Imagine Central Park with trash mounds 20 stories high. Is it the more advanced drainage system in the more recently capped East Mound that makes for a drier soil? As a result of intense community pressure, a state law was passed in 1996 requiring that the landfill cease accepting solid waste by the end of 2001. Tree planting (started by arborists, accelerated by seed-carrying birds) would occur in coordination with the careful engineering of what you might call the dumps natural excretions, the methane and the leachate. Robert. This meant more solid waste for the city's eight landfills to handle. 1. The bridge was finished long before the rest of the expressway and was used by workers to travel between the two plants. Even in a group, a visitor feels like an interloper in a quiet, faraway green space, dotted with glimpses of infrastructure: plastic sheeting, methane extraction pipes, concrete troughs to channel rainwater.
Fresh Kills Landfill - Staten Island, New York - Atlas Obscura I dont feel like they care at all.. Understanding the former landfills health effects will remain relevant, experts said, because the city plans to transform Fresh Kills into Freshkills, a sprawling park that it expects to fully open in 2036. What Freshkills park initially represented back in 2001 was the Bloomberg administrations plan to transfer garbage to way stations out of Staten Island and into neighborhoods where people of color lived. [16] In 1950, the height was increased to 2540 feet (812m). The next creatures park planners are hoping to attract are humans, who have been locked out since these 2,200 acres of the islands west shore were first locked down for trash. And we have to remember what it means that the hills growth stopped. The community is right to be concerned, Philip Landrigan, who directs Boston Colleges Global Public Health Program and Global Pollution Observatory and has studied the health effects of 9/11 debris on cleanup workers, said. It is the southernmost settlement in both New York City and New York State. [1] In adults living in the area around Fresh Kills during the same period, there were statistically significant elevations in five cancer types bladder, breast, kidney, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and thyroid when compared to residents elsewhere in Staten Island. 1.
Tottenville, Staten Island - Wikipedia It blows my mind that we have come this far, that we are somehow able, in the 21st century, to skillfully erase the evidence of our worst 20th century mistakes. A Draft Master Plan was refined in cooperation with Mayor Bloombergs city planners and turned over to the Parks Department in 2006. Goats were brought in for their ecological restoration abilities in 2012. Hirsh later insists that that Freshkills is more than a park. Original plans showed the dump with a twenty-year lifespan. Unlike the most recent study, the previous ones did not find statistically significant elevations in cancer rates around the landfill when compared to the rest of Staten Island. [4] It consists of four mounds which range in height from 90 to about 225 feet (30 to about 70m) and hold about 150million short tons (14010^6t) of solid waste. [9] Hall intended the landfill to be part of a proposed belt highway along Staten Island's west shore, which was approved by Moses in exchange for his support of the landfill. Staten Islands plight isnt uncommon, Brawley, who was the chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society from 2007 to 2018, said. The name "Fresh Kills" refers to its location along the banks of the Fresh Kills estuary in western Staten Island. Staten Island City Council Member Joe Borelli has pushed for a more thorough investigation into Fresh Kills since he was elected in 2015. After this, garbage would be compacted and shipped away in containers.
PDF Cancer and other health outcomes around former fresh kills landfill Revenue has declined as the landfill produces less methane, but data from the New York City Sanitation Department shows that since 2007, the city has received at least $58 million for gas from Fresh Kills. When the fund was reauthorized in 2015, Congress wrote the Canal Street boundaries into the law. Air, surface water and groundwater monitoring are conducted on a regular basis. Published Friday, Sept. 11, 2020 at 1:30 a.m. Nabavi sits down with me in a little green trailer that currently serves as the parks visitors center. New York City sent all its trash to Staten Island, some 20 barges every day. By 1955, Fresh Kills was the worlds largest landfill. Corner told me at the time. "Were lucky where New York City landfills located on latitude and longitude, the rainfall we get and the temperature is ideal. One minute hes pointing out the osprey and the next a smoke stack belonging to a distant Con Edison plant.
Highlands and Islands - Wikipedia A cancer cluster, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is a greater-than-expected number of cancer cases that occurs within a group of people in a geographic area over a period of time., Accessible icon title "The amount of moisture and temperature are significant in controlling methane generation," Nabavi explains. Because of the predatory birds, rat sightings, especially during the day, dropped dramatically.
