fresh kills landfill from space

There were no parks as we think of them today in 1843, when Henry David Thoreau lived on Staten Island, but in his spare time he walked the south shore, climbed the hills, and might have, Im guessing, boated in the area of Fresh Kills, in the wide open streams. Eisler-Grynsztajns cancer was diagnosed during treatment for a fall he sustained while jogging. In the case of the landfill, the government wants to make it into a park and wants to be able to say that is no problem, Carpenter said. The last barge of garbage arrives at the Fresh Kills landfill on March 22, 2001. The Native history has been erased, of course; the 1670 deed that Dutch land purchasers used to end Munsee claims on the island is complicated, to put it mildly. The midnight to 8 am shift was for maintenance. Rejuvenation is not restricted to the decay and new growth of plant matter. As of mid-2011, construction drawings for the first phase of development in the South Park section were completed. New York City Department of Sanitation spokeswoman Belinda Mager said that the department has been conducting groundwater, surface water and sediment tests at Fresh Kills for decades. A 1996 report and its addendum, in 2000, recommended further monitoring of the site. Slowly drifting kites hang in the air above. Truckloads of imported soil enter the site, much of it from the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, an iron-rich coastal soil that stains the roads on the Staten Island mounds red. By 1946, only ten incinerators were in operation, with capacity having declined by half since 1937. The name comes from the landfill's location along the banks of the Fresh Kills estuary in western Staten Island. The landfill opened in 1948 and, at its peak, absorbed as much as 29,000 tons of trash per day. Its just not that easy scientifically to be able to link an exposure as broad as a landfill to these cancers.. Copyright 2023 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. Monitoring a communitys health can be expensive, but Borelli pointed to an obvious source of funding. While cancer rates around the landfill were higher when compared to the rest of Staten Island, rates were only meaningfully elevated for five bladder, breast, kidney, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and thyroid cancer and the study found little evidence of an association between living close to the former Fresh Kills Landfill and cancer. More plausible explanations, the authors wrote, were higher screening rates for thyroid cancer and Staten Islanders higher smoking rates. It was something the old guys would opine about in a bar and its something moms would discuss just about health in their family, Borelli, the city council member, said. Initially, the land where the landfill was located was a salt marsh in which there were tidal wetlands, forests, and freshwater wetlands. Feinberg added that his team did not rely on health data or experts to draw the geographic boundaries. Freshkills Park in Staten Island, New York, is transforming what was the world's largest landfill. Michael Lanza, a spokesman for the citys health department, wrote in an email that the citys methodology was the only appropriate approach for investigating whether so many cancers were linked to environmental exposure. Youve seen all the photos of big cities in the weeks after Covid-19 locked the world down visibly cleaner air, flocks of birds, herds of animals in the streets tagged with the ironic social media meme, Nature is healing. Fresh Kills is a pre-Covid healing place, where game cams spot the red fox at play on the edges of the rising woodlands or in the wildlife crossings that are codesigned by humans and the wildlife doing the crossing. At this height, it would have been taller than Todt Hill making it the highest point on the East Coast south of Mount Desert Island in Maine. [9][11] A bill was passed (later vetoed by the governor) requiring all garbage to be incinerated before dumping. Ill think of the migrating birds who see Freshkills and all of Staten Islands parks as a life-sustaining stop on the way through the region, up through the Meadowlands and into Long Island Sound and beyond. Next year, when I look out from the top of the North Mound, Ill be thinking about what the all-new grasslands and the restored marshes mean not just for the lucky-at-last Staten Island communities nearby but for the Mid-Atlantic coast. The core problem would be adapting the site to the trash no less than 150 million tons of garbage had been dumped at Fresh Kills (roughly the equivalent of the amount of plastic currently floating in the ocean). Smoking is a known risk factor for bladder cancer. And in just twenty-five years, it was gone, buried under millions of tons of New York City's refuse.