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My Dream House and the Pond

News Feed
Tuesday, March 12, 2024

I can’t talk about our house in the Bronx without telling you first about the pond out front. Given how much worse flooding can be elsewhere in New York City—even just two blocks to the east along the valley of Broadway, where the sewer is always at capacity—not to mention elsewhere in the world, I’m embarrassed to gripe about my personal pond. These days, such bodies of water are everywhere. Mine is not the only pond, but merely the pond I can’t avoid.The pond dilates and contracts according to water levels. After a string of dry days, it may shrink to a puddle. After a storm, it may stretch to the length of a freight car, spilling into the middle of the street. It’s bad for curb appeal. Its sources are environmental, structural, and complex. On the rare occasion the pond dissipates, it leaves behind a residue like black mayonnaise.The pond is almost always there. Our region is getting wetter as the climate changes. More rain, more storms, more often. The infrastructure of our city, at the edge of the rising sea, isn’t fit to handle so much water. Sudden, torrential downpours overwhelm our outdated drainage systems, especially at high tide; drench the subway system; and, in some low-lying places nearby, turn streets into sewers and basements into death traps.In summer, the pond breeds mosquitoes and collects litter: cigarette butts, scratched-off lotto tickets. In winter, I worry the pond will become a slipping hazard. This is what I say when dialing 311, the city’s helpline, in hopes of remediation. An elderly neighbor could slip on the ice and break a bone. The pond could collapse into a sinkhole.Tell it to the DOT, lady, says the Department of Environmental Protection. I do. Nope, says the Department of Transportation; because of the tree, this is a problem for Parks. I follow up. Weeks pass. The Department of Parks and Recreation directs me to the Department of Health. Months pass. What you need to do for ponding, says the DOH, is try the DEP. I write to my city-council member: I’m being given the runaround. Weeks pass without reply. Surely, this wouldn’t happen in the rich neighborhood up the hill. As a city worker myself, I know this dance well—this absurd, disjointed roundelay.[Olga Khazan: Why can’t I just rent a house? ]I ruminate over the pond. It has caused me not just embarrassment but shame. It has turned me scientific, made me into a water witch. I understand that the pond is beyond the scope of any one person, or any one agency, to handle, and that it’s perilous to ignore. The pond is a dark mirror; in it, our house appears upside down, distorted. It reflects deeper problems of stewardship and governance and the position of our house in relation to both. We are privileged to own a home. Yet we live on land that will drown, that is inundated already. The pond is a portal. Sometimes it smells, this vent hole of the netherworld. Beneath its surface, something lies concealed. Given the fact of the pond, why did we buy the house? Now that we dwell in the house, what to do about the pond?Technically, the pond isn’t on our property at all. Our home inspector had no reason to suspect it. It belongs to the city, along with the street where it spreads. This is what we were told on the rainy day we arrived for the final walk-through before closing on the house in the deadly spring of 2020: The pond was up to the city to fix, with taxpayer dollars.Plenty of folks were deserting New York then. I mean hundreds of thousands. That we were committed to staying in the city was both an act of necessity and a point of pride. For my husband and I, the house was a step up from the crowded three-room apartment in Washington Heights where we’d sheltered in place, away from the mad snarl of highways whose traffic had given our boys asthma: a place to stretch out, a sign of our upward mobility. The American dream. To a Black family without generational wealth, some of whose ancestors were property themselves, it signified even more: Shelter. Safety. Equity. Arrival. A future for our children.We fell in love with the house as soon as we saw it, a run-down detached brick home in a working-class neighborhood with a little garden in back and windows on all four sides. The house had solid bones. We rejoiced when our offer was accepted. Yet until the day of the final walk-through, we had never visited the house in the rain.That morning, the pond greeted us like the opposite of a welcome mat, giving shape to whatever latent misgivings we had about making this move. I felt hoodwinked. Buyer beware! I waded into the middle of that bad omen to gauge its depth. Murky water sloshed over the tops of my rain boots, drenching my socks. Good Lord. It was so much more significant than a puddle. I wondered what it was, how to name it, and why it was here. Was what I stood on actually land, or something less concrete? Could it have been a wetland, once? Why hadn’t the pond been disclosed? Because it didn’t have to be, said the tight-lipped seller’s agent representing the estate of the previous owner, an old man named Jeremiah Breen.That night, my husband and I lay awake in bed, discussing our options. Sirens sounded up from the street. People were dying of COVID all around us. Purportedly, the house sat outside the floodplain. But what if the pond got bigger with worsening weather? Would it pour into the basement? Was the house’s foundation as solid as we’d been told? We doubted that the city would handle the underlying issues—not while hobbled by the pandemic. Would flood insurance be enough? Would the house be around to bequeath to our children, or would it be underwater? Was it an asset or a millstone? How high would the waters rise? How soon? Did we even believe, deep down in our souls, of ownership of this kind? Why fake like we or anyone else could own the land?Such questions of capital consumed us deep into the night. The bottom line was this: If we pulled out of the deal, we’d lose our down payment, amounting to two years of college tuition for one of our kids. By dawn, we admitted our disillusionment. We’d already crossed the Rubicon, imbricated in the twisted system that brought about the pond. Or so we said because nevertheless, we still loved the house.We renegotiated the purchase price; we moved in.Later, I learned that many current maps for flood risk overlap with maps of historic housing discrimination. Geography determines a neighborhood’s risk and, this being America, so does race. Neighborhoods that suffered from redlining in the 1930s—when our house was built—face a far higher risk of flooding today. The pond suggested a submerged history beneath the daily surface of things.The house was not just a risk but a wreck. Its rusty tanks sweated out oil that looked like blood onto the basement floor. Most of its windowpanes were cracked; its floors, uneven; its doors, out of plumb. It lacked adequate insulation. Under the creaky old planks, we discovered a newspaper dating back to the Depression. The front page addressed the use of antiques in home decoration. It featured a photo of a card room with an 18th-century Queen Anne table being used for bridge. How far back could I imagine? The paper flaked into pieces like the wings of moths when I tried to turn the page.By the time Jeremiah Breen took possession of the house, bridge had fallen out of fashion. At the time the table was carved, this part of the Bronx was marsh. When I input our zip code into the online archive of the U.S. Geological Survey, I can see on a century-old map what this wetland looked like before it was developed into the grid of streets, shops, houses, schools, and apartment buildings that make up the neighborhood now. In 1900, the land is still veined by blue streams. A pin in the shape of a teardrop marks the spot of our present address, smack-dab in a bend of a waterway called Tibbetts Brook. The brook was named after a settler whose descendants were driven off the land for their royalist sympathies during the Revolutionary War. Before that, it had another name. The Munsee Lenape called it Mosholu. We live on the ghost of this rivulet, just one of the city’s dozens of lost streams.