By Michael Gold
Seven prominent places in Yonkers, in the Hudson and Saw Mill rivers, all failed water quality tests for the fecal indicator bacteria Enterococcus in the most recent testing.
Fecal indicator bacteria are often used to assess water quality and suitability for water related recreational activities and their cell counts indicates the presence of fecal material from humans, pets and wildlife.
The Yonkers Paddling and Rowing Club, at 19 Alexander Street, failed, with a count of 457 fecal cells per 100 milliliters of water.
The JFK Marina boat launch, at 565 Warburton Avenue, had a fecal bacteria count of 95 cells per hundred milliliters of water, as recorded on July 10th.
The spots in the Saw Mill that failed were the Yonkers daylighted section of the river – Van der Donck Park, Hearst Street, Walsh Road, and Torre Place. They all were recorded as having 10 times or more than the accepted amount of fecal pollution as defined by Federal standards. Sarah Lawrence’s College Center for the Urban River (CURB), located at 35 Alexander Street in Yonkers, performed the testing.
The Yonkers daylighted section of the river was recorded as having 19,863 fecal cells per 100 milliliters of water, on August 21st.
The Hearst Street location was recorded as having 24,196 fecal cells per 100 milliliters, on August 14th. The Walsh Road site was recorded as having 3,873 fecal cells per 100 milliliters on July 10th. The Torre Place site was recorded as having 798 fecal cells per 100 milliliters, also on July 10th.
The site where the Saw Mill drains into the Hudson in Yonkers also failed, but not as dramatically. Riverkeeper, the most prominent organization protecting the river, recorded 462 fecal cells per 100 milliliters on August 13th.
The New York State fresh water sanitary guideline is 61 fecal cells per 100 milliliters. A grade of 10 times the standard means that the samples CURB and Riverkeeper tested and analyzed were recorded at ten times the acceptable threshold.
“The entero was more than 10 times the allowable standard — over 610 for freshwater sites and 1040 for saline,” said Shannon Roback, Riverkeeper’s science director. These sites “significantly failed,” Roback said.
“This is more than ten times what’s safe,” explained Dan Shapley, Riverkeeper’s senior director of advocacy, policy and planning. “If this (each site) was a public beach, it would be closed. Water is a magnet for kids,” Shapley said. We have to make it clean for them.”
If a swimmer accidentally swallowed the water, “it could cause gastrointestinal problems, especially if it was someone who was immune-compromised, or had an underlying health condition, or a child,” said Shannon Roback, Riverkeeper’s science director.
“If you have an open cut, you could be at risk for infection,” if you went swimming in these waters, Shapley said.
The cause of much of the high bacterial cell counts is rainfall that causes untreated sewage to flow into our rivers, Roback said.
“Water quality changes all the time,” Roback said. “Most places in the river are safe to swim most of the time. For example, seventy five percent of the time, the Yonkers Paddling and Rowing Club is safe in dry weather.”
But “when it rains, there’s a flush of pollution into the river, of untreated sewage,” Roback said. “You can use our map to see which sites are regularly safe to swim and which are often not after a rain event,” she said.
Riverkeeper has published a map displaying water quality levels in the Hudson and its tributaries, for those who want to boat, swim, or fish in the water. The map also provides drinking water quality reports for the Hudson Valley watershed.
The fecal cell counts along the Saw Mill River are all extremely high, in Ardsley, Hastings, Pleasantville, and New Castle for ample, as Riverkeeper’s map shows.
“The Saw Mill runs through a densely populated area,” Shapley pointed out. “There are underground networks of sewers, old pipes in many cases. Many are leaking. Cracks will allow for stormwater to leak into pipes and sewers.
“The pipes have been around for a long time. It’s a common problem through the county,” Shapley explained.
“One hundred years ago or more, when these systems were built, they were designed to get waste away from where people were living,” Shapley said.
“Thirteen Yonkers sites are designed to spill into the Hudson when it rains,” Shapley said. In comparison, New York City has 460 of these sites, he said.
Also, “twenty-one other municipalities (in Westchester) are sending sewage to Yonkers,” Shapley explained. “Yonkers hosts the county municipal sewage plant.”
Compared to all the other sewage treatment plants along the Hudson River, including Ossining and Peekskill in Westchester, “Yonkers by far has the biggest volume discharge into the Hudson, except for New York City,” Shapley said.
“What surprises people is that even with all of this sewage infrastructure in Yonkers, the Hudson is usually really clean, wrote Ryan Palmer, Director of CURB, whose headquarters are in Yonkers on the Hudson, in an email.
“Clean, meaning even passing EPA levels for safe swimming. In fact the majority of the time the Hudson River sites we sample, JFK Marina and the Yonkers Paddling and Rowing Club, pass these standards. The Saw Mill River, not so much,” Palmer stated.
“Sewage infrastructure crisscrosses the county,” Palmer said. “There are miles and miles of pipes. There’s a major sewer trunk line near the Saw Mill River. It runs along the Saw Mill. The pipes are very old.”
The obvious solution is to fix the leaks and cracks, Palmer said, but this would require state funding. Shapley explained that an extensive engineering analysis would be required of the whole sewage system to find the leaks and fix them. State grants are available to support investigations of leaks and the repairs, he said.
One promising development is that a new county group has recently formed to lobby Westchester County governments for cleaner water. Called the Westchester Coalition for Clean Water (WCCW), the group will be calling on county and local governments to better manage sewer pollution, and stormwater flooding, increase access to the county’s waterfronts and improve the quality of fish and shellfish caught in local waterbodies.
“WCCW is calling for all waterways in Westchester to be clean and healthy, free of trash and sewage, and flood resilient within 10 years,” the group’s declaration states on CURB’s website. Members include CURB, Riverkeeper, Federated Conservationists of Westchester County, Groundwork Hudson Valley, Bronx River Alliance, the Citizens Advisory Committee of the Long Island Sound Study, Yonkers Paddling and Rowing Club, and the Beczak Environmental Education Center.
The Riverkeeper water quality map can be found at: https://data.riverkeeper.org.
Michael Gold’s work has been published in The New York Daily News, The Albany Times-Union, The Hartford Courant, and other newspapers.
