“We want people to understand that at the end of the day, we’re not talking about an obscure number of properties,” said Joshua Klainberg, the senior vice president for the NYLCVEF. “We’re saying through this analysis, one in five New Yorkers is drinking water from a service line that is lead or possible lead.”
“As yet another hot and humid summer approaches, exacerbated by the prospect of rising temperatures, we have fewer public pools per capita than any other major U.S. city and 520 miles of waterfront. As Paris reclaims its riverbanks for public recreation, here we sit in the Big Apple, surrounded by the Hudson, Harlem, and East Rivers, with zero access for swimming.”
Across the country, cities are transforming asphalt schoolyards into spongy, shady community centers. The new playground at PS 184M Shuang Wen School in Manhattan’s Chinatown, for example, has a porous turf field that can capture an estimated 1.3 million gallons of stormwater runoff.
About 20 houses in South Jamaica are prone to sewer backups every few months, say homeowners, some of whom have dealt with the issue for more than a decade. But because the sewer line is on private property, the residents are left to contend with the problem on their own.
The city’s aging infrastructure combined with more intense rainfall is resulting in more backups, which took on average more than 15 hours to resolve during the last fiscal year that ended in June.
Residents in upstate New York are putting a new statewide constitutional right to its first test in two lawsuits filed this spring, alleging that a landfill receiving garbage from the city is disrupting their right to clean air and a healthful environment.
“Water main breaks have caused outages across my community and contamination from old pipes have left homes with rust colored water for days…The people of New York City deserve functioning infrastructure and real investments are the only way to get us there.”
The discovery of arsenic in the water supply at NYCHA’s Jacob Riis Houses is a scary reminder of how little control most people have over their taps. While most of the water in New York City apartment buildings is perfectly potable, older plumbing can leach toxins, especially lead, during the final stretch from street to sink.
The ‘Rainfall Ready NYC’ plan unveiled last week offers short-term fixes to fortify the city against intense rain, as the administration continues to work on a more comprehensive long-term plan, Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala told City Limits.
By 2050, the city’s annual greenhouse gas emissions should be no higher than 12 million metric tons of carbon dioxide—in 2020, buildings alone accounted for 34 million metric tons. “It kind of paints a very stark picture of how much work we have to do and how it can’t just be business as usual.”
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