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Newtown Creek, already a federally designated Superfund site due to historical industrial dumping, receives billions of gallons of sewage annually. To address the overflow, the city Department of Environmental Protection aims to build a 26-foot-wide, 3.26-mile tunnel to divert overflow and store up to 50 million gallons of runoff that would otherwise flow into the creek when it rains. The tunnel would collect the raw sewage and polluted storm runoff from streets, roofs, and other impervious surfaces until the rain subsides. Then it would all be pumped to the Newtown Creek wastewater treatment plant in Greenpoint.
“ It costs a lot of money. It takes a lot of time, but it's absolutely necessary,” Willis Elkins, executive director of the Newtown Creek Alliance, told Gothamist.
A similar project is currently under construction at the Gowanus Canal.
