Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

By clicking “Accept”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information or to customize your cookie preferences.

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 Sudden, torrential downpours overwhelm our outdated drainage systems, especially at high tide; drench the subway system; and, in some low-lying places nearby, turn streets into sewers and basements into death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.
Photos courtesy of

Officials to Test Water From Ohio Village Near Cold War-Era Weapons Plant After Newspaper Probe

Authorities in Ohio plan to test the water supply across a small village near a former weapons plant after a newspaper investigation published Friday found high levels of radioactivity in samples taken at a school, athletic field, library and other sites

LUCKEY, Ohio (AP) — Authorities in Ohio plan to test the groundwater supply across a village near a former weapons plant after a newspaper investigation published Friday found high levels of radioactivity in samples taken at a school, athletic field, library and other sites.However, The Blade in Toledo said its tests showed radioactivity levels 10 times higher than normal in water from a drinking fountain at Eastwood Middle School, 45 times higher than normal at the Luckey Library and 1,731 times higher than normal at a water pump near athletic fields.“We’ve got to get to the bottom of this,” said Lt. Col. Robert Burnham, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Buffalo District, which oversees the cleanup.Nineteen of the 39 samples collected by the newspaper from well water across Luckey — at homes, businesses, and public places — showed radioactivity at least 10 times greater than what the federal government calls normal for the area, the newspaper said. The Blade hired an accredited private lab to conduct the testing.The radioactivity detected was primarily bismuth-214, which decays from the radioactive gas radon-222. Experts agree that high levels of bismuth-214 suggest high levels of radon are also present.Radon exposure is the leading cause of lung cancer in nonsmokers.The testing also found low levels of radioactive cobalt-60, a man-made isotope, in two wells. Experts called that finding extremely rare.Taehyun Roh, a Texas A&M University scientist who specializes in environmental exposures, said regulators should also conduct air and soil testing to assess the extent of the contamination and identify the source."Since this area likely has high radon levels, testing for radon in both air and water is advisable,” he wrote in an email. “A safe drinking water advisory should be issued, recommending the use of bottled water until further assessments and mitigation measures are in place.”The Corps of Engineers has long maintained that residential drinking water was not being contaminated by the removal work. Burnham and others said they still believe that to be true, citing thousands of their own soil samples.The state Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Health will lead the testing. In an email, Ohio EPA spokesperson Katie Boyer told the newspaper the contaminant levels in the public drinking water are still “within acceptable drinking water standards.” She said any concerns raised by the state testing would be addressed.The 44-acre industrial site — 22 miles (35 kilometers) south of Toledo — was long crucial to America’s nuclear weapons program. In the 1940s, farmland was replaced by a sprawling defense plant that produced magnesium metal for the Manhattan Project. In the 1950s, the plant became the government’s sole source of beryllium metal for nuclear bombs, Cold War missiles and Space Race products, including a heat shield for Project Mercury.“Things that happened generations ago are still affecting us,” said Karina Hahn-Claydon, a 50-year-old teacher whose family lives less than a mile from the site. “And that’s because the government didn’t take care of it.”Private drinking wells, unlike municipal systems, are not regulated, and responsibility for testing is left to owners. The Blade’s testing took place from April 2024 through January.Radioactivity has been linked to an increased risk of various cancers, including blood and thyroid cancers.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

UK spending watchdog censures water firms and regulators over sewage failings

NAO finds regulatory gaps have enabled overspending on infrastructure building while not improving sewage worksWater companies have been getting away with failures to improve sewage works and overspending because of regulatory problems, a damning report by the government’s spending watchdog has found.Firms have overspent on infrastructure building, the National Audit Office (NAO) found, with some of these costs being added to consumers’ bills. The Guardian this week reported Ofwat and the independent water commission are investigating water firms for spending up to 10 times as much on their sewage works and piping as comparable countries. Continue reading...