From Landfill to Landscape, a Staten Island Cinderella Story Still The Freshkills Park Project is transforming the Fresh Kills Landfill on the west shore of Staten Island into a new public park.. At 2,200 acres - almost three times the size of Central Park - New York's Freshkills Park is one of the most ambitious public works projects in the world, combining state-of-the-art ecological restoration techniques with extraordinary settings for recreation . [26] It will consist of a variety of public spaces and facilities for a multitude of activity types. Eisler-Grynsztajn, who was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer in March 2019, said he was lucky to be diagnosed. As described in an inter-departmental report from 1946: "Because of the substantial sums involved in the preparation and acquisition of the [Fresh Kills] site, [in order to justify this expense] the City must dispose of refuse at this location for a number of years. A legal not a medical question.. We have a swimming pool (and) nobody wanted to even go swimming because (of) the stench. Eisler-Grynsztajn recalled. About 1.6million short tons (1.510^6t) of rubble came here for sorting. Plant #1 was located at the site of an old factory on the south side of the junction of the Great Fresh Kills, and Little Fresh Kills. We now bury our garbage in neighboring states and haul some of it to a plant in New Jersey that burns it to generate power. After 9/11, Staten Islands defunct Fresh Kills landfill became a forensic site for Ground Zero debris. And thats how ecosystems grow.. In a statement, state health department spokeswoman Erin Silk said the reports findings suggested that practices in the medical care system may be influencing thyroid cancer incidence on Staten Island and that health care providers should avoid performing thyroid cancer screenings for people without symptoms and at average risk. Instead, the garbage took on a life of its own. In the case of the landfill, the government wants to make it into a park and wants to be able to say that is no problem, Carpenter said. Long Island (1401 square miles) is much larger. CNN Sans & 2016 Cable News Network. And a lot of people like me feel the same.. City officials have sought to examine Fresh Kills potential health effects before. Nineteen years later, some Staten Islanders fear the inactive landfill and its contents including the 9/11 debris is contributing to cancer rates in the borough. View full sizeStaten Island Advance/Staten Island MuseumThe Lenape Indians settled in the Northeast as long as 10,000 years ago, and began living on Staten Island at least since the year 1000 . Staten Islanders dont only suspect Fresh Kills as a potential environmental cause of their health problems. The result was the closing of nine of the city's incinerators and a sharp reduction in the combustion of waste by 1944. In a statement, Chris DAndrea, an assistant commissioner in the city health departments environmental health division, said the most recent studys findings were consistent with previous investigations of Fresh Kills. On both sides, the views stretched through the drizzle toward infinity, green, green, as far as the eye could see. (Michael Falco), Brett Roegiers, Will Lanzoni, Rebecca Wright, Follow All photographs accompanying this article are from an ongoing series documenting the rebirth of Freshkills. Freshkills Park is a public park being built atop a former landfill on Staten Island. Planned attractions include playgrounds, athletic fields, horseback riding trails and a wildlife refuge. A wooden trestle bridge was built across Fresh Kills Creek to expand the Plant 2 operating area. These included red-winged blackbirds, American goldfinches, red-tailed hawks, American kestrels, osprey, ring-necked pheasants, tree swallows, turkey vultures, and northern snapping turtles. Im really very sympathetic to the situation and understand why people are concerned, Herbstman said. The voters of Staten Island, reliably conservative, rallied around Michael R. Bloomberg, who, down in the polls in his first term, promised to trade their dump for a park. Indeed, the hill Im standing on in East Park, one of five areas that will make up the completed park, is composed entirely of garbage, the municipal solid waste generated by the people of New York City for 53 years, from 1948 to 2001. The Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, New York, was formerly the largest landfill in the world and the principal landfill of New York City in the later 20th century. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the city has seen increases in household garbage produced by New Yorkers under lockdown. "Were probably the only facility in the United States where the gas is purified and goes directly to consumers," he tells me.
