Sludge

Past Manhattan, where the Hudson River meets the ocean, the coasts of Long Island and New Jersey slope outward, away from each other. They form a broad vee, with crooked legs of sand and New York City at the point. The ocean rolling into this open triangle is called the New York Bight. Twice daily, a long white ship plows out across it to a point about twelve miles offshore, then turns a slow half circle and heads back toward the land. This is the sludge tanker Newtown Creek.

On a day in July of 1974, a voyage took the Newtown Creek from a dock in Brooklyn down the East River, through the Verrazano Narrows, and out Ambrose Channel to the ocean. While the tanker moved out into the Bight, the captain led a tour around her decks. Heading southeast in gentle rollers, the ship had taken on a slight sea motion. There was no sea smell in the breeze, but instead a musty, riverlike scent. The captain opened a hatch on the immaculate foredeck and the aroma stiffened. Sloshing around inside the hold, just below deck level, lay the cargo, a thick brown liquid. This was sewage sludge, the stuff that treatment plants remove from sewer water. It was somewhat atypical of New York-New Jersey sewage sludge in that it had been cleansed of half of its live organisms and its strongest odors. But like most sludge, it would contain many different bacteria and viruses and “significant” amounts of heavy metals, such as zinc, chromium, and lead.

The sludge tanker moved seaward. A few miles beyond Ambrose Light—a platform perched above the ocean on enormous stilts the captain bent over a radarscope. He ordered the dumping commenced. Under the bridge at deck level, a grizzled mate stood at a large console full of red and green buttons. He pushed the buttons in careful order, opening the tanks below.

You couldn’t see the land now. The sky was low and white, and the sea around us looked green. Back on the stern, the oiler, assistant to the engineer, leaned his elbows on the rail and watched the wake turn black. A heavy man in an oilstained shirt and a stocking cap, the oiler said, looking down, “Yeah it comes out like mud. But you can see it breaking up right away. Soon as the water hits it, it breaks up and fades away.” Sludge from the hold frothed in the wake, then spread behind the ship in a lengthening, widening line that stood out black against green water.

The ship turned slowly. By the time the wake began to clear and the Newtown Creek started back toward Manhattan, leaving a vanishing, semicircular trail of sludge a couple of miles long, there were other vessels in sight. A barge from New Jersey, another sludge tanker from New York, and an old gray sludge ship from Long Island were converging on the dumping grounds.

The Hudson River flows by Manhattan in a volume exceeding a billion gallons a day. New York City and its neighbors produce a daily river of sewage almost twice that large. A great deal of this waste-water river flows directly to the sea, and another large part is piped to treatment plants which remove solid wastes from the water and collect them in great vats. The amalgamation of wastes is known as sewage sludge.

In 1974, New York wasn’t the only place in the country using salt waters to get rid of sludge. Los Angeles was piping sewage off its coast into underwater canyons; Boston was pumping sludge into its harbor; Philadelphia was dumping it at sea. At the same time, a number of cities had found ways to dispose of sewage waste on land. Chicago, Milwaukee, Houston, and Denver were either selling sludge as a soil conditioner or laying it down on large tracts of land. Chicago was growing corn on its sludge fields. Meanwhile, New York was building a fleet of luxurious sludge tankers.

The New York metropolitan area doesn’t have abundant open land nearby. It would have been difficult and expensive to find a piece of property big enough to hold the city’s sewer wastes. Besides, sludge has always seemed just a small part of an enormous refuse problem. The metropolitan area generates about 60 percent of the sludge that is dumped in the New York Bight, and that is a vast amount. But sludge is only one percent of all solid wastes. City managers never felt they could afford to spend great sums on its disposal.

The city had been dumping its sludge in the New York Bight for about forty years when, in 1970, a team of scientists reported that the dumping of sludge and other materials had created a twenty-square-mile “dead sea.” The report fell into the hands of a New York politician, who took it to the papers. The story got wide circulation for a while and then vanished. The ships kept dumping. Almost four years later, on December 11, 1973, the front page of the New York Times carried this headline: “Sewage Sludge Is Nearing Long Island.” Since 1969, a Brooklyn College geochemistry professor named William Harris had been studying the ocean floor between Atlantic Beach, Long Island, and the sludge dump site. According to the Times story, Dr. Harris believed that the sewage sludge had moved out of the dumping grounds and was coming in a mass toward the beaches of Long Island. Later he called it “creeping contamination.” The article quoted Harris as saying that the manifold bacteria and viruses harbored in the approaching sludge could close some of Long Island’s south shore beaches by the summer of 1974. Harris also said that when the sludge got close enough to land, some of its germs might become airborne and make the air conducive to a variety of diseases.

