Queens Tribune

John Lipscomb was snooping around English Kills, a small canal off Newtown Creek, two weeks ago when he spotted something trapped in an oil boom.

Lipscomb was disgusted.

"There was a dead rat floating," he said later. "It has to be bad water to kill a rat."

Lipscomb is the captain - and often sole crewmember - of the R. Ian Fletcher, a small patrol boat operated by the environmental watchdog group, Riverkeeper. He surveys and tests more than 150 miles of Hudson waterways from Waterford, New York, north of Albany, down to New York Harbor, logging an average of 6,000 miles a year. What he finds along the 3-1/2-mile stretch of Newtown Creek is often the most shocking.

With Lipscomb at the helm, the R. Ian Fletcher has become the primary - albeit vigilante - enforcer of the Clean Water Act on this blighted waterway. After seven years, those efforts are paying off. Illegal dumpers, accustomed to deep-sixing at will, are on notice. ExxonMobil, Chevron, and British Petroleum deployed measures to contain seepage from the vast oil spill beneath nearby Greenpoint into the creek. And on Sept. 23, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed Superfund status for Newtown Creek.

Cleaning up the creek's toxic sludge, accrued over a century and a half, will be complicated by continued oil seepage and raw sewage discharges. Yet, until Newtown Creek is swimmable, Riverkeeper intends to keep patrolling.

On a recent Thursday, Lipscomb gathered six riders along for the day on the open, aft deck. For Lipscomb, who rose from building ships to managing a boat yard, these patrols have become a second career. He ran his finger along a laminated chart of the creek and reviewed the day's mission: taking two water quality samples; watching for dumping; and especially, watching for discharges. With that, he walked back to the cabin, started the diesel engine, and swung the 36-foot boat towards the mouth of the creek. The patrol had begun. Newtown Creek, once surrounded by natural marshland, was a booming industrial area by the mid-19th Century, its shore lined with coal yards and oil refineries. By 1870, more than 50 refineries clustered along the creek. The small estuary was becoming one of the nation's busiest waterways.

But today, maritime traffic is light. The piers where barges once tied up have fallen into disrepair in places, alongside factories and plants that are now empty husks. Still, some industry clings to the creek, such as the oil tanks and scrap heaps that squat along the shore.

A gushing pipe a mile or so along the creek heralds the oil spill. ExxonMobil recovers oil and gas from the underground spill - estimated by some experts at 30 million gallons, or three times the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill - by pumping out the groundwater beneath it. The oil is separated and stored for reuse. The water is treated and splashed from pipes like this one, into the creek.

When Lipscomb began patrolling the creek in 2002, he found oil slicks and odor, but few oil collection measures in place. Riverkeeper began testing and discovered that massive amounts of oil were leaking into the creek from the ExxonMobil property, according to Phillip Musegaas, Riverkeeper's Hudson River program director.

Riverkeeper sued ExxonMobil for violations of the Clean Water Act in 2004, an action the New York attorney general joined three years later as a plaintiff that is in settlement.

Now, leaky piers on the creek are swathed in impermeable fabric or water-resistant grout and cordoned off by layers of oil booms. Some bulkheads have been repaired. And Chevron, ExxonMobil, and BP run a total of 36 wells collecting spilled oil, which is more than four times the number in 2002, according to the companies' documents. However, no effort has been made to clean Newtown Creek itself.

Superfund status, if approved, would change that. After conducting a study of the creek, the EPA would identify polluters and compel them to pay for a comprehensive clean-up of the waterway, a process that will take years and tens of millions of dollars.

But even this would not resolve another huge pollution source: the millions of gallons of raw sewage dumped into the creek every year.

Arriving at English Kills, where the creek dead ends, Lipscomb killed the engine. The water here was as flat as a pond. Trucks rumbled over a bridge nearby. He put on a heavy, orange glove and grabbed a bottle. Leaning over the side, he carefully dipped it into the water and pulled up a sample.

Lipscomb, sometimes joined by scientists from Queens College and the Lamont Earth Observatory at Columbia University, has been taking samples to test for enterococcus, a bacteria present in untreated sewage. Over the last three years, 40 percent of the creek's samples have had concentrations exceeding - often many times over - EPA standards.

Because New York City's sewers combine sanitation lines with storm water drains, rain - sometimes as little as a tenth of an inch - can overwhelm the treatment system. The excess is discharged into New York's rivers, untreated. Newtown Creek alone has 22 such sewage overflows.

Discharges of raw sewage, which inhibit the creek's ecosystem, are a "potentially more significant issue" than the continued seepage of oil into the creek, according to a recent EPA study.

This is especially true of English Kills. At three miles from the tidal mixing at the creek's mouth, the canal lacks the current and ecosystem to process this waste, according to Lipscomb.

"Back here, three miles in, it's a pretty harsh environment because it's all coming out of a toilet or off a road," Lipscomb observed.

Still, Lipscomb says he has seen progress since he first began his patrols. He recalled one company that used to throw their broken wooden pallets into the creek.

"It was just guys doing it the old way," Lipscomb said. "The old way was if you had something broken, you threw it in the water - just threw it in the water."

But now, with Riverkeeper on watch, Lipscomb said attitudes are changing.

"All you have to do is call them up and say, 'Would you please stop that?'"