The Mystery of Newtown Creek - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 14

“SISTER NEWTOWN CREEK”
In September 1978, a Coast Guard helicopter pilot on a routine patrol over Brooklyn
noticed a huge black oil plume emanating from the Meeker Avenue bulkhead along
Newtown Creek. He filed a report, and a containment boom—a string of yellow plastic
floats designed to restrict the oil to the shoreline, preventing it from washing down-
stream into New York Harbor—was set. In six months, the boom collected over a hun-
dred thousand gallons of degraded gasoline, fuel oil, and industrial chemicals, some of
which dated to 1948. New Yorkers were shocked. A Coast Guard investigation revealed
that the entire length of Newtown Creek and a large swath of Greenpoint's soil—an area
of roughly ity-ive acres—was saturated by toxic industrial chemicals.
That summer, not long after the Coast Guard's discovery, a city bus driver noticed oil
oozing out of the pavement on Manhattan Avenue, a wide industrial street in Green-
point. He mentioned it to a local nun, Sister Francis Gerard Kress . Sister Francis began
to ask people in the neighborhood if they knew anything about the mysterious oil. She
was surprised to learn that almost every resident had a story about the black mayon-
naise. “Toxic fumes stained their clothes drying on the line outside,” she recalled. “It
gave people headaches. It made children agitated. The people hated it, but they learned
to live with it. They didn't want to cause any trouble.”
Although Newtown Creek was viscous with oil, some residents swam there on
scorching summer days or ate the fish or crabs they pulled from its murky waters. Sister
Francis worried that the spill would endanger people's health, so she mentioned it to the
local community board, politicians, and to practically everyone she met. Few of them
paid attention.
“They told me I was a nuisance,” she said. “But I have Viking blood and decided to
look into it anyway.”
With the help of sympathetic coastguardsmen, Sister Francis dressed herself in a
hazardous-materials suit, climbed over barbed-wire fences into vacant lots, and skirted
packs of wild dogs to inspect the creek. The more she saw of it, the more concerned she
became. But when Church elders learned that she was agitating for a cleanup, she re-
called, they immediately warned her to desist. “The Church banished me from Green-
point!” Sister Francis declared in a loud voice when I visited her at a church-run nursing
home on Long Island, in 2007. She was ninety-two, and wheelchairbound, but recalled
every detail of her mission to save Newtown Creek.
Sister Francis continued her activism in secret, but even Greenpoint residents didn't
want her to “stir things up.” While she made inroads with local politicians and helped
individual families, her efforts were largely met with stubborn disengagement. “I've nev-
er seen such a community. They stillneed to clean up my creek!” she thundered, insist-