Freshkills Park : NYC Parks [9], Staten Island Transfer Station occupies a small portion of the site of the former Fresh Kills Landfill near the old Plant #2 at 403449N 741138W / 40.580267N 74.193994W / 40.580267; -74.193994 (Staten Island Transfer Station). May 24: The Department of Parks & Recreation held a public scoping meeting on the Scope of Work for a Generic Environmental Impact Statement (GEIS) to be prepared for the proposed Freshkills Park. Navas could not say how many claims or how much money the VCF has approved for people who worked at Fresh Kills because, she said, it does not possess detailed data on where claimants worked. With my yogurt containers, my paper towels, and my Baggiesand the help of eight million fellow New YorkersI built this hill. The area was declared a wild bird sanctuary, and some hawks, falcons, and owls were brought in. After 9/11, it unexpectedly became a burial site. "And we actually decided to as a piece of what our mission is, to do scientific research about what it takes when you restore a very, very disturbed site. the amount of plastic currently floating in the ocean, Henry David Thoreau lived on Staten Island. The fund covers people who worked on the barges and at Fresh Kills landfill. During this period, the dump was in a state of flux. Santulli-Barone, who moved from Brooklyn to Staten Islands Huguenot neighborhood in 1985, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014 and leukemia in 2015. Now having two cancers, I dont want to use that park I dont want to push my luck, Santulli-Barone said. Therefore its no surprise that the west shore of Staten Island became trash-filled no-mans land because, in 1948, Robert Moses determined that it would be a good idea to sop up the swamps with a little garbage. Way off in the distance is the Manhattan skyline, which looks as if it would fit neatly on a platter. The landfill received its last barge of garbage on March 22, 2001. (They eat phragmites, a common reed that tends to take over.)
Freshkills Park - Wikipedia Communities with elevated cancer rates often point to an environmental exposure as the source of their problem, but researchers are rarely able to connect the two, he said. The 32-year-old, who said there is no history of cancer in her family, said she worries that living near the former landfill is linked to the breast cancer diagnosis she received last year. "Were standing on top of 50 years of NYCs garbage," says Megan Moriarty, a programming associate for the park, reminding me that I am thousands of miles off, geographically and conceptually. Figure 3-1: Potential Exposure Pathways to Landfill Gas Top of Page ", Maybe this is because New Yorkers produce high quality garbage, but it probably has more to do with the wetland setting and the climate. In the years after 9/11, some workers who were exposed to debris at Ground Zero and Fresh Kills began to wrestle with health problems. "Everybody all over the world has landfills, and now many more people are trying to figure out what to do with them, and were kind of a big lab for that," she explains.
The plan described the project as "lifescape," defined as an "ecological process of environmental reclamation and renewal on a vast scale. There are gas wells, submerged vaults topped with an exotic arrangement of pipes, valves, and tubes.
The name comes from the landfill's location along the banks of the Fresh Kills estuary in western Staten Island. Two of its three city council members are Republicans. By 1946, only ten incinerators were in operation, with capacity having declined by half since 1937. Now, the EPA says in the most recent set of statistics (2013), that we generate 254 million tons per year, or 1,600 pounds annually per person. The site is large enough to support many sports and programs including nature trails, horseback riding, mountain biking, community events, outdoor dining, sports fields, and canoeing/kayaking. No more garbage for the people of Staten Island, said Governor Pataki. [22] The remaining waste was buried in a 40-acre (160,000m2) portion of the landfill; it is highly likely that this debris still contains fragmentary human remains. Michael Lanza, a spokesman for the citys health department, wrote in an email that the citys methodology was the only appropriate approach for investigating whether so many cancers were linked to environmental exposure. Some of what would have gone to Fresh Kills is today incinerated in Newark, N.J., Niagara Falls and Chester, Pa., on the Philadelphia border, where 70 percent of residents are African-American. [12] The talk of using Fresh Kills for only three years may have been a ploy to allow Hall to save face politically. The native plant species were driven out by the common reed, a grass that grows abundantly in disturbed areas and can tolerate both fresh and brackish water.
Staten Island facts that you probably didn't know - Time Out At about 2,200 acres (8.9 km 2 ), it will be the largest park developed in New York City since the 19th century. It is almost unbelievable that New York City would set aside a parcel of land as big as Lower Manhattan south of 23rd Street and just let it go to seed. Find out how after . In 2007, capping of the East Mound began, and in 2011 a regular old park appeared, or reappeared, on the northwest edge of Freshkills. How could they say particles didnt travel farther? Ted Nabavi, the director of waste management engineering for New York Citys Department of Sanitation, has been, for 25 years, overseeing the closure and reinvention of Fresh Kills. Though some still associate fresh kills with the former landfill, went a Freshkills Park Alliance blog post this past January, many have begun to recognize its significance as a symbol of renewal, rebirth, and rejuvenation.. Ironically, one of the answers lies within Fresh Kills - Staten Island's out-of-commission landfill - the largest landfill in the United States until it was shutdown in 2001. What happened to the Staten Island landfill? Some Staten Islanders, including Eisler-Grynsztajn, want a deeper investigation into the landfill and the potential health effects of the 9/11 debris.
How the world's largest landfill became New York's biggest new park
Population Of Huonville Tasmania,
My Girlfriend Wants Everything Her Way,
Lincoln County, Wyoming Property Search,
Articles I