This made better news than the 1970 story about the twenty-square-mile dead sea. That report had concerned an offshore area, but this related to the land. Over fifteen million people had used Long Island’s public south shore beaches and many others had used the private ones in 1973. So Dr. Harris’ theory posed an enormous social and economic threat.

Three Long Island residents, Morris Kramer, Rod Vandivert, and Bonnie Mellon, who call themselves “environmental activists,” had arranged for the publication of the December Times story, which amounted to the first public airing of Dr. Harris’ theory. These three people weren’t scientists, but professional environmental campaigners, veterans of wars against things like bridges and highways and developments on waterfront and wetlands. Representatives of several environmental groups quickly joined them in the fight against sludge. The organizations included the Friends of the Earth, the Striped Bass Fund, the Save Our Bays Association, and the Long Island Environmental Council. People from these and other groups, along with a number of ordinary citizens, formed a loose federation. The three original “sludge activists” and three or four other professional environmentalists conducted most of the federation’s business. They arranged public hearings, they spoke at public hearings, they presented position papers, they cultivated the press and secured front-page publicity.

The activists demanded an end to sludge dumping, and in the months following the first Times story, they gained some concessions from politicians and bureaucrats. Then, in the spring and early summer, they muffled their campaign, partly in deference to those citizens trying to rent out shore-front houses, who could not be expected to welcome the publicity. They also wanted to give Dr. Harris time to gather more data. But several important public officials—such as the local representative of the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Nassau County executive—as well as the local Board of Health, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and the New York Environmental Protection Administration, had consistently denied there was cause for alarm, and had derided Harris’ theory. And so, in midsummer when the weather got really hot and the beaches were crowded, the activists opened a new campaign. They arranged a cruise for the press.

On July 9, reporters from a dozen New York papers and TV stations were transported out to a rusty-looking tramp of a ship, called the Commonwealth, no more than a mile away from Long Island’s Atlantic Beach. When they boarded her around lunchtime. Dr. Harris, a chubby man of medium height with a traditional haircut, dressed in shorts and sneakers, met them. He was holding a white paper plate. A black substance lay heaped high on it. “A sticks black ooze,”Dr. Harris said, looking at the stu IT. and explained it was typical of what he had been finding on the bottom in this area.

“A year ago these were little sludge pockets.”he said, raising his voice against the wind. “We have watched them link together, and now the main sludge body has positioned itself within three miles of the beach,”He puffed on a pipe. “With some short patches as close as a quarter mile off Atlantic Beach.”

A newsman asked Harris how he knew that the Stuff he was finding near shore came from the twelve-mile dump site.

“Because of the heavy-metal ratios.”Harris said, explaining that he had found a way of “fingerprinting" sewage sludge by comparing the ratios between heavy metals found in near-shore sediments with ratios of metals found in sludge at the dump site.

A TV reporter asked, “Can you give us a prediction when it’ll hit?”

Harris answered. “At present rates of movement, we believe that bv the summer of 1977 the sludge will be there. But by 1976, the coliform bacteria count will be so high they will have to close the beach.”He said he suspected the water of being unsafe for swimming now. Harris said he wouldn’t let his children even walk on Atlantic Beach.

Now the reporters debarked and Harris resumed bottom sampling. He was picking up chunks of the sea floor with a sort of spring-loaded bucket, lowered off the side of the Commonwealth on a winch.

A little fleet of power boats had carried us out here. The boat I was on, along with a few reporters, two concerned scuba divers, two sludge activists, a paid captain, a man named Donald Cotten who was running for Congress, and a few ordinary citizens, lingered near the Commonwealth. That ship worked its way closer and closer to the beach and at length it sat just about three hundred yards from the sand. On our boat somebody said, “He’s gonna look for sludge in there. Okay!" From across the water, we watched the stocky chemist and his students lower their bucket. In a moment we saw it come back up.