[Hannah Ritchie: A slightly hotter world could still be a better one]The teardrop confirmed what I sensed about the true nature of my pond, which was so much more than a puddle, and not mine at all, but rather a part of a much larger body of water.Waterways like Tibbetts Brook were once the lifeblood of the city. As New York grew, in the 17th and 18th centuries, into the world’s supreme port, it counted on such freshwater streams for transportation, drinking water, fishing, and waterpower for grain mills and sawmills. The brook became polluted; eventually, railroad lines overtook waterways as transportation routes. Waterpower was replaced by steam. Steam was replaced by electric power. The banks of the streams became industrial wastelands, which became Black and brown neighborhoods. Plundered water bodies. Plundered peoples.The works of Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecologist, and Herbert Kraft, a scholar of the Lenape, help me imagine a preindustrial, pre-European version of my home place. The Wiechquaeseck community of Lenape lived in a settlement nearby, around Spuytin Duyvil Creek, fed by the waters of Mosholu. They lived mostly out of doors and owned no more than they could carry. Wealth was being in communion with one another, and in balance with the abundant natural world, “filled with an almost infinite variety of plants, animals, insects, clouds and stones, each of which possessed spirits no less important than those of human beings,” according to Kraft.All I have to do to see a remaining pocket of that natural world that was once my home is walk three blocks east to Van Cortlandt Park, where a narrow belt of lowland swamp forest still survives along a trail around open water. This small freshwater wetland is ecologically precious, home to many plant and animal species. It slows erosion, prevents flooding by retaining stormwater, filters and decomposes pollutants, and converts carbon dioxide into oxygen.Hunting the swamp are barred owls and red-tailed hawks. Water lilies, swamp loosestrife, and arrowhead each grow at different water depths, thickening the open water by midsummer. Mallards and wood ducks feed, nest, preen, and glide among dense strands of cattail, buttonbush, arrow arum, and blue flag. Eastern kingbirds and belted kingfishers screech from the treetops while painted turtles sun themselves on the lodges of muskrats. These, too, are my neighbors.The Van Cortlandt Swamp is fed by Tibbetts Brook, before the brook divides down into the concrete conduit, its tail buried. This little swamp is a patch of the 2,000 acres of freshwater wetland remaining in the city today, out of the 224,000 acres it boasted 200 years ago.“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back where it was,” Toni Morrison once wrote. From that point of view, the pond in front of our house is not a nuisance but rather the brook remembering itself. Mosholu. How might Thoreau have described my pond? The pond is a gift to the birds who stop there to bathe, and a place for wildlife to slake their thirst at night: possum, coyote, skunk. The pond is a lieu de mémoire, a reservoir. When the sun hits it at the right angle, the pond’s surface dances with jewels of light. When night comes, the pond throws back the orange glow of the streetlight. The pond is the paved-over wetland, reasserting its form.The Lenape believed that everything in nature has a spirit, and should be given thanks, and asked permission before taking from it. I doubt Jacobus Van Cortlandt, landowner, enslaver, and mayor of New York, asked permission when he had the Black people he owned dam up Tibbetts Brook in 1699 to install a sawmill and gristmill on his plantation. Some of the skeletons of those he enslaved were unearthed by construction workers laying down railroad tracks in the 1870s. The mill operated until 1889, when the city purchased the land for its park. At that point, the millpond became a small, decorative lake. Sometimes I walk to this lake, next to the African burial ground, to watch the damselflies and contemplate what lies beneath.At the lake’s south end, in 1912, the brook was piped into a storm drain and rechanneled into an underground tunnel that merged into a brick sewer below Broadway. This enabled the construction of streets and buildings south of the park, including our house, on top of backfill and city trash. What does it mean to live in a place where rivers are harnessed to carry our waste away, so we don’t have to think about it?According to the Department of Environmental Protection, 4 million to 5 million gallons of water flow into the Broadway sewer on a dry day from Tibbetts Brook and the millpond alone. That water runs through the sewer, where it mixes with raw household sewage, and then on to Wards Island Wastewater Treatment Plant. But when it rains, the amount of water can be five times that. At least 60 times a year, the treatment plant gets overwhelmed by rainwater and shuts down. Untreated sewage and rainwater are then discharged into the Harlem River, in violation of federal law.Now there are plans to “daylight” the subterranean stretch of Tibbetts Brook, bringing it back to the surface. This restoration will alleviate flooding by rerouting the buried section of the brook directly into the Harlem River, not exactly along its historic route, upon which our house sits. Instead, it will flow slightly to the east, along an old railway line that accidentally reverted to an urban wetland after the freight trains stopped running in the 1980s. This gully runs behind BJ’s Wholesale Club and the strip mall with the nail salon and the Flame hibachi and the Staples—already rewilding with tall marsh grasses and reeds.There is talk of undoing the past, of giving some of what was taken from nature back to nature. There is talk of a bike path along a greenway costing millions of dollars. If the project comes to pass by 2030 as planned, it will be New York City’s first daylighting story, and we will be in the watershed. Unburying the brook seems like a good thing. I hope, when it beautifies the landscape, that my neighbors can still afford to live here.We were still living out of boxes in early September 2021 when the National Weather Service declared New York City’s first flash-flood emergency. Our boys were by then 8 and 10. More than three inches of rain fell in just one hour, shattering a record set by a storm the week before. Was it even correct to call it a 500-year rainfall event when the past had become such a poor guide to the present? The remnants of Hurricane Ida turned the nearby Major Deegan Expressway back into a river, stranding cars, buses, and trucks in high water. That image, from our new neighborhood, became an international symbol of the city’s unpreparedness. Every single subway line in the city was stalled. A thousand straphangers were evacuated from 17 stuck trains. “We are BEYOND not ready for climate change,” a city-council member declared on Twitter.The pond in front of our house was whipped into waves by the wind. It was as sure a sign as any that we were living on borrowed time. But in the weeks that followed Ida, against our better judgment, we had Con Edison connect us to the gas line under the kettle in the street where the water gathers. We’d have preferred to heat the house with geothermal energy, but couldn’t find anybody yet trained to install it. At times, the house feels like a snare. I mean to say, if I remain embarrassed as a homeowner, it is not on account of the pond.Just as remarkable as the pond out front is the garden out back. Down on my knees with my hands in the soil, I weed and tend the beds. My mother has given me a Lenten rose. It is the first thing to bloom in spring. I marvel at the shoots coming up from the bulbs planted before me by Mary, wife of Jeremiah, whose name was not on the deed but was told to me by our neighbor Eve. Daffodils, peonies, hyacinths, and tulips.I live in Lenapehoking, the unceded territory of the Lenape people, past and present. Generations before we bought this land, it was stolen. I believe we have a responsibility to honor them by becoming better stewards of the land we inhabit. I want these words to be more than words; I want them to be deeds.I’m learning to grow food for our table, sensing that the truest sacrament is eating the earth’s body. I have planted lettuce, tomatoes, sweet peas, and beets. I collect water in a barrel under the gutter spout. I see that our land is a quilt; that our house is only a structure among structures among pollinating plants visited by bees.The pond is part of the place where we live. To prevent stagnation, I sometimes stir it with a stick. Through the front windows, I watch it swell when it rains. I observe the birds who stop there to bathe: warblers, tanagers, grosbeaks, sparrows. Some of them are endangered. A small reparation: I am teaching our children their names.This essay has been adapted from Emily Raboteau’s forthcoming book, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse.”

