so that there’s less that’s being processed by water treatment plants and keep the streets and the roads clear of litter and pollutants so that less of it is flushed into the water during storms.