by Worldchanging NYC local blogger, Joshua Wiese: New York City’s biggest water quality problem can be described with a three letter acronym: CSO. It stands for Combined Sewage Overflows. Combined overflows provide the much needed relief to our sewers when the city’s treatment facilities become overwhelmed by a combined overload of wastewater from buildings and stormwater runoff from the streets: they divert this flow directly into our rivers, canals and bays instead. Sewer overflows basically prevent raw sewage and polluted stormwater runoff from backing up into our homes, schools, offices, streets, and anywhere else a drain connects to the sewer — but at a steep cost for the health of the waters in and around the city. According to Riverkeeper, New York City dumps “more than 27 billion gallons of raw sewage and polluted stormwater discharge” via sewer overflows into our surrounding waterways every year. So it’s not surprising that the focus of PlaNYC’s 10 initiatives devoted to restoring the health and quality of New York City’s waterbodies (with the goal of making 90 percent of the waters safe for recreation by the year 2030) is primarily on sewage and stormwater management. In the name of full disclosure, I’ve spent… (more)
(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Urban Design and Planning at 1:03 PM)