Would the house be around to bequeath to our children, or would it be underwater?

I can’t talk about our house in the Bronx without telling you first about the pond out front. Given how much worse flooding can be elsewhere in New York City—even just two blocks to the east along the valley of Broadway, where the sewer is always at capacity—not to mention elsewhere in the world, I’m embarrassed to gripe about my personal pond. These days, such bodies of water are everywhere. Mine is not the only pond, but merely the pond I can’t avoid.

The pond dilates and contracts according to water levels. After a string of dry days, it may shrink to a puddle. After a storm, it may stretch to the length of a freight car, spilling into the middle of the street. It’s bad for curb appeal. Its sources are environmental, structural, and complex. On the rare occasion the pond dissipates, it leaves behind a residue like black mayonnaise.

The pond is almost always there. Our region is getting wetter as the climate changes. More rain, more storms, more often. The infrastructure of our city, at the edge of the rising sea, isn’t fit to handle so much water. Sudden, torrential downpours overwhelm our outdated drainage systems, especially at high tide; drench the subway system; and, in some low-lying places nearby, turn streets into sewers and basements into death traps.

In summer, the pond breeds mosquitoes and collects litter: cigarette butts, scratched-off lotto tickets. In winter, I worry the pond will become a slipping hazard. This is what I say when dialing 311, the city’s helpline, in hopes of remediation. An elderly neighbor could slip on the ice and break a bone. The pond could collapse into a sinkhole.

Tell it to the DOT, lady, says the Department of Environmental Protection. I do. Nope, says the Department of Transportation; because of the tree, this is a problem for Parks. I follow up. Weeks pass. The Department of Parks and Recreation directs me to the Department of Health. Months pass. What you need to do for ponding, says the DOH, is try the DEP. I write to my city-council member: I’m being given the runaround. Weeks pass without reply. Surely, this wouldn’t happen in the rich neighborhood up the hill. As a city worker myself, I know this dance well—this absurd, disjointed roundelay.

[Olga Khazan: Why can’t I just rent a house? ]

I ruminate over the pond. It has caused me not just embarrassment but shame. It has turned me scientific, made me into a water witch. I understand that the pond is beyond the scope of any one person, or any one agency, to handle, and that it’s perilous to ignore. The pond is a dark mirror; in it, our house appears upside down, distorted. It reflects deeper problems of stewardship and governance and the position of our house in relation to both. We are privileged to own a home. Yet we live on land that will drown, that is inundated already. The pond is a portal. Sometimes it smells, this vent hole of the netherworld. Beneath its surface, something lies concealed. Given the fact of the pond, why did we buy the house? Now that we dwell in the house, what to do about the pond?

Technically, the pond isn’t on our property at all. Our home inspector had no reason to suspect it. It belongs to the city, along with the street where it spreads. This is what we were told on the rainy day we arrived for the final walk-through before closing on the house in the deadly spring of 2020: The pond was up to the city to fix, with taxpayer dollars.

Plenty of folks were deserting New York then. I mean hundreds of thousands. That we were committed to staying in the city was both an act of necessity and a point of pride. For my husband and I, the house was a step up from the crowded three-room apartment in Washington Heights where we’d sheltered in place, away from the mad snarl of highways whose traffic had given our boys asthma: a place to stretch out, a sign of our upward mobility. The American dream. To a Black family without generational wealth, some of whose ancestors were property themselves, it signified even more: Shelter. Safety. Equity. Arrival. A future for our children.

