The East River, separating Manhattan from Queens and Brooklyn, is many things, but river is not one of them. Basically speaking, it’s a sunken valley. Realistically speaking, it’s a sewer.

By David Stone

Assorted Ideas, Large & Small/Special to the Roosevelt Island Daily

The East River Over Time

Born over 2.5 billion years ago, the East River came into being as a sunken valley carved out of the last ice age. As glaciers shrunk north, melt off forced sea levels to rise. Salt water filling up areas around present day New York City created a tidal strait, this one unusually pushed and pulled by three sources.

A huge factor in turning the East into an open sewer are the triple forces entering the waterway from the Atlantic Ocean, the Harlem River — also not a river — and Long Island Sound. The East changes direction as frequently as every two hours with the power of the current changing too. That’s a novelty, a curiosity, but it also wipes out its ability to flush itself. Conflicting tides block whatever’s in the water from clearing out efficiently.

A range of solutions have been offered, the most useful being a damn at the western end of the Long Island Sound. That would allow a more natural flushing, coordinated with the Ocean. But the trouble always is money. Nobody is willing to spend enough, and that also contributes to the failure of other solutions floating around.

Mired in the 19th Century, Flooded with Failure

Living on Roosevelt Island with a view facing Manhattan, I’ve been long aware that the stories told about stormy weather overflows into rivers, straits and canals were incomplete. Under clear blue skies on a summer day, water gushed into the East River, visible above the waterline at low tide. But that never squared with the official story.

“Every time it rains in New York, millions of gallons of sewage-laced stormwater flows into the city’s waterways. Instead of being diverted to a wastewater treatment plant, what goes down your toilet ends up floating along rivers, canals, beaches, and waterfront parks. All told, more than 20 billion gallons of feces-polluted water is flushed out onto the city’s coastline every year.”

Curbed New York

Waste water systems for New York, built in the mid-1800s, did not anticipate today’s population density. And at the time, the worst damage came from factories and plants on the shorelines. They dumped wastes directly into the water untreated because the ocean is vast. It could absorb all those chemicals not yet recognized as toxic.

And then, there is this…

That’s how the East River got hurt in the first place, but increasingly, a prime contributor was whatever went down your sink, bathtub and toilet. The conversion to sewage removal by municipal pipes from that of men carting it away from outhouses overnight increased convenience. It also delivered untreated human wastes into the water.

Feeble water treatment efforts, according to NYC Department of Environmental Protection numbers, now allow 11 billion gallons of human waste into various city waterways every year. But no one’s counting the unexplained releases like the one shown above. They contradict the official story, releasing who knows what into the river.