Water companies have been getting away with failures to improve sewage works and overspending because of regulatory problems, a damning report by the government’s spending watchdog has found.Firms have overspent on infrastructure building, the National Audit Office (NAO) found, with some of these costs being added to consumers’ bills. The Guardian this week reported Ofwat and the independent water commission are investigating water firms for spending up to 10 times as much on their sewage works and piping as comparable countries.Bills in England and Wales are rising by £123 on average this year, and will go up further over the next five years, so that companies can fix ageing sewage infrastructure and stop spills of human waste from contaminating rivers and seas. Several water firms have complained to the Competition and Markets Authority because they want the regulator to allow them to increase bills even further.Only 1% of water companies’ actions to improve environmental performance, such as improving sewer overflows, have been inspected by the Environment Agency, the authors of the NAO report said. They also found there was no regulator responsible for proactively inspecting wastewater assets to prevent further environmental harm.The report, which audited the three water regulators, Ofwat, the Environment Agency, and the Drinking Water Inspectorate, as well as the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, also found the regulators did not have a good understanding of the condition of infrastructure assets such as leaking sewers and ageing sewage treatment facilities as they do not have a set of metrics to assess their condition.Gareth Davies, the head of the NAO, said: “Given the unprecedented situation facing the sector, Defra and the regulators need to act urgently to address industry performance and resilience to ensure the sector can meet government targets and achieve value for money over the long term for bill payers.”Despite the huge costs of infrastructure, the water companies have moved slowly meaning that at the current rate, it would take 700 years to replace the entire existing water network, the report found. Regulatory gaps and a lack of urgency about replacing old and malfunctioning infrastructure has caused a “rising tide of risk” in the sector, which is contributing to increasing bills for customers, the report warned.It also criticised the lack of a national plan for water supply and recommended that Defra must understand the costs and deliverability of its plans, alongside the impact they would have on customers’ bills.Several of the issues raised by the NAO, including concerns about weak infrastructure, have come to the fore in the debate over the future of Thames Water, the country’s largest water company with 16 million customers. Thames, which is under significant financial pressure with almost £20bn in debt, needs to secure fresh investment within months. Questions over the state of Thames’s infrastructure and regulatory punishment it could face for its failures have dogged the process of winning fresh funds. Meanwhile, Ofwat has also rejected its requests to raise bills by as much as 59%, instead allowing a 35% increase over the next five years.The government set up the independent water commission (IWC) last year to investigate how the water industry operated and whether regulation was fit for purpose.Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the Tory chair of the Commons public accounts committee, said: “Today’s NAO report lays bare the scale of the challenges facing the water sector – not least the real prospect of water shortfall without urgent action.“The consequences of government’s failure to regulate this sector properly are now landing squarely on bill payers who are being left to pick up the tab. After years of under-investment, pollution incidents and water supply issues, it is no surprise that consumer trust is at an all-time low. Having not built any reservoirs in the last 30 years, we now need 10.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Business TodayGet set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morningPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotion“Consumers rightly expect a water sector that is robust, resilient and fit for the future. Defra and the regulators must focus on rebuilding public confidence and ensure the sector can attract the long-term investment it desperately needs.”An Environment Agency spokesperson said: “We recognise the significant challenges facing the water industry. That is why we will be working with Defra and other water regulators to implement the report’s recommendations and update our frameworks to reflect its findings.”An Ofwat spokesperson added: “We agree with the NAO’s recommendations for Ofwat and we continue to progress our work in these areas, and to contribute to the IWC wider review of the regulatory framework. We also look forward to the IWC’s recommendations and to working with government and other regulators to better deliver for customers and the environment.”A Defra spokesperson said: “The government has taken urgent action to fix the water industry – but change will not happen overnight. We have put water companies under tough special measures through our landmark Water Act.”Water UK, which represents the water companies, has been contacted for comment.

Water firms admit sewage monitoring damaging public trust

The industry says powers to self-monitor water quality should be handed back to the regulator.