[9]. Studies have shown that about 80% of all thyroid cancers are papillary cancers that are slow-growing and rarely fatal. The eight-mile (13km) Staten Island Railway freight service, which connects the facility to the national rail freight network via the Arthur Kill Vertical Lift Bridge, was reactivated in April 2007, after it had been closed in 1991. The landfill, which opened in 1948 as a temporary landfill, is now on its way to becoming the largest park developed in New York City since the 19th century. [12] The talk of using Fresh Kills for only three years may have been a ploy to allow Hall to save face politically. Jonathan Eisler-Grynsztajn, 25, said as a child, he watched as trucks from Ground Zero drove through his neighborhood and unloaded tons of wreckage at Fresh Kills. Thyroid cancer on Staten Island was nearly 70% higher than in the rest of the city and state, though the states researchers could not identify any environmental exposures and suggested that the results are skewed because Staten Island doctors screen for and diagnose thyroid cancer at higher rates than other parts of the city and state. Old Place Creek is, incidentally, about as close as you can get to seeing what Fresh Kills looked like before Freshkills Park and before Fresh Kills dump, when Thoreau might have paddled through. The site is large enough to support many sports . Thats a clear source of revenue that should go back to Staten Islanders, Borelli said. The site has become famous, primarily due to its sheer size; Fresh Kills is around three times the size of Central Park, and it can be readily identified in satellite images of Staten Island. Because you can't see Staten Island from outer space, how could you possibly see a facility that. The area became a popular spot for birdwatching. Julie Herbstman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, was one of 15 advisers who provided feedback during the citys study process. All photographs accompanying this article are from an ongoing series documenting the rebirth of Freshkills. Im really very sympathetic to the situation and understand why people are concerned, Herbstman said. CBS News Each section of the park gives visitors a glimpse at the extensive undertaking. Residents worry its making them sick, but the city has found little evidence of a link. Imagine a not-delicious mix of household waste excreting noxious methane and millions of gallons of ammonium-rich leachate, the technical term for the juice that flows from trash hills into the waterways. A retrospective follow-up study, which would involve interviewing patients about past exposures, would be unrealistic, he said, because people move, the city was unable to identify exposures from the landfill that might be plausibly linked to the cancers of concern and because there is no way to quantify potential exposures from decades past.. The park holds a reminder of harrowing times. By the late 1970s, an estimated 28,000 tons of trash arrived at Fresh Kills every day. Robert Sullivan is the author of numerous books, including Rats and The Meadowlands. He teaches at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. Thoreau would have understood the tidal creeks and salt marshes to be the lifeblood of the giant Hudson-Raritan estuary, which includes the lower Passaic and Hackensack watershed referred to as the Meadowlands. A cancer cluster, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is a greater-than-expected number of cancer cases that occurs within a group of people in a geographic area over a period of time., Accessible icon title Navas could not say how many claims or how much money the VCF has approved for people who worked at Fresh Kills because, she said, it does not possess detailed data on where claimants worked. The Brookfield Avenue site was north of the Arthur Kill Road and Brookfield Avenue intersection. These containers are then loaded, four containers each car, onto flatbed rail cars to be hauled by rail to a Republic Services landfill in South Carolina. Once the world's largest landfill, Fresh Kills in Staten Island, New York, serves as a burial ground for 1.8 tons million tons of rubble from the 9/11 attacks. It estimates that as global urbanization accelerates and populations grow, the figure will rise to 2.2 billion tons by 2025. Staten Island's Freshkills Park was once the world's largest landfill, a dumping ground for New York City's abundant heaps of garbage. The department also operates a registry to track health data on 9/11 survivors. (Staten Island Advance . An art gallery popped up in 2018. Plant #1 was located at the site of an old factory on the south side of the junction of the Great Fresh Kills, and Little Fresh Kills. [9] Samuel Kearing, who had served as sanitation commissioner under Mayor John V. Lindsay, remembered in 1970 his first visit to the Fresh Kills project: It had a certain nightmare quality. Jade Doskow is an Artist Partner in Photography of Freshkills Park. The citys law department did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Operations were carried