Like a lot of NYC waterways, Newtown Creek is cleaner than it has been in the last 150 years, but dirtier than it should be. NYC like a lot of towns up and down the Hudson has a “combined system,” meaning that the sewer and the street runoff go into the same system to be treated. That’s all well and good — a cigarette butt tossed i to the street gets filtered out — u til it rains when the system is overwhelmed and both raw untreated sewage and street trash go straight into the river. As little as a 1/10 of an inch of rain can trigger a combined sewer overflow. In fact, the largest treatment plant in the city servicing Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn (310 million gallons a day!) empties its treated (and sonetimes untreated) affluent into the creek just a little upstream from where we are squatting under the Pulaski Bridge. #wastetreatment #shantyboat #sewage #cso #runoff #pollution