The Gowanus Canal Cleanup Will Cost Half a Billion Dollars
The Environmental Protection Agency released its plan for cleaning up the Gowanus Canal Superfund site yesterday, and as expected, the process is going to be complicated, time-consuming, and mind-bogglingly expensive.
markyweiss The Gowanus Canal has been a repository of toxic filth for more than a century.
Since its completion in the 1860s, the Gowanus Canal has been the home of virtually every high-pollution industry imaginable: cement makers, chemical plants, coal yards, gas works, ink factories, machine shops, oil refineries, paint factories, soap makers, and tanneries. All of these industries dumped their various strains of super-toxic filth into the canal, and without an effective way to circulate water in the canal (a flushing mechanism stopped working in the 1960s) it stayed put, settling to the bottom.
What sort of super-toxic filth are we talking about? Per the EPA:
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