$57M East Brooklyn Cleanup Hopes to Halt Massive Sewage Overflow Into Fresh Creek

EAST NEW YORK, BROOKLYN — A new, $57 million city cleanup project in East New York and Canarsie will help curb flooding, clean up drinking water and rebuild roadways in the communities surrounding Fresh Creek, the waterway running from Jamaica Bay up to East New York, city officials announced Tuesday.

The New York City Departments of Environmental Protection (DEP) and Design and Construction (DDC) are overseeing the project.

The colossal endeavor will be carried out in three phases, and will target drainage infrastructure covering 419 acres — all in hopes of reducing pressure on the existing sewer system.

Currently, an estimated 189 million gallons of raw sewage (mixed with water) overflows annually into Fresh Creek, a DEP spokesman told Patch.

New York City — including Canarsie and East New York — is largely serviced by what's called a "combined sewer system." In this system, stormwater that falls on roofs, streets and sidewalks — as well as wastewater from homes and businesses — is carried through the sewer system to treatment plants, said Edward Timbers, a spokesman for the DEP.

During times of heavy rain, water falling on the city's surfaces is too much for the combined sewer to hold, and it overflows — causing a nasty mix of stormwater and raw sewage to leak into local waterways, such as Fresh Creek, Timbers said.

This project hopes to prevent these overflows.

City workers plan to build more than seven miles of new, high-level storm sewers to collect stormwater runoff and divert it from the existing sewer system. These new storm sewers will only carry stormwater that falls on roadways, sideways, etc. — thus separating the sanitary system from the storm system.

"If sewer overflows weren't discharged, the city's treatment plants would be flooded and severely damaged, and wastewater could backup into homes and businesses," Timbers said.

A full rehab of the worn-down roadways surrounding Fresh Creek — specifically, Flatlands Avenue and Avenue J, and the side streets between East 98th Street and East 108th Street — will also take place once subsurface construction is finished.

“The success of our city sits — both figuratively and literally — upon the infrastructure that maintains our daily quality of life," Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said in a statement. "It is vital that we are on top of funding and completing critical neighborhood projects such as new roadways, storm sewers, and water mains."

The $57 million cleanup will also restore 25,000 square feet of wetlands in the Fresh Creek Basin Nature Preserve. Workers will remove fill, debris, invasive species and other ecological impairments in the preserve — a native habitat of the "saltmarsh cordgrass" plant species, among others.

Construction is expected to wrap up by the end of 2018.

Photos courtesy of NYC Water/Flickr