New York City’s waterways are the healthiest they have been in a century

Since 1909, the city has tested the waters within New York Harbor to measure their overall quality. The effort started when the harbor, with nearly 600 miles of waterfront and about 240 miles of shipping channels, received hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage discharged straight from the sewer pipes.

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Such dumping still occurs but to a far lesser extent (when heavy rain overwhelms the citys waste treatment plants) because of the passage of environmental laws and upgrades to the plants allowing them to handle a daily average of 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater generated by city residents.

To mark the 2009 centennial of the water surveys, the citys Department of Environmental Protection just released a report, New York Harbor Survey Program: Celebrating 100 years, detailing the history of wastewater treatment and efforts to improve the harbors health. (The report was published a year after the actual centennial because data collected in a given year is not analyzed until the following one.)

Among its water quality snapshots: fecal bacteria levels are 99 percent below 1970s levels harborwide.

New York Citys waterways are the healthiest they have been in a century, and this report explains how we got here and where we are headed, said Caswell F. Holloway, commissioner of the environmental department. This development in the New York Harbor gives hope to other cities across the country who also reside beside large sometimes very polluted rivers and lakes.