We fell in love with the house as soon as we saw it, a run-down detached brick home in a working-class neighborhood with a little garden in back and windows on all four sides. The house had solid bones. We rejoiced when our offer was accepted. Yet until the day of the final walk-through, we had never visited the house in the rain.

That morning, the pond greeted us like the opposite of a welcome mat, giving shape to whatever latent misgivings we had about making this move. I felt hoodwinked. Buyer beware! I waded into the middle of that bad omen to gauge its depth. Murky water sloshed over the tops of my rain boots, drenching my socks. Good Lord. It was so much more significant than a puddle. I wondered what it was, how to name it, and why it was here. Was what I stood on actually land, or something less concrete? Could it have been a wetland, once? Why hadn’t the pond been disclosed? Because it didn’t have to be, said the tight-lipped seller’s agent representing the estate of the previous owner, an old man named Jeremiah Breen.

That night, my husband and I lay awake in bed, discussing our options. Sirens sounded up from the street. People were dying of COVID all around us. Purportedly, the house sat outside the floodplain. But what if the pond got bigger with worsening weather? Would it pour into the basement? Was the house’s foundation as solid as we’d been told? We doubted that the city would handle the underlying issues—not while hobbled by the pandemic. Would flood insurance be enough? Would the house be around to bequeath to our children, or would it be underwater? Was it an asset or a millstone? How high would the waters rise? How soon? Did we even believe, deep down in our souls, of ownership of this kind? Why fake like we or anyone else could own the land?

Such questions of capital consumed us deep into the night. The bottom line was this: If we pulled out of the deal, we’d lose our down payment, amounting to two years of college tuition for one of our kids. By dawn, we admitted our disillusionment. We’d already crossed the Rubicon, imbricated in the twisted system that brought about the pond. Or so we said because nevertheless, we still loved the house.

We renegotiated the purchase price; we moved in.


Later, I learned that many current maps for flood risk overlap with maps of historic housing discrimination. Geography determines a neighborhood’s risk and, this being America, so does race. Neighborhoods that suffered from redlining in the 1930s—when our house was built—face a far higher risk of flooding today. The pond suggested a submerged history beneath the daily surface of things.

The house was not just a risk but a wreck. Its rusty tanks sweated out oil that looked like blood onto the basement floor. Most of its windowpanes were cracked; its floors, uneven; its doors, out of plumb. It lacked adequate insulation. Under the creaky old planks, we discovered a newspaper dating back to the Depression. The front page addressed the use of antiques in home decoration. It featured a photo of a card room with an 18th-century Queen Anne table being used for bridge. How far back could I imagine? The paper flaked into pieces like the wings of moths when I tried to turn the page.

By the time Jeremiah Breen took possession of the house, bridge had fallen out of fashion. At the time the table was carved, this part of the Bronx was marsh. When I input our zip code into the online archive of the U.S. Geological Survey, I can see on a century-old map what this wetland looked like before it was developed into the grid of streets, shops, houses, schools, and apartment buildings that make up the neighborhood now. In 1900, the land is still veined by blue streams. A pin in the shape of a teardrop marks the spot of our present address, smack-dab in a bend of a waterway called Tibbetts Brook. The brook was named after a settler whose descendants were driven off the land for their royalist sympathies during the Revolutionary War. Before that, it had another name. The Munsee Lenape called it Mosholu. We live on the ghost of this rivulet, just one of the city’s dozens of lost streams.

[Hannah Ritchie: A slightly hotter world could still be a better one]

The teardrop confirmed what I sensed about the true nature of my pond, which was so much more than a puddle, and not mine at all, but rather a part of a much larger body of water.

Waterways like Tibbetts Brook were once the lifeblood of the city. As New York grew, in the 17th and 18th centuries, into the world’s supreme port, it counted on such freshwater streams for transportation, drinking water, fishing, and waterpower for grain mills and sawmills. The brook became polluted; eventually, railroad lines overtook waterways as transportation routes. Waterpower was replaced by steam. Steam was replaced by electric power. The banks of the streams became industrial wastelands, which became Black and brown neighborhoods. Plundered water bodies. Plundered peoples.

The works of Eric Sanderson, a landscape ecologist, and Herbert Kraft, a scholar of the Lenape, help me imagine a preindustrial, pre-European version of my home place. The Wiechquaeseck community of Lenape lived in a settlement nearby, around Spuytin Duyvil Creek, fed by the waters of Mosholu. They lived mostly out of doors and owned no more than they could carry. Wealth was being in communion with one another, and in balance with the abundant natural world, “filled with an almost infinite variety of plants, animals, insects, clouds and stones, each of which possessed spirits no less important than those of human beings,” according to Kraft.

All I have to do to see a remaining pocket of that natural world that was once my home is walk three blocks east to Van Cortlandt Park, where a narrow belt of lowland swamp forest still survives along a trail around open water. This small freshwater wetland is ecologically precious, home to many plant and animal species. It slows erosion, prevents flooding by retaining stormwater, filters and decomposes pollutants, and converts carbon dioxide into oxygen.

Hunting the swamp are barred owls and red-tailed hawks. Water lilies, swamp loosestrife, and arrowhead each grow at different water depths, thickening the open water by midsummer. Mallards and wood ducks feed, nest, preen, and glide among dense strands of cattail, buttonbush, arrow arum, and blue flag. Eastern kingbirds and belted kingfishers screech from the treetops while painted turtles sun themselves on the lodges of muskrats. These, too, are my neighbors.

The Van Cortlandt Swamp is fed by Tibbetts Brook, before the brook divides down into the concrete conduit, its tail buried. This little swamp is a patch of the 2,000 acres of freshwater wetland remaining in the city today, out of the 224,000 acres it boasted 200 years ago.