Water companies should no longer be allowed to monitor their own levels of sewage pollution, the industry body has told the BBC exclusively.Instead they are proposing a new, third-party monitoring system to build consumer trust.The recommendation is part of a submission made to the UK government's independent review into the water sector.Campaigners have long complained the companies' self-reporting has prevented the true scale of pollution in UK water being revealed.A third-party system could add more pressure to the regulators, which have also been criticised for not holding the companies to account. A report from the National Audit Office is expected to say on Friday that the Environment Agency does not currently have enough capacity to take on any new monitoring.David Henderson, CEO of industry body Water UK, told the BBC: "We absolutely accept that self-monitoring is not helping to instil trust and so we would like to see an end to it, and in place of it a more robust, third-party system." As part of their permitting arrangements water companies are expected to regularly sample water quality to identify potential pollution, and submit this data to the Environment Agency in an arrangement known as "operator self monitoring". But there have been incidents of misreporting by water companies in England and Wales uncovered by the regulators, who said some cases had been deliberate.Southern Water was previously issued fines totalling £213m by the industry regulator (Ofwat) and the environmental regulator (the Environment Agency) for manipulating sewage data.In that case, there was unreported pollution into numerous conservation sites which caused "major environmental harm" to wildlife.The company later admitted its actions "fell short".Henderson added that the industry never asked to self-monitor, but that it was introduced in 2009 by the then Labour government to "reduce the administrative burden" on the Environment Agency (EA). In 2023, the BBC reported that EA staff were concerned that, due to funding cuts, the Agency was increasingly relying on water companies to self-report rather than carrying out its own checks on pollution from sewage. The current environment minister, Steve Reed, has promised to review the system, calling it the equivalent of companies "mark[ing] their own homework".But the National Audit Office (NAO), which reviews government spending, questioned the ability of the EA to take on any new monitoring. "Regulators need to address the fact that they currently have limited oversight over whether water companies are carrying out their work as expected. It is hard to see how they will achieve this without increased overall capacity," said Anita Shah, NAO Director of Regulation.It is expected to publish a full review of the regulation of the water sector on Friday. A Defra spokesperson told the BBC: "We are committed to taking decisive action to fix the water industry. The Water Commission's recommendations will mark the next major step [to] restore public trust in the sector."The government launched an independent water commission in October to review the sector and the way it is regulated. The public consultation closed on Wednesday with the findings expected in July. Water UK submitted a 200-page document of recommendations, including this call to end self-monitoring.The industry body also requested that water meters be universal across England and Wales to make bills fairer. At present about 60% of the population have a meter."The meter is just to ensure that people are paying for what they use as opposed to a flat rate of system where you can use virtually no water and pay the same as someone filling up a pool three times in a summer," said Henderson."This doesn't properly reflect the value of water and encourage people to conserve it in the way that we need," he added.

Cambodia Canal's Impact on Mekong Questioned After China Signs Deal

By Francesco Guarascio(Reuters) -Cambodia should share a feasibility study on the impact of a planned China-backed canal that would divert water...