out from 8 am to midnight six days a week. To understand how Freshkills went from hated landfill to. The City of New York established the Fresh Kills Landfill in 1948, before there was any large-scale development on the west shore of Staten Island. ", "New York City to Pay Jersey Town $1 Million Over Shore Pollution", "New York State Seeks $76 Million In Fines Over Fresh Kills Landfill", "Where New York's 14 Million Tons of Trash Go - NYC Revealed", "At Fresh Kills landfill, a heartbreaking effort after World Trade Center attacks", "Recovery: The World Trade Center Recovery Operation at Fresh Kills", "Landfill Has 9/11 Remains, Medical Examiner Wrote", "Staten Island's Freshkills Park Gets City's Biggest Solar Array Getting Fresh", "Staten Island's Schmul Park, a gateway to the future Freshkills Park, to open Thursday", "Mayor Bloomberg officially reactivates the Staten Island railroad", Fresh Kills: New York City Department of Parks & Recreation information section, Items in the Staten Island Historical Society Online Collection Database pertaining to Fresh Kills Landfill, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fresh_Kills_Landfill&oldid=1154499178, This page was last edited on 12 May 2023, at 22:25. Planned attractions include playgrounds, athletic fields, horseback riding trails and a wildlife refuge. Only one landfill, Edgemere Landfill in Queens, had a long-term future, and as such, an alternative site had to be found. The goal is to create a space where people can engage and enjoy the scenery but also learn about the impact everyday waste has. By 1997, two of the four landfill mounds were closed and covered with a thick, impermeable cap. The draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was published for public review in May 2008. In the same litigation, insurers paid a $28 million settlement to more than 1,300 plaintiffs who operated the barges that transported debris from Manhattan to Fresh Kills. While the report was an appropriate first step in dissecting the issue, Beate Ritz, a professor of epidemiology and environmental health at UCLA, said a deeper investigation would require interviewing Staten Island residents about their lifestyles, jobs, experiences living near the landfill and medical histories, all factors that can play a role in causing cancer. The response usually is to sort of make the problem go away by saying, it could be all sorts of stuff, Ozonoff, who has studied public health agencies response to waste site concerns in Massachusetts and upstate New York, said. It has a lower poverty rate and a higher median household income. Cities like New York generate a massive amount of municipal waste. A Washington Post article from the era called the landfill the primary reason most islanders cite for wanting to end ties with the rest of the city; residents, the paper reported, had come to see the landfill as a fetid symbol of its strained relationship with the larger city. The area was declared a wild bird sanctuary, and some hawks, falcons, and owls were brought in. ", First published on January 12, 2018 / 4:16 PM. These days the Fresh Kills landfill is somewhere between its infamous, stinking past and its future as Freshkills Park, a 2,200-acre park with meadows and wetlands and a strange-looking name. Tracey Morgan Gallery, in Ashville North Carolina, presented Jade Doskow: Freshkills, a new exhibition of photographs taken at Staten Island's Freshkills Park.The exhibit ran from September 21, 2021 through October 30, 2021. But that victory was diminished when, after the September 11th attacks, then-Governor George Pataki reopened Fresh Kills and workers transported more than 1.8 million tons of debris, some of it found to be toxic, from Ground Zero to the landfill. The four garbage mountains would be transformed into four soft green hills straddling the convergence of creeks. As the actual dump site moved further from paved roads, it became more difficult for trucks to unload. It also has a significant history as the site of the Fresh Kills Landfill, which was the largest landfill in the world before closing in 2001. / CBS News. These marshes define our region, from an ecological standpoint, despite how hard we continue to transform them into dumps or luxury waterfront developments. Unlike the most recent study, the previous ones did not find statistically significant elevations in cancer rates around the landfill when compared to the rest of Staten Island. In July 2002, Fresh Kills closed again. CNN Sans & 2016 Cable News Network. The public space will include fields, playgrounds and even kayaking, art installations and horseback riding trails. After the 9/11. Eloise Hirsh, administrator of Freshkills Park and president of the Freshkills Park Alliance, was tasked with transforming those hundreds of acres of compiled garbage into an enormous, activity-filled public space. Sixteen hours after the World Trade Centers first tower collapsed, debris began to arrive at Fresh Kills. Picture taken from the top of a mound at the former Fresh Kills landfill Tuesday, May 24, 2022 shows part of the area's waterway and Staten Island's industrial West Shore. Sleight Family Graveyard. As conceived by James Corner Field Operations, the landscape architects responsible for the High Line, the idea was not just to build a park but to reimagine the idea of park. No reparations were paid to the business owners on the Jersey Shore for revenues lost during the months of inactivity.