“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back where it was,” Toni Morrison once wrote. From that point of view, the pond in front of our house is not a nuisance but rather the brook remembering itself. Mosholu. How might Thoreau have described my pond? The pond is a gift to the birds who stop there to bathe, and a place for wildlife to slake their thirst at night: possum, coyote, skunk. The pond is a lieu de mémoire, a reservoir. When the sun hits it at the right angle, the pond’s surface dances with jewels of light. When night comes, the pond throws back the orange glow of the streetlight. The pond is the paved-over wetland, reasserting its form.

The Lenape believed that everything in nature has a spirit, and should be given thanks, and asked permission before taking from it. I doubt Jacobus Van Cortlandt, landowner, enslaver, and mayor of New York, asked permission when he had the Black people he owned dam up Tibbetts Brook in 1699 to install a sawmill and gristmill on his plantation. Some of the skeletons of those he enslaved were unearthed by construction workers laying down railroad tracks in the 1870s. The mill operated until 1889, when the city purchased the land for its park. At that point, the millpond became a small, decorative lake. Sometimes I walk to this lake, next to the African burial ground, to watch the damselflies and contemplate what lies beneath.

At the lake’s south end, in 1912, the brook was piped into a storm drain and rechanneled into an underground tunnel that merged into a brick sewer below Broadway. This enabled the construction of streets and buildings south of the park, including our house, on top of backfill and city trash. What does it mean to live in a place where rivers are harnessed to carry our waste away, so we don’t have to think about it?

According to the Department of Environmental Protection, 4 million to 5 million gallons of water flow into the Broadway sewer on a dry day from Tibbetts Brook and the millpond alone. That water runs through the sewer, where it mixes with raw household sewage, and then on to Wards Island Wastewater Treatment Plant. But when it rains, the amount of water can be five times that. At least 60 times a year, the treatment plant gets overwhelmed by rainwater and shuts down. Untreated sewage and rainwater are then discharged into the Harlem River, in violation of federal law.

Now there are plans to “daylight” the subterranean stretch of Tibbetts Brook, bringing it back to the surface. This restoration will alleviate flooding by rerouting the buried section of the brook directly into the Harlem River, not exactly along its historic route, upon which our house sits. Instead, it will flow slightly to the east, along an old railway line that accidentally reverted to an urban wetland after the freight trains stopped running in the 1980s. This gully runs behind BJ’s Wholesale Club and the strip mall with the nail salon and the Flame hibachi and the Staples—already rewilding with tall marsh grasses and reeds.

There is talk of undoing the past, of giving some of what was taken from nature back to nature. There is talk of a bike path along a greenway costing millions of dollars. If the project comes to pass by 2030 as planned, it will be New York City’s first daylighting story, and we will be in the watershed. Unburying the brook seems like a good thing. I hope, when it beautifies the landscape, that my neighbors can still afford to live here.


We were still living out of boxes in early September 2021 when the National Weather Service declared New York City’s first flash-flood emergency. Our boys were by then 8 and 10. More than three inches of rain fell in just one hour, shattering a record set by a storm the week before. Was it even correct to call it a 500-year rainfall event when the past had become such a poor guide to the present? The remnants of Hurricane Ida turned the nearby Major Deegan Expressway back into a river, stranding cars, buses, and trucks in high water. That image, from our new neighborhood, became an international symbol of the city’s unpreparedness. Every single subway line in the city was stalled. A thousand straphangers were evacuated from 17 stuck trains. “We are BEYOND not ready for climate change,” a city-council member declared on Twitter.

The pond in front of our house was whipped into waves by the wind. It was as sure a sign as any that we were living on borrowed time. But in the weeks that followed Ida, against our better judgment, we had Con Edison connect us to the gas line under the kettle in the street where the water gathers. We’d have preferred to heat the house with geothermal energy, but couldn’t find anybody yet trained to install it. At times, the house feels like a snare. I mean to say, if I remain embarrassed as a homeowner, it is not on account of the pond.

Just as remarkable as the pond out front is the garden out back. Down on my knees with my hands in the soil, I weed and tend the beds. My mother has given me a Lenten rose. It is the first thing to bloom in spring. I marvel at the shoots coming up from the bulbs planted before me by Mary, wife of Jeremiah, whose name was not on the deed but was told to me by our neighbor Eve. Daffodils, peonies, hyacinths, and tulips.

I live in Lenapehoking, the unceded territory of the Lenape people, past and present. Generations before we bought this land, it was stolen. I believe we have a responsibility to honor them by becoming better stewards of the land we inhabit. I want these words to be more than words; I want them to be deeds.

I’m learning to grow food for our table, sensing that the truest sacrament is eating the earth’s body. I have planted lettuce, tomatoes, sweet peas, and beets. I collect water in a barrel under the gutter spout. I see that our land is a quilt; that our house is only a structure among structures among pollinating plants visited by bees.

The pond is part of the place where we live. To prevent stagnation, I sometimes stir it with a stick. Through the front windows, I watch it swell when it rains. I observe the birds who stop there to bathe: warblers, tanagers, grosbeaks, sparrows. Some of them are endangered. A small reparation: I am teaching our children their names.

This essay has been adapted from Emily Raboteau’s forthcoming book, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse.”

Read the full story here.
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Environment watchdog confirms Sydney’s mystery beach balls likely came from sewage treatment plants

NSW EPA investigation finds debris that washed up on Sydney beaches in 2024 ‘consistent with a land-based sewage source’Get our afternoon election email, free app or daily news podcastAuthorities investigating mystery balls of debris that closed New South Wales beaches in recent months have determined the they likely originated from Sydney sewage treatment plants.On Friday, the NSW Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) revealed its investigation into the source of debris balls that closed beaches in Sydney and the south coast of the state found that they likely originated from Sydney Water’s land-based sewage treatment network. Continue reading...