(Reuters) -Cambodia should share a feasibility study on the impact of a planned China-backed canal that would divert water from the rice-growing floodplains of Vietnam's Mekong Delta, said the body overseeing the transnational river.After months of uncertainty, Phnom Penh last week signed a deal with China to develop the Funan Techo Canal when President Xi Jinping visited Cambodia as part of a tour of Southeast Asia.It was Beijing's first explicit public commitment to the project, giving state-controlled construction giant China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) a 49% stake through a subsidiary, but also linking Chinese support to the "sustainability" of the project.The Secretariat of the intergovernmental Mekong River Commission (MRC) that coordinates the sustainable development of Southeast Asia's longest river said it had so far received from Cambodia only "basic information" on the project."We hope that further details, including the feasibility study report and other relevant reports, will be provided," the Commission said in a statement to Reuters this week.That would be needed "to ensure that any potential implications for the broader Mekong Basin are fully considered," it added.The canal has already created concern among environmentalists who say it could further harm the delicate ecology of the Mekong Delta, which is Vietnam's major rice growing region and is already facing problems of drought and salination as result of infrastructure projects upstream. Vietnam is also a leading exporter of rice.On Friday, the Cambodian government said the canal would have minimal environmental impact and "aligns with the 1995 Mekong Agreement" which governs cooperation among riverine countries in Southeast Asia.The Mekong River, fed by a series of tributaries, flows some 4,900 kilometres (3,045 miles) from its source in the Tibetan plateau through China, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to the sea."Whether the Funan Techo Canal violates the 1995 Mekong Agreement depends on several factors, including its connection to the Mekong mainstream," the Commission said, offering additional guidance to Phnom Penh and other member states "to ensure compliance".Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam are members of the MRC while China and Myanmar are dialogue partners.The Cambodian government did not respond to questions about whether it intended to share the requested documents.Vietnam's foreign ministry did not reply to a request for comment after the deal with China was signed, but the country has repeatedly asked Cambodia to share more information about the canal to assess its impact.Xi made no reference to the canal in his public statements in Phnom Penh but a joint communique issued at the end of his visit said China supported Cambodia in building the canal "in accordance with the principles of feasibility and sustainability".The deal signed by CCCC on Friday was for a 151.6 km (94.2 miles) canal costing $1.16 billion.However, the Cambodian government says on the canal's official website that the waterway would stretch 180 km and cost $1.7 billion at completion in 2028.The higher cost reflects a short section to be built by Cambodian firms as well as bridges and water conservation resources, the government told Reuters without clarifying who would pay for the bridges and water conservation.Cambodia's deputy prime minister said in May 2024 that China would cover the entire cost of the project, which was put at $1.7 billion.The canal is designed to link the Mekong Basin to the Gulf of Thailand in Cambodia's southern Kep province. Much of the Mekong's nutrient-rich sediment no longer reaches rice farms in the Delta because of multiple hydroelectric dams built by China upriver, a Reuters analysis showed in 2022.The project agreed with China is also different from the original plan as it is focusing on boosting irrigation rather than solely pursuing navigation purposes, said Brian Eyler, an expert on the Mekong region at U.S.-based think tank Stimson Center.The water diverted from the Mekong Delta "will be much more than previously described," said Eyler.(Reporting by Francesco Guarascio; additional reporting by Khanh Vu in Hanoi; Editing by Kate Mayberry)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

EPA chief urges Mexico to help deliver '100% solution' to clean up polluted Tijuana River

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin visited the polluted Tijuana River on the U.S.-Mexico border, calling for a '100% solution' to clean up raw sewage that has fouled the waterway for years.

