idiomatic voice
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
You don’t need to resort to filters or camera tricks to create a perfect mirror out of the waters of Newtown Creek, about three miles back from the East River. One of the core environmental problems back here is “flow.” Historically, there were dozens of small creeks and streams that flowed down out of the hills in Bushwick and Ridgewood and fed fresh water into the English Kills tributary of Newtown Creek, but colonization/industrialization/gentrification has turned them all into underground sewers. Natural springs were either capped or exploited. The water here rises and falls with the East River tide, but there’s virtually zero “laminar” or horizontal flow.
Anything that ends up in the water precipitates vertically down, building a sediment bed which is currently 15-20 feet thick that is referred to as “Black Mayonnaise.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
To combat this lack of current, and the low oxygen levels inherent in still or standing water, the State commanded the City to build an aeration system which seems to be fairly useless. Expensively useless would also be a phrase that applies. I keep on bringing up the creation of small waterfalls, the engineered kind where water flows and splashes down concrete steps. Hydrological engineering for the bulkheads to accommodate the water’s flow via the introduction of compression and expansion zones is something else I ponder.
The concept underlying the latter is that since water has an absolute limit on its top – atmospheric pressure – and another absolute limit at the hard bottom of the waterway, if you compress the water column horizontally the water will flow faster to its only egress. Same principle as holding a thumb over a garden hose’s outlet increases the pressure of the water. If the bulkheads included some sort of repeating scallop shape, it could theoretically create “flow” without having to power up pumps or impellers. That’s the theory, anyway.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
If improving Newtown Creek requires the use of a mechanism that needs to be fueled or powered, the improvement has already failed before it left the design phase. The physics of how water moves over, past, and through certain shapes embedded in its columnar body is what really matters to my eyes. Irrigation and petroleum pipeline professional engineers handle this sort of thing all the time, moving pressurized liquids around to where they’re needed. Pumping is largely accomplished with gravity and pipes that narrow and then widen.
Ehh. What do I know, I’m just some wandering mendicant with a camera.
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The Newtown Pentacle 
Mitch, I keep reading you for years about the “black mayonnaise”. Is there anyway you could perhaps scoop some out – with a bucket or pole – and photograph it?
georgetheatheist . . . goopy goop
September 17, 2021 at 12:03 pm
I’ve got photos of the cores EPA scooped out somewhere, but you really – really – don’t want to interact with this stuff in anything other than lab conditions.
Mitch Waxman
September 17, 2021 at 12:42 pm
I sure it’s very toxic but it would be a favor to us readers if you could somehow show visually what this stuff looks like,
georgetheatheist . . . goopy goop
September 17, 2021 at 12:54 pm
It’s black goo that smells of poop and oil. I’ll try and dig up a shot of the core for you next week
Mitch Waxman
September 17, 2021 at 1:46 pm