It’s Eau de Gowanus delivered to your doorstep.
Dump trucks will soon be hauling ancient toxic sludge dredged from the depths of the Gowanus through neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Staten Island — as critics worry the caravan may take the canal’s infamous stink on tour.
More than 60 Department of Environment Protection trucks will be moving contaminated soil from canal dig sites through the city each day, with only tarps separating the pungent debris from the public, according to department officials.
“They have a tarp over [the trucks] — a loose tarp — meanwhile they’re full of all this toxic material,” said Steve Markus, a member of the Voice of Gowanus resident advocacy group at a discussion event Wednesday.
“What the neighbors have been dealing with for the past eight-to-nine months on Nevins and Sackett [Streets] the entire neighborhood of Gowanus, Carroll Gardens, Bay Ridge, Staten Island – they’re gonna be exposed to this as well,” Markus added.
The trucks will carry the canal’s 120-year-old gas plant waste to disposal facilities in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and even Ohio depending on the level of contamination, and soil will be secured by non-airtight tarps similar to any “standard construction dump truck,” a DEP rep said at a community meeting Tuesday.
An upset neighbor at Tuesday’s meeting said she is concerned about soil being dropped from the trucks en route to the disposal sites.
“My concern is the trucks are going to … turn a corner,” the resident said, “and drop a couple of pebbles – 65 times a day, that’s an awful lot of pebbles.”
DEP rep Kevin Clarke noted that the agency “can consider” spraying a mineral-based membrane on more heavily contaminated material traveling on the dump trucks, but would only deploy it if it’s “absolutely necessary.”
The federal Environmental Protection Agency in 2010 first identified the canal as a “Superfund” site – cemented in history as an industrial-era waste dumping ground. The EPA later revealed plans for an 8-million-gallon underground retention tank that would hold sewage and rainwater during storms inside the “black mayonnaise”-caked canal.
Numerous complaints over the odor at the Nevins Street site have been documented since construction on a perimeter wall began last year, the EPA said. In response the federal agency applied “odor-suppressing foam” and tarps, put up a tent to shield the public from a smelly piece of machinery and even perfumed the canal with a Yuletide scent through the summer.
The second phase of the project starting in summer 2025 includes soil excavation that will dredge up over 100-year-old waste – though work during cooler months means the stink won’t be as prevalent, according to DEP documents.
The EPA revealed at Tuesday’s community meeting that it wouldn’t be possible to cover the dig sites with tents to contain the foul smell, claiming tenting would add over a year to the project’s timeline.
Tents will only be erected if “air emissions data indicates the potential for human health impacts,” though will likely significantly increase the duration of the project,” an EPA rep said.
Meanwhile, the excavation site has exuded smells that 43-year-old Gowanus resident Steve Tranter could only describe as “absolutely terrible, like really rotten eggs … I just hold my breath.”
“The residents on Nevins Street are being tortured,” Voice of Gowanus member Lina LaViolette told The Post. “I have lived here for 50 years, I have never smelled it as bad as that. There is the sewage in the canal that smells like poop, but coal tar smells differently.
“For the last year they had been ghosting the residents on Nevins Street, saying, ‘there is no smell, we don’t smell anything,'” she said. “They should have tented it so they could keep the odors in.”
The stink and health concerns have Nevins residents sleeping with their windows closed and air conditioning off in the summer months, 30-year Gowanus resident Lisa Bowstead said.
“The people on Nevins Street – I am speaking on their behalf – because they’ve given up, they don’t know what to do,” Bowstead said. “They’re living in hell.”
It’s not just having to plug their noses either – some residents said they’ve been getting sick over the last few years amid the lengthy remediation.
EPA Human Health Risk Assessor Dr. Lora Smith-Staines admitted Tuesday that the canal’s contaminants could cause headaches and nausea even with a low amount of exposure over short periods of times, with Naphthalene concentrations at the canal the alleged culprit.
Writer Alisa Ackerman, 60, said she and her family have battled a series of illnesses since construction began.
“It’s a lot,” Ackerman said in an interview. “At first I thought it was a post-COVID thing, but we’re well past COVID now … we have a right to clean air.
“There are days when the smell is really bad,” she added. “But that also depends on the wind. My main concern is soil vapor intrusion” – meaning the “shockingly high levels” of the cancer-causing chemical trichloroethylene found inside homes and buildings near the canal.
The EPA said the next phase of work will be done on an “accelerated” five-month schedule with expanded air monitoring and improved odor investigation measures — including collecting wind direction and location data.
There will also be efforts to limit the stink by spraying excavated soil with a mineral-based membrane, overnight tarping and misting with an unscented odor-neutralizing spray – but some residents still think it won’t be enough.
“We’re advocating that [the DEP] seal this stuff safely before they load these dump trucks and before they leave the site,” Markus added.
“It’s not just the odors, but the debris that’s all contaminated being spread around our neighborhood.”
