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Brigid Bergin: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin, reporter in the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom. New York City beaches have officially opened for the season and since it's a Friday, we're going to do a deep dive into just how clean our waterways are. Mariana Simões is an investigative journalist covering climate and the environment for City Limits, who recently wrote a piece about this and she joins us now. Also joining us is Lawrence Levine, director of the Urban Water Infrastructure and senior attorney at National Resources Defense Council. Mariana and Lawrie, welcome to WNYC.

Mariana Simões: Hi, Bridget. Thanks for having City Limits on the show. Happy to be here.

Lawrence Levine: Hi. Thanks so much for having me too.

Brigid Bergin: That's great. Listeners, any questions you've always had about New York City Water Quality, now is your chance. You can call or text us at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Maybe you've encountered one of the many beach closures last year. Tell us that story or share your favorite swim spot in New York City. Again, the number 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Mariana, your investigation found that last year the city's 25 beaches saw a total of 244 closures. How does that compare to previous years?

Mariana Simões: Well, that's up from 94 closures in the 2021 season. We compared those two because before that, we had the pandemic so there wasn't much testing being done in the waters. We looked at that jump from the 2021 season to the 2022 season. We did also take a deep dive into the city's annual report on beach water quality for the past four summers.

What we saw, Brigid, is- well, we discovered a lot of things. One of the things that I think is interesting to point out given that this week we saw the clouds of smoke hit New York City, everybody is talking about climate change. I think there's no way to run from it at this point and I think that has become quite obvious, especially this week, is that the beach water quality gets worse because of climate change. We have heavier rains coming with climate change, and that's causing more sewage and more pollution to spill over into the surrounding waterways.

Brigid Bergin: Larry, we're going to get into some of the issues regarding how the city measures water quality in a bit but first, can you explain what would trigger a beach closure?

Mariana Simões: Yes. The way that works, when we're looking at the annual report is that they're testing for the bacteria found in fecal matter, so I think that once it exceeds the city safety standards then the beach could close for a series of reasons, and water quality being one of them. Do you want to add a little more to that, Larry?

Lawrence Levine: Sure. Well, there's two things that can trigger it. One is actual water quality sampling and unfortunately, it often takes about a day to get results back from the lab so by the timing advisory is posted the conditions may well be different.

The second, though, is there's just an expectation that when it rains a certain amount, there's going to be pollution in the water and so the city also relies on modeling of its sewer system and of the waters around the city to predict, well, if there's a certain amount of rainfall today, we know that in this area there's going to be a lot of polluted runoff coming out of pipes near the shore and that's going to wash the shore near beaches and they'll-- even before they get a lab sample will say, "Well, there was enough rain to trigger an advisory today."

Brigid Bergin: Larry, just-

Lawrence Levine: Stay safe, stay out of water.

Brigid Bergin: -just to be clear, as we've talked about this bad weather tends to make the water quality worse because the city has got a really old sewer system. Can you explain a little bit about how it works and why the rain makes all the water quality worse?

Lawrence Levine: That's right. I think it's not intuitive but it's pervasive and it's a fact of life in New York City and in so many other urban contexts, wherever you've got pavement, basically. When rainfall hits the ground, it has nowhere to go to soak in as it would in a more natural landscape, and so where it goes into the sewers and in about 60% of the city, the same sewer pipes carry that storm runoff and carries sewage from buildings and it all gets mixed together.

On a normal day, when there's no rain, all the sewage in there goes to a sewage treatment plant and gets treated before it's discharged. When there's rain, that can overload the system and there's no capacity in the treatment plant to handle that mix of all the rain plus the sewage and so the release valve on the system is basically to just discharge the excess as an overflow without treatment and so the water is all around the city for more than 400 different locations.

Brigid Bergin: Ugh.

Lawrence Levine: Yes, it's pretty gross and then there's the other 40% of the city where the pipes actually are separated, but even the storm runoff itself, you think about everything that's washed off of the streets down those storm drains, everything from pet waste to litter, to just the normal dirt and grime and oil and grease that you find on the roads, that all ends up at the end of the pipe too even without the human sewage, and that also follows the waters.

Brigid Bergin: Larry, besides as you mentioned, it being pretty gross, what are the potential health risks associated with swimming in contaminated water?

Lawrence Levine: Well, they're all the things you'd expect and this, I'd say is pretty intuitive. There's bacteria and viruses and all sorts of stuff in there. It can cause diarrhea, skin rashes, pinkeye, other sorts of infections. For the same reason you wash your hands after you use the bathroom, you also don't want to be in contact with fecal matter, with raw sewage, if you're touching the water.

Brigid Bergin: Mariana, the City has estimated that an overhaul of the sewer system would cost upwards of $100 billion, but some work has begun. Can you give us just a brief overview of some of the bigger projects the City is taking on?

Mariana Simões: The City has done a lot of work on this, and as you pointed out, it's going to take a lot of money to take out and revamp and redo the entire sewer system since it is quite archaic. They came up with this project called the long-term control plans. That's been going on since 2013. I think one of the criticisms and one of the things that we found when we were talking to environmental groups for the story is that it's just taking a long time to roll out these plans.