[18]. The scientific process has gone through strict rules and regulations to ensure the safety of the space. [9], Staten Island residents and their representatives opposed the plan. The fauna were largely replaced by herring gulls. The fund covers people who worked on the barges and at Fresh Kills landfill. We have to see it too as a reminder of what the city consumes those mountains are made of our trash. Acres of wide-open grasslands are rare anywhere in the U.S. and unimaginable in a city overrun by development. I can still recall looking down on the operation from a control tower and thinking that Fresh Kills, like Jamaica Bay, had for thousands of years been a magnificent, teeming, literally life-enhancing tidal marsh. [27], Schmul Park, the first section of Freshkills Park, opened to the public in 2012. The garbage once destined for Fresh Kills was shipped to landfills in other states, primarily in Pennsylvania, but also in Virginia and Ohio. Not once. "Most cancers take more than 19 years to really show up, Clapp said, referencing the 9/11 debris brought to Staten Island in 2001. landfill-to-park journey. Still, Fresh Kills at its height received about 10 million tonnes of garbage annually, transferred from barges by cranes and dump trucks to create trash mountains that towered over the. Lanza, the city health departments spokesman, did not address Carpenter and Ozonoffs specific claims when asked. Which presidential candidates raised the most from April through June? Lawyer Gregory Cannata, who has represented 9/11 victims and workers for nearly two decades, said that if a Staten Island resident with cancer could show that they were regularly exposed to dust because of wind and proximity to the landfill, theres a strong argument to be made that theres a link between the two.. They would blame every other possible causation factor besides the World Trade Center dust as being the cause of the injury, LoPalo recalled. . As described in an inter-departmental report from 1946: "Because of the substantial sums involved in the preparation and acquisition of the [Fresh Kills] site, [in order to justify this expense] the City must dispose of refuse at this location for a number of years. Fresh Kills Landfill The Fresh Kills Landfill was a landfill covering 2,200 acres (890 ha) in the New York City borough of Staten Island in the United States. Tree planting (started by arborists, accelerated by seed-carrying birds) would occur in coordination with the careful engineering of what you might call the dumps natural excretions, the methane and the leachate. A portion of the former landfill was transformed into a massive crime scene as barges transported mountains of debris by trucks and later by barges from lower Manhattan. They load it onto barges [] and dumped it then at the Fresh Kills landfill where dust went flying everywhere, Barasch said. Whats astounding is how long they lasted: it was mostly marshes along the Arthur Kill, well into the early 1900s, when, following the example of John D. Rockefeller, oil companies began to set up huge petroleum farms. A final count of 4,257 human remains was retrieved, but only 300 people were identified from these remains. But the trends for each cancer type did not show a consistent increase over time or between men and women, they wrote, suggesting other factors were to blame. By the time Fresh Kills closed in 2001, the large swath of the boroughs western shore was the only functioning municipal landfill within city limits, and contained household trash food waste, paper, clothes from across all five boroughs. All along, park officials occasionally escorted groups of birders through the closed-off park-in-progress, as well as artists and school groups. Kidnapping of Louisiana mom foiled by gut instinct of off-duty sheriff's deputy, Kratom products draw criticism from health experts. Original plans showed the dump with a twenty-year lifespan. The city never reached out to me. In a letter to Zadrogas family, then-Chief Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch, who died in 2016, wrote it was his offices unequivocal opinion, with certainty beyond doubt, that the foreign material in (Zadrogas) lungs did not get there as a result of inhaling dust at the World Trade Center or elsewhere.. Borelli grew up in the district he represents and said he could see the landfill from his childhood bedroom in the islands Village