Authorities investigating mystery balls of debris that closed New South Wales beaches in recent months have determined the they likely originated from Sydney sewage treatment plants.On Friday, the NSW Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) revealed its investigation into the source of debris balls that closed beaches in Sydney and the south coast of the state found that they likely originated from Sydney Water’s land-based sewage treatment network.“The development comes after a comprehensive scientific and technical investigation found similarities between the make-up of the debris balls and samples taken from several of Sydney Water’s major waste-water treatment plants, including those at Malabar and Bondi,” the EPA said in a statement.In November, Sydney Water had said “there have been no issues with the normal operations of the Bondi or Malabar wastewater treatment plants”.EPA director of operations, Adam Gilligan, said it was “a significant step forward in our investigation but there is still work to do”.“While we are yet to determine exactly what caused the pollution incidents to occur when they did, we can say the composition and the characteristics of the debris balls are consistent with a land-based sewage source,” Gilligan said.The EPA issued an investigation notice to Sydney Water, requiring it to undertake oceanographic modelling of the dispersion of the debris balls; complete a sampling and analysis program at its sewage treatment plants; and assess its deep ocean outfall systems and sewerage pipe network to identify where in its systems the debris balls originated to prevent a recurrence.Sydney Water’s acting executive general manager of water and environment services, Louise Beer, said in a Friday statement that an internal review had been implemented.“It is important to note, all coastal treatment facilities are operating normally, and we are compliant with regulatory standards,” Beer said in a statement.“As we could not find any faults with our system, we conducted widespread sampling and analysis of the debris balls at Sydney Water’s laboratories and appointed an independent oceanographer to determine the potential geographic origin of the debris balls.”The investigation indicated the debris balls may have formed due to an increased load of fats, oils, and greases in the wastewater system over time, with unique oceanographic factors and weather conditions playing a role in why the debris balls appeared on beaches this summer, Sydney Water said.It urged the city’s residents to keep fats, oils and greases out of drains.More details soon …

Lawsuit claims Gore-Tex poisoned drinking water near Maryland facilities

Firm makes product used to waterproof clothing and allegedly polluted water with some kinds of PfasThe makers of Gore-Tex, a popular product commonly used to waterproof clothing by companies such as the North Face and Mountain Hardware, poisoned drinking water and sickened residents around their facilities in rural Maryland, two lawsuits allege.The facilities, about 90 miles north-east of Baltimore, polluted drinking water with levels up to 700 times above federal limits with some kinds of Pfas, a group of toxins known as “forever chemicals” due to their environmental longevity. The tainted water caused high rates of cancers and other diseases linked to Pfas exposure in the area, a class action suit alleges. Continue reading...

The makers of Gore-Tex, a popular product commonly used to waterproof clothing by companies such as the North Face and Mountain Hardware, poisoned drinking water and sickened residents around their facilities in rural Maryland, two lawsuits allege.The facilities, about 90 miles north-east of Baltimore, polluted drinking water with levels up to 700 times above federal limits with some kinds of Pfas, a group of toxins known as “forever chemicals” due to their environmental longevity. The tainted water caused high rates of cancers and other diseases linked to Pfas exposure in the area, a class action suit alleges.Meanwhile, Maryland is suing WL Gore and Associates, Gore-Tex’s parent company, over alleged environmental violations. Each suit claims Gore knew about its products’ dangers as early as the 1980s, but continued to put Pfas into local waters, which drain into the Chesapeake Bay, and emit the substances from smokestacks.The company has said it only learned about PFOA, a common type of Pfas compound, in nearby groundwater two years ago, and has suggested it is not responsible for at least some of the pollution.Philip Federico, an attorney for the plaintiffs, dismissed the idea, noting the chemicals in the water match what Gore used. “They’re really not in a position to say it’s not their Pfas – they know it is, and everyone else knows it,” Federico said.Pfas are a class of about 15,000 chemicals typically used to make products that resist water, stains and heat. They can accumulate in humans and the environment, and are linked to cancer, kidney disease, liver problems, immune disorders, birth defects and other serious health problems.The EPA in 2023 found virtually no level of exposure to PFOA in drinking water is safe. PFOA was used in Gore’s production process, the suit alleges. The chemicals that were emitted from the smokestacks probably landed on the nearby ground and percolated into groundwater that contaminated wells and poisoned agricultural soil. Similar issues have been reported around other Pfas facilities.Gore, a company with an estimated value of nearly $5bn, used PFOA to produce PTFE, a type of Pfas, applied to clothing, carpets, furniture, food packaging and more. The company set up a webpage defending its record, noting it has conducted some investigations. It has said it is working with state regulators, as well as providing drinking water or filtration systems to some residents.“Gore denies the allegations in the various lawsuits that have been recently filed. We have been and will remain committed to the health and safety of our Associates, our community, and the environment,” says a statement on the website.It added: “Working with our suppliers, we eliminated PFOA, the substance cited in the lawsuit, from our supply chain many years ago. We will defend ourselves against the meritless allegations through the legal process with facts and science.”The suit details how the Pfas industry knew throughout the 1970s that the substances were dangerous, and a Gore executive knew by 1990 at the latest. Still, the company’s Pfas waste grew as operations expanded, and the company told employees the substance was harmless even as staff got sick and some died of Pfas-linked disease.The suit alleges Gore effectively lied to regulators about Pfas air pollution beginning in 1995 and the company also later destroyed documents detailing its pollution, the suit alleges.“Gore had actual knowledge, knew and fully understood the toxicity and danger to human life caused by APFO/PFOA at all times by its production and dispersion activities,” the complaint reads.About 4,000 people are part of the class action suit. It and the state of Maryland demands the company cover cleanup costs, pay for medical costs, pay for upgrades to water utilities and provide clean water to residents, among other actions.