Billions are being put into this, but to actually get the solutions going is a long battle. It's a long effort. What the City does do is they come up with ways to stop the rainfall from ever reaching the point of overflow. I think that's what they've been doing since they can't really go in there and change all the pipes. The idea is to come up with solutions to collect that rainfall.

They've done this, in Gowanus, for example, there was a $1.6 billion project there to put storage tanks in the Gowanus Canal and then they also spent another $106 million to replenish some of the pipes in the Bronx.

There has been efforts done and I think one of the reasons I really enjoyed speaking to Larry for this is that he told me that despite what's happening with these efforts, environmental groups are still putting forth a lawsuit that is trying to get the state of New York to meet the stricter Federal limits outlined by the EPA on water quality standards.

What that means, and Lawrie can talk more about this, is that we can come up with all these plans to stop the sewage from overflowing and what not but if we don't have strict enough standards for how we are measuring the quality of the water, we're going to end up coming up with plans that are not doing enough.

Brigid Bergin: I want to get callers in here who have some questions for you. We may be able to answer them, we may not. Let's go to Jacob and Queens. Jacob, talk about your experience real quick.

Jacob: Hi, this is more of a comment to people listening. Last year I discovered that there's places where you can swim in the East River. I live in Astoria and pretty close to me is a little beach area and I also bought a kayak. There's approved launch area and something that you need to get a city permit for, which is a really easy process. It's a recommendation for other New Yorkers who are looking to get out this summer that water quality is typically fine.

Obviously like we're talking about you want to check and not go out right after it's rained and check the currents and always have proper safety equipment. It's something that I enjoy, and I think other New Yorkers should enjoy as well.

Brigid Bergin: Jacob, thanks so much for your call. Let's go to Alan in Brooklyn. Alan, welcome to WNYC.

Alan: Yes, hi. In addition to preventing the rainwater from reaching the overflow stage, isn't the City doing anything to encourage [unintelligible 00:10:45] building owners to retrofit so that they can hold more of their sanitary sewage on site before the rain stop and then release it when the rain has discontinued so that people who are either not building yet should have that requirement, and those who have existing buildings should have some financial incentive to retrofit the buildings that way?

Brigid Bergin: Alan, thanks so much for the question. Larry or Mariana, can you give a short answer you could give to Alan on the state of building regulations?

Lawrence Levine: Yes, sure. I think holding the sanitary sewage on site in any significant volume is my understanding pretty challenging. What actually is more feasible and is being done and needs to be done more is what we call green infrastructure. Which means thinking about on the outside of the building and on public property, creating places that the water can go, the stormwater, the rainwater, besides into the sewer.

It's really about literally greening the landscape of the city with more vegetation and soils and places that the water can soak in and the trees and vegetation will soak up that water like a sponge before it gets into the sewer system and causes all that pollution at the end of the pipe.

Brigid Bergin: I think maybe we lost Larry for a second there. Mariana, as we're wrapping up just for people who want to check what water quality advisories are available, are there resources you can recommend for folks?

Mariana Simões: Yes, of course. The New York City Health Department actually comes up with an annual report on this and this is what we use to dig into the data here. You could just go on the New York City Health Department's website and they have a list of the beaches and what the water quality was for the past few years.

You can also check our story, we created a map there where you can look at the beaches and click on them, navigate through that map. Then if you click on the beach, it'll tell you how much of the percentage over the safety limit of the water samples were for that particular beach. That's a good resource. Do go to citylimits.org and you can check out our story there.

I will say one last thing that's important. What we found in our investigation is that the public beaches tended to be cleaner than the private ones. That's because of the way they are set up geographically. When the water comes into the public ones that tend to be more in open water areas, it flushes out the contaminants.

Brigid Bergin: Really quickly, Mariana, can you just really quickly just give some examples in about 15 seconds?

Mariana Simões: Sure. There are beaches, like for example, the Coney Island Beach, it faces an open waterway. A beach that was not very clean because it was in a private, more enclosed location where the water was not getting flushed out, was Douglas Manor Association. That was ranked the worst beach in the state. You might want to stay away from that one.

Brigid Bergin: We're going to have to leave it there. My guests have been Mariana Simões, investigative journalist covering climate and the environment for City Limits, and Larry Levine, director of Urban Water Infrastructure and senior attorney at the National Resources Defense Council. Thank you both so much for coming on today and for all your work.

Mariana Simões: Thanks so much.

Lawrence Levine: Thanks again. Great to be here.

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Brigid Bergin: The Brian Lehrer Show's producers are Lisa Allison, Mary Croke, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen takes care of the podcast. Megan Ryan is the head of live radio. Our interns are Catherine Angst and Brandon [unintelligible 00:14:36]. Juliana Fonda, Matt Marando and Milton Ruiz are at the audio controls. I'm Brigid Bergen, and this is the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Brian will be back Monday. Have a wonderful weekend, and thank you so much for listening.

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