The Mystery of Newtown Creek - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 21

tacular disasters such as BP's Gulf spill divert our attention from slower-moving, nearly
invisible disasters, such as the pollution of Newtown Creek, which can prove even more
insidious in the long run because they are less likely to be cleaned up.
The worst oil pollution caused by humans originates not in a single giant disaster but
in millions of tiny leaks from the cars, trucks, motorcycles, lawn mowers, boats, planes,
snowmobiles, and other machines we use every day. Gasoline that spills during refuel-
ing, or oil that drips from an engine, falls to the ground, where it is eventually washed
into sewers or creeks that flow into rivers, lakes, or the ocean. The cumulative effect of
these millions of tiny leaks is even worse than that of the sinking of the Deepwater Ho-
rizon.
According to OilintheSeaIII , a respected 2003 report by the National Research
Council, humans spill more than 300 million gallons of oil into North American waters
every decade, which is nearly double the highest estimate of the BP spill. Worldwide,
the report said, some 4 billion gallons of oil leaks into the world's oceans every decade,
more than twenty-five times the highest estimate from the BP tragedy. (Natural seepage
of oil is another major problem and could be as much as 493 million gallons a decade
in North American waters alone, according to the report.) Neither government nor in-
dustry track such small-scale spills, and woefully little research has been done on their
health and environmental impacts. What is known is that small amounts of oil-based
products contain toxic compounds that kill marine life and cause cancer in humans.
Likewise, it is easy to forget that across the country, thousands of industrial spills,
many let over from a less regulated time, continue to poison groundwater, leak toxins
into rivers and lakes, and impact human and environmental health in ways that are dif-
ficult to define or even to imagine.
These cases are reminders of the unintended consequences of man's progress, moral
lessons about our long-term impact on the environment for short-term gain. Yet, in an
ironic twist, and in defiance of easy categorizing, some of the nation's most polluted
rivers and lakes contain the promise of rescue and redemption.