More water recycling could help fix Colorado River shortfall. California has a ways to go, report says

UCLA researchers say California and other states aren't recycling enough water. They recommend reusing much more to ease water shortages along the Colorado River.

California isn’t recycling nearly enough water, according to a new report by UCLA researchers, who say the state should treat and reuse more wastewater to help address the Colorado River’s chronic shortages.Analyzing data for large sewage treatment plants in seven states that rely on Colorado River water, the researchers found California is recycling only 22% of its treated wastewater. That’s far behind the country’s driest two states: Nevada, which is recycling 85% of its wastewater, and Arizona, which is reusing 52%.The report, based on 2022 data, found other states in the Colorado River Basin are trailing, with New Mexico recycling 18%, Colorado 3.6%, Wyoming 3.3% and Utah less than 1%.The researchers said that California and other states, with support from the federal government, should scale up investments in water recycling facilities to help as the region faces demands to dramatically reduce water use in order to prevent the river’s reservoirs from falling to critically low levels. They said the Southwest needs to prioritize water recycling to adapt as droughts grow more intense and long-lasting with global warming.“We’re facing a hotter, drier future and we need to pursue water recycling aggressively if we’re going to ensure a sustainable, resilient water supply,” said Noah Garrison, a water researcher at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.“There is huge opportunity here,” Garrison said. “We need to create these new and resilient, reliable sources of water.”The study shows that across the seven states, an average of 26% of municipal wastewater is being recycled.If California and other states were to pursue targets of recycling 40% or 50% of their wastewater, the researchers said, that would go a long way toward addressing the river’s gap between supply and demand. If every state achieved even 30%, they calculated, that would generate more than 450,000 acre-feet of water annually — almost as much as the total annual usage of Los Angeles.“These modest gains in water reuse could make an enormous difference on the Colorado,” said co-author Mark Gold, a UCLA adjunct professor and director of water scarcity solutions at the Natural Resources Defense Council.The biggest potential lies in California, which uses more Colorado River water than any other state. The water flows in aqueducts and canals to desert farmlands and cities from Palm Springs to San Diego.Some of Southern California’s urban wastewater is treated and reused to irrigate golf courses and parks, while Orange County has a system that purifies wastewater and puts it into the groundwater basin for use as drinking water.Other treated effluent is discharged into rivers or the ocean. Penstocks at the Gene Pumping Plant, near Lake Havasu, transport Colorado River water to Southern California. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times) The researchers compiled statewide data for all seven states in the Colorado River Basin, including areas that rely on the river as well as other areas that do not.In coastal Southern California, from Ventura County to San Diego County, 29% of wastewater is currently recycled, the researchers said. According to state data, building three large planned water recycling projects would enable the region to reuse more than 56%.Once fully built, these three facilities, planned by San Diego, Los Angeles and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, would dramatically increase local water supplies. The total cost for the three projects and new water distribution systems could exceed $25 billion, the report said.Although the costs will be substantial, building these projects should be viewed as vital infrastructure improvements, Gold said.“We’re clearly not managing water in a sustainable manner, and recycled water is just so critical as a way to do that,” Gold said.The researchers said that major state and federal investments will be necessary for the work, and that it should be undertaken with urgency.The Colorado River provides water for cities from Denver to Los Angeles, 30 Native tribes and farming communities from the Rocky Mountains to northern Mexico.The river has long been overused, and its reservoirs have declined dramatically amid persistent dry conditions since 2000. The average flow of the river has shrunk about 20% since 2000, and scientists have estimated that roughly half of that decline has been caused by global warming driven by the burning of fossil fuels.The decline in flow is projected to worsen as temperatures rise. The All-American Canal delivers Colorado River water into California’s Imperial County. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) “We can’t afford not to move forward with water recycling because of the importance of reliability and climate resilience,” Gold said.The river’s average difference between supply and demand has been estimated to be between 2 million acre-feet and 4 million acre-feet annually, Gold said. A large portion of this could be offset by recycling more water.“But this can’t happen without major federal and state investments,” Gold said.The researchers called for the federal Environmental Protection Agency to develop water reuse goals, and for state governments to commit to targets — such as 30%, 40% or 50% — and work with other agencies to secure funding. They also said states need to collect better data on water recycling.Several states lacked that basic information, and researchers had to call treatment plants one by one to learn how much water is being treated and reused.“The lack of adequate data is a significant barrier,” Garrison said. “The fact that most of the states have little idea what’s happening is a real and growing problem.”The researchers said California has the nation’s most comprehensive regulations on recycled water and also leads other states in tracking data on reuse. They said the state adopted ambitious water recycling goals in 2009 but those targets were effectively abandoned under a state strategy adopted in 2022.“The real problem is that in 15 years, we’ve made almost no progress,” Garrison said. “It’s really time for California to start investing much more heavily in this as a solution, particularly given the uncertainty around Colorado River Basin water.”Over the last few years, the State Water Resources Control Board has provided $1.4 billion for projects that will produce an additional 125,000 acre-feet of recycled water annually, said E. Joaquin Esquivel, the board’s chair.“Increasing recycled water use is a top priority for the state and a key part of Gov. Newsom’s strategy to buffer the anticipated loss of 10% of our water supplies by 2040 due to hotter, drier conditions,” Esquivel said in an email.He said that although there has been tremendous progress by the state and Southern California agencies in recent years, “continued investment and planning is critical to leverage the full potential of recycled water and simultaneously reduce reliance on the Colorado River.”

Houston water bill rates to increase by average of 6% starting in April

The increase is part of a series of rate hikes approved in 2021 as part of the City of Houston’s consent decree with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the State of Texas following multiple sewage spills that violated the federal Clean Water Act.