Greens section. "[13], One of the first steps taken was the dredging of the marsh to allow the passage of the city's garbage scows. Following that, an exception had to be made for it to receive the debris of the World Trade Center. But the American Cancer Society says many factors a persons environment, their lifestyle, their genes make people more susceptible to cancer and experts said it can be difficult to identify just one source. He wanted the area to be developed as Staten Island's industrial base, as it was opposite the Arthur Kill from the heavy industry of New Jersey. While the specifics vary, several studies in the 1990s linked other waste sites in the United States and Canada to possible increased risks of a variety of cancers, including leukemia, bladder, stomach, liver, lung, prostate and cervical cancer. Fresh Kills continued to operate until its closure in 2001. But (they) forgot about the residents of Staten Island they dumped it on., ID cards found in the remains of the World Trade Center are sorted in an evidence decontamination room at Fresh Kills. Previously, the city used other landfills and. One proposal for the West Shore Expressway bridge across Fresh Kills included a tide gate, which would have blocked Plant 2's marine access. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the funds extension would cost about $10 billion over the next decade. When 20 acres of trails and fields opens next spring, it will be a monumental event. The message is a profound one that's resonated far beyond Staten Island. These included red-winged blackbirds, American goldfinches, red-tailed hawks, American kestrels, osprey, ring-necked pheasants, tree swallows, turkey vultures, and northern snapping turtles. Three years ago, the city health department launched a study the third of its kind in 25 years to investigate concerns like Nelsons and found little evidence to link living near the former landfill and cancer. Representatives from around the globe have visited Freshkills to learn about its mission and bring home the message of waste transformation and awareness. In a statement, state health department spokeswoman Erin Silk said the reports findings suggested that practices in the medical care system may be influencing thyroid cancer incidence on Staten Island and that health care providers should avoid performing thyroid cancer screenings for people without symptoms and at average risk. But the researchers still saw little evidence of a link to the landfill because they could not find any reasonable explanations for how residents would have come into contact with materials in the landfill that were known or suspected to cause bladder or thyroid cancers, especially since Fresh Kills closed. I am going along with this proposal because I believe we are in a position to use this fill to our advantage, for the development of the West Shore of Staten Island, which is essential.". The post highlighted CrossFit Fresh Kills, a new gym down the road; a high-end Brooklyn furniture store called Fresh Kills; and Fresh Kills IPA, a beer brewed by Staten Islands Flagship Brewing Company. The bridge, when finally built in 1959, actually enhanced operations. Published Friday, Sept. 11, 2020 at 1:30 a.m. Communities with elevated cancer rates often point to an environmental exposure as the source of their problem, but researchers are rarely able to connect the two, he said. About an hour later, Mr. Giuliani was at Fresh Kills himself, standing amid garbage hills 200 feet tall, alongside Staten Islands borough president, Guy Molinari, and Gov. We simply made a decision that, since the Federal statute creating the Fund required that deaths and physical injuries occur in the immediate vicinity of the World Trade Center we conclude that Canal Street rather than Houston satisfied the statutory requirement, Feinberg wrote in an email. CNN. NYC Parks. The 2,200-acre Fresh Kills . A study by the city's health . The Plant 1 digger was electric, but the Plant 2 one was steam-powered. Fresh Kills, primed by years of local dumping, was ripe for further exploitation. Consequently, some community members said they feel ignored, insulted and abandoned. In 2012, attorney Chris LoPalo and his then-firm helped to negotiate a $24 million settlement for almost 2,000 plaintiffs who worked for three contractors that operated at the landfill following 9/11. Beate Ritz, an epidemiology and environmental health sciences professor at UCLA, agreed that a more robust study would be costly because it would require interviewing Staten Islanders about their jobs, residences and family histories. Fresh Kills is a section of Staten Island in New York which was used as a landfill between 1948 and 2001. [9][20], After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Fresh Kills was temporarily reopened as a sorting ground for roughly a third of the rubble from Ground Zero.
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