This may be the perfect complement to an article on Wednesday
about Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to reduce the flow of
sewage into the city’s water bodies: a video on YouTube showing
a sheet of sewage and storm water coating the Gowanus Canal in
Brooklyn with a muddy brown. The video, dated Sept. 16 and
already posted on sites like that of Riverkeeper, the
environmental group that monitors the city’s waterways, is so
graphic that viewers can almost smell the stench. But city
officials say it is a prime example of a problem plaguing the
city’s ancient sewer system and prompting the designation of the
Gowanus and Newtown Creek as federal Superfund sites. Both are
scheduled for half-billion-dollar cleanups over the next 10 to
15 years. When it rains, untreated sewage and storm water can
overwhelm sewage treatment plants. So the sewer system releases
the combined overflows into bodies of water like New York
Harbor, Jamaica Bay and, of course, the Gowanus Canal and
Newtown Creek, which straddles Brooklyn and