U.S. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin on Tuesday called for Mexico and the U.S. to develop a “100% solution” to stop the flow of raw sewage from Tijuana that has polluted the Tijuana River and left communities near the border coping with foul odors and beaches that are often closed because of high bacteria levels.“Americans on our side of the border who have been dealing with this for decades are out of patience,” Zeldin said during a news conference in San Diego. “They want action and they’re right.”Zeldin visited the river north of the border and met with Mexican government officials as well as local officials in San Diego County. He said the Trump administration is seeking “max collaboration and extreme urgency to end a crisis that should have ended a long time ago.”The Tijuana River has been plagued with untreated sewage and industrial waste from Tijuana for decades. The city’s growth has far outpaced the existing sewage treatment plants, and inadequate and broken facilities spew waste into the river, polluting the water and air in Imperial Beach and other communities near the border.Zeldin met for about 90 minutes on Monday night with Mexican Environment Secretary Alicia Bárcena and other Mexican officials, who he said indicated that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and her administration are “fully committed to doing their part to resolving this issue.” Bárcena said in a post on social media that it was a “very productive meeting.”“We agreed to reinforce our joint actions,” Bárcena said, “to accelerate the projects to address the sanitation of Rio Tijuana for the well-being of our communities.”Zeldin said Mexico still needs to provide $88 million that it previously pledged in a 2022 agreement. He said that U.S. and Mexican officials soon plan to draw up a “specific statement from both countries” outlining actions the Mexican government will take to help address the problems.“We all need to be on the same page on the 100% solution from the U.S. side that if all of these things on that list get done, this crisis is over,” Zeldin said.He didn’t discuss costs or a timetable, but said the goal should be to “to get every project done as fast as humanly possible.”The environmental group American Rivers last week ranked the Tijuana River No. 2 on its annual list of the nation’s most endangered rivers, up from No. 9 on the list last year. The group said it elevated the river on the list to bring greater attention to the waterway’s chronic pollution problems and the lack of action to clean it up.Environmental advocates have urged the U.S. government to prioritize fixing and expanding the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant north of the border, which handles sewage from Tijuana and is in disrepair.Zeldin toured the South Bay plant, where he met with Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre and other officials. With him were members of Congress including Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) and Mike Levin (D-San Juan Capistrano).Levin said the U.S. government has appropriated $653 million for fixing and expanding the South Bay wastewater plant — an amount that steadily increased after an initial $300 million was committed in 2020.“We’ve got to get those shovels in the ground,” Levin said. “We’ve got to get the South Bay plant up and running, doubled in capacity, as quickly as possible.”Zeldin also said he was meeting with Navy SEALs who train in the area and have suffered illnesses because of the polluted water.In a recent report, the Department of Defense said about 1,100 cases of illness were reported among Navy SEALS and other service members who were exposed to high levels of bacteria when they trained in and around the ocean near the border.“This has been a problem for decades. It hasn’t been corrected. It’s only gotten worse,” said Dan’l Steward, a retired Navy captain and former SEAL who lives in Coronado but did not attend Tuesday’s events.Decades ago, Steward got sick after basic underwater SEAL training and had to take antibiotics to recover. Steward said he has heard similar stories from SEALs and candidates who undergo training along the beaches in Coronado. “It’s a national security issue,” Steward said. For Navy personnel in the area, he said, “it’s limiting them in their ability to properly train, and it’s endangering their lives for the ones that are going through basic training in particular.”Others affected, he said, include Marines, Coast Guard service members and Border Patrol agents. Steward said his daughter, while surfing nearby, became sick with an infection from a type of bacteria called MRSA, which is resistant to many antibiotics.“The United States has a role to help improve the situation, even though their plants are south of the border,” Steward said. “We all have a role to play here. And I also feel that’s the only way to solve the problem.”Ramon Chairez, director of environmental advocacy for the Encinitas-based nonprofit group Un Mar de Colores, said he’d like to see various actions taken on the U.S. side of the border, including working to dismantle culverts where polluted water cascades down and sends polluted water vapor and gases into the air.Chairez said he thought Zeldin’s focus on collaboration between Mexico and the U.S. made sense.“Overall, I think the general tone is pointing more towards holding Mexico accountable, although there’s some acknowledgment that it’s going to be a collaborative effort on both sides of the border,” Chairez said.One topic that wasn’t discussed but has contributed to the problems, he said, is that many U.S.-based companies have set up factories on the Mexican side of the border.“I didn’t hear a word about maquiladoras and factories and industries on the Mexican side and holding them accountable,” he said. “There’s American and California-based corporations operating all along the border, and especially in Tijuana, and they’re polluting the river just as much.”Matthew Tejada, senior vice president of environmental health for the Natural Resources Defense Fund, said the commitments from U.S. officials sound good, but he also said delivering on those pledges will be more complicated because of cuts in budget and staffing. He noted that Zeldin has said he wants to eliminate 65% of the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget.“It will be an interesting trick for EPA to achieve exactly those sorts of outcomes while they are internally tearing down the very staff and systems they need to actually make those changes happen,” Tejada said.He said the Trump administration’s recent actions, including cutting funding and rolling back environmental protection measures, are “making it that much harder for this country to actually have clean air, clean land and clean water.”

Suggested Viewing

Join us to forge
a sustainable future

Our team is always growing.
Become a partner, volunteer, sponsor, or intern today.
Let us know how you would like to get involved!

CONTACT US

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Subscribers receive a free day pass for streaming Cinema Verde.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.