Aboard our boat. I heard someone say, “Cousteau says the oceans will be dead in ten years.”“I also helped organize Earth Day in Manhattan in 1970,”said the politician. Cotten. “If I don’t do this there won’t be any lobsters, everybody better realize this.”a scuba diver said. There was also a lot of talk about a “cover-up” by the EPA. For months that agency denied that sludge was closing with the shore. “A salt Watergate.”an activist said. “They’re doing a whitewash of a brown liquid.” Cotten said. Apostles id Dr. Harris’ theory, most of the people on board had long ago accepted the idea that the beaches were in danger. Now they hoped to give the press a successful demonstration. Harris had the same objective. Several months back, on a similar excursion, he and some activists had led a TV crew on a daylong search for sludge and had found nothing worth filming, an embarrassment he didn’t care to repeat.

One of the activists aboard our boat cupped his hands and shouted through them, across the water toward Dr. Harris: “You got it?”

“They got it!”

Someone cheered.

“They found sludge three hundred yards off shore?” asked a reporter.

“That’s right.”said a black-haired young man.

“But that’s less than a quarter mile.”

“That’s a lot less, my friend.”said the young man, smiling. Everyone seemed to be smiling.

How seriously was Harris to be taken? “He seemed to be a reasonably good chemist,”a scientist who knew Harris before the first Times story broke told me. At that time Harris, who is in his late thirties, had virtually no publications and no long history of involvement in environmental issues. He wasn’t a well-known scientist, and certainly he wasn’t an activist. When he first started taking samples of the sea floor between the dump site and the beach, he was doing it as part of a student training program and “just for the hell of it.” And before he talked to the Times reporter, in December of 1973. he’d only spoken casually, and mostly just to friends, about his evolving theory of an impending sewage sludge disaster.

When Harris first told the Times reporter about his theory, he simultaneously alerted some state and local officials. But essentially he used the paper to make his theory public. Some officials scored him for that, and his reputation suffered in professional circles. Years of concern about dumping in the Bight, expressed in scholarly, dignified ways, hadn’t accomplished much beyond promoting further research. So it was common for marine scientists to say things like, “I think we owe Harris a debt of thanks.”or “I would agree that Harris has forced several agencies to zero in on what’s a very real problem.”But the scientists I talked to—a marine geologist from Adelphi University, a chemist from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, a marine geochemist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, a marine biologist from the National Oceanic Administration, a couple of biologists from the National Marine Fisheries-all disapproved of what they called “Harris’ approach.” For them, he was speaking to the public on the basis of unpublished, unscrutinized, and therefore suspicious data.

His supporters liked to portray Harris as an independent kind of man who “had no ax to grind.” who “just wanted to let the public know what was going on.” They emphasized his modesty. “He was made public, he didn’t make himself public,” they said, and they were in a position to know, since they had arranged the publicity.

Harris once allowed that things might have gotten “a little out of hand.” He couldn’t have foreseen the exposure his theory would receive, and he had been a little reckless back in December when he predicted that the beaches would be closed by summer-looking toward land the afternoon of July 9, you could see those beaches shimmering with people. As for the airborne bacteria and virus theory, which he offered to the Times reporter, other scientists had publicly labeled it “farfetched.”

Harris’ theory had threatened the entire dumping operation and city managers who had a stake in it. His prediction had threatened to discredit several state and local agencies. Above all, it had promised to embarrass the federal EPA, which controlled sludge dumping permits and owned responsibility for detecting and preventing dumping related catastrophes. These agencies, public officials, and a few local politicians first doubted, then denied the imminence of sludge. The federal EPA became the main representative of this group. A man named Richard Dewling usually spoke for the EPA.

“Be careful of Dewling. He’s got a smooth mouth,” said one sludge activist. “If Mr. Dewling ever leaves government I’m sure he’ll do well selling soap or snake oil,” said another. “The Ronald Ziegler of the EPA.” “A typical engineer.”

The EPA had not investigated the behavior of sludge in the ocean. While a team of agency divers went out to have a look, Dewling defended the EPA’s apparent negligence by pointing out that they’d only just inherited the responsibility for ocean dumping from the Corps of Engineers, who had left things in disarray. Dewling said that again and again, at many public meetings. Later, a couple of’ months after the first Times story, Dewling called Harris’ theory “unfounded” and “lacking technical substantiation.”Chewing on a cigar, he confronted Dr. Harris and asked, “Why haven’t you presented this to us officially, before this?” “Some Ph.D.s write technical papers.” Dewling once said with a smile. “Others hold press conferences.” At public hearings, playing on Harris’ tendency to speak of the sludge as if it were alive, Dewling mocked the idea of sewer waste “creeping” or “leaping.”