City of Houston The increase is part of a series of rate hikes approved in 2021 as part of the City of Houston’s consent decree with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the State of Texas following multiple sewage spills that violated the federal Clean Water Act. Dominic Anthony Walsh/Houston Public MediaA motorist navigates a water leak at the intersection of Main and Elgin streets in Houston on Feb. 25, 2025.Houston residents can expect to see increases on their water bills starting in April as part of the city's five-year plan to fund its sewer system repairs. According to Houston Public Works, customers can expect an average increase of 6%, but the exact rate will vary from customer to customer. "This does not mean all customers are receiving a 6% increase on their bill," a Houston Public Works spokesperson told Houston Public Media. "The new percentage for each customer is calculated by customer category and consumption." This increase is the second-to-last in a series of five rate hikes approved in 2021 as part of the City of Houston's consent decree with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the State of Texas. The consent decree came after years of negotiation between the city and the EPA over Houston's multiple sewage spills that violated the federal Clean Water Act. However, the agreement was only finalized after the environmental advocacy group Bayou City Waterkeeper filed a lawsuit in the summer of 2018, claiming the city had more than 9,000 violations over five years. The five years of rate increases are expected to raise approximately $2 billion, which will be spent over the next 15 years on sewer improvements to stop overflows. "These rate adjustments are necessary to pay increases in the cost of operating, maintaining and repairing the combined water and wastewater utility system; debt service on the utility system's bonds and other obligations of the utility system; protect the financial integrity of the utility system; and comply with certain bond covenants and all other applicable law[s]," Houston Public Works said in a statement. In 2023, residents across Houston reported inflated water bills after new meter-reading devices were installed. A year later, newly elected Mayor John Whitmire introduced his Water Bill Improvement Plan that temporarily charged some customers a fixed amount. The temporary rate fixes went into place on April 1, 2024. At the time, the city said it was working to replace about 125,000 faulty remote reading devices. As of December, it reported that more than 100,000 had been successfully replaced. Last August, Houston Public Works announced that the city's water system lost an estimated 31.8 billion gallons of water in 2023 due to leaks. In comparison, the San Antonio Water System lost around 19.5 billion gallons and the City of Austin Water & Wastewater lost 7.1 billion gallons during the same period. The main cause of the water leaks is the city's stagnation on water line maintenance. To correct this, the city planned to increase its rate of pipe replacement from 0.06% per year in 2023 to 6% per year. According to Houston Water, a replacement rate of at least 2% is required to maintain a 50-year lifespan. Despite Houston’s population being around 2.3 million, Houston Water serves approximately 5.3 million customers in the region, according to Houston Water. The last rate increase approved as part of the consent degree will go into effect on April 1, 2026.

Judge Blocks Imports of Some Chilean Sea Bass From Antarctica in Fishing Feud at Bottom of the World

A federal judge in Florida has blocked the imports of a high-priced Chilean sea bass from protected waters near Antarctica

MIAMI (AP) — A federal judge in Florida has blocked the imports of a high-priced fish from protected waters near Antarctica, siding with U.S. regulators who argued they were required to block imports amid a diplomatic feud triggered by Russia's obstruction of longstanding conservation efforts at the bottom of the world.Judge David Leibowitz, in a ruling Monday, dismissed a lawsuit filed in 2022 by Texas-based Southern Cross Seafoods that alleged it had suffered undue economic harm by what it argued was the U.S. government's arbitrary decision to bar imports of Chilean sea bass. Every year for four decades, 26 governments banded together in the Commission on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, or CCAMLR, to set catch limits for Patagonia toothfish, as Chilean sea bass is also known, based on the recommendations of a committee of international scientists.But in 2021, and ever since, Russian representatives to the treaty organization have refused to sign off on the catch limits in what many see as a part of a broader push by President Vladimir Putin's government to stymie international cooperation on a range of issues. Russia's refusal was an effective veto because the commission works by consensus, meaning any single government can hold up action.The U.K.’s response to Russia's gambit was to unilaterally set its own catch limit for Chilean sea bass — lower than the never-adopted recommendation of the scientific commission — and issue its own licenses to fish off the coast of South Georgia, an uninhabited island it controls in the South Atlantic. That drew fire from environmentalists as well as U.S. officials, who fear it could encourage even worse abuse, undermining international fisheries management.Leibowitz in his ruling sided with the U.S. government's interpretation of its treaty obligations, warning that the U.K.'s eschewing of the procedures established by CCAMLR risked overfishing in a sensitive part of the South Atlantic and undermining the very essence of the treaty. “Unlimited fishing would by no means further the goals of CCAMLR to protect the Antarctic ecosystem,” he wrote. “Allowing one nation to refuse to agree on a catch limit for a particular fish only to then be able to harvest that fish in unlimited quantities would contravene the expressed purposes of CCAMLR.”The ruling effectively extends an existing ban on imports from all U.K.-licensed fishing vessels operating near South Georgia, which is also claimed by Argentina. However, the fish is still available in the U.S. from suppliers authorized by Australia, France and other countries in areas where Russia did not object to the proposed catch limits. Chilean sea bass from South Georgia was for years some of the highest-priced seafood at U.S. supermarkets and for decades the fishery was a poster child for international cooperation, bringing together global powers like Russia, China and the U.S. to protect the chilly, crystal blue southern ocean from the sort of fishing free-for-all seen elsewhere on the high seas.Southern Cross originally filed it lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade but it was moved last year to federal court in Ft. Lauderdale, where the company received two shipments of seabass from a British-Norwegian fishing company in 2022.An attorney for Southern Cross, which doesn't have a website and lists as its address a waterfront home in a Houston suburb, didn't immediately respond to a request seeking comment.Environmental groups praised the ruling.“Allowing any country to sidestep agreed limits and fish freely undermines decades of hard-won international cooperation and threatens one of the last intact marine ecosystems on the planet,” said Andrea Kavanagh, who directs Antarctic and Southern Ocean work for Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

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