He angered Dr. Harris’ allies with sarcasm and frustrated them with joviality. At one of the dozens of public hearings Dewling attended in order to defend the EPA, there was a speaker who railed at him with remarkable eloquence. “He tore me limb from limb,” Dewling marveled. “I had to congratulate him. He was so fantastic.” At times Dewling even praised the activists for their “spirited criticisms.” as if to sax that while they disagreed about the sludge they were all really allies in the fight to protect the environment.

Thirty-eight years old, Dewling is a big, fairskinned man who dresses in patent leather loafers, wire-rimmed glasses, and wide ties. Regional head of the EPA’s surveillance and analysis division, he presides over a plush, spacious office. On one wall hangs a framed color photo of an oil spill in progress.

Dewling calls himself a “technical man.”He trained and first worked as a sanitary engineer, which means he once was chiefly occupied with problems of cost and efficiency in public health. That naturally affects the way he approaches environmental issues. You must weigh cost against benefit, he says. “Let me give you an absurd example.”He asked me to imagine a community, faced with competing claims for its limited resources, that sits by a polluted lake. Should it spend a million to clean up the lake or thousands to build a swimming pool? Dewling didn’t say what his answer was.

He also told me, “It’s my nature to be as honest as I can and try and put things in perspective. People at hearings ask me, ‘Are sludge balls a health hazard?’ (Sludge balls are congealed lumps of oil that frequently wash up on Long Island’s south shore. A product of oil spills and sewage in the water, some recently discovered ones contained high levels of coliform bacteria, evidence of fecal contamination.) I say, ‘Yes, in the strict sense of the word. But let’s prioritize this.’ ” Dewling pulled out a book which estimated that dogs drop 750,000 pounds of excrement in New York City each day. Dewling said, with a significant look, “Kids can step on dogshit, too.”

A middle-level civil servant, Dewling didn’t singlehandedly write the various positions the EPA took on sludge. But it was Dewling who for months stood up before hostile crowds in his colorful jackets and defended those positions in an emphatic voice, asking himself questions, answering them, tossing out analogies and jokes, and reciting data in what even his enemies agree was a convincing, professional style. He took his first stand on the claim that the present twelve-mile dumping site posed no threat to the beaches or the public health for at least five or ten years. This position lasted him through most of February and the hearings on sludge dumping permit renewals.

Dewling had to reissue permits: no municipality was equipped to put its sludge anywhere but at the twelve-mile site. Activists claimed that Dewling therefore entered into a conspiracy to conceal the truth about the sludge. As evidence, they pointed out that he denounced Harris’ theory before the EPA collected any scientific data. Whether that was true or not, at the permits hearing Dewling defended his position-“There is no steady creep of sludge"-with several recent studies, conducted by state and local agencies and the EPA. There is no evidence of dishonesty in them, but they are slim. Only one agency in the area had the resources to investigate the complex question of whether the sludge was moving: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA had already begun a five-year study of the New York Bight. But NOAA was equivocal. Its representative said that scientists had found some indications that sludge had moved eight and a half miles beachward. But these “inconclusive" indications didn’t establish an “immediate threat.”

Dewling issued the dumping permits for another year. Having invited the public to speak on the issue, he announced he intended to grant the permits before the hearing began.

But his stance was shifting. Even before the hearing started. Dewling had been trying to persuade NOAA officials to recommend a new deepwater dump site far away from the beaches. In March, armored in caveats, NOAA’s local representative “tentatively” recommended two large offshore areas where scientists suspected a suitable new place for dumping might be found. Then, repeating, “There is no steady creep,” Dewling announced that the EPA would order the old dump site abandoned and a new site opened within two years. “Why two years?” he asked. Because, he said, sludge production would triple by 1977, an increase the twelve-mile site couldn’t safely accommodate. Dewling had known about sludge loads tripling for a long time before this. He’d known back in the winter, when he was contending that the twelve-mile site could be used for five or ten more years. Later he explained, “I still say five or ten years. But we can’t let any degradation of the beaches occur. We can’t take a chance.” To let dumping continue at the twelve-mile site after 1976 would be to “gamble” with the beaches and the public health, he said.

In April Dewling added several names to a growing list of industries denied permission to dump wastes at sea. Later, still denying a present menace, he announced “our goal.”He repeated it: “Our goal is to phase out ocean dumping altogether by 1981.” He had reached a resting place.

During this time, Dewling had been under pressure from all sides. TV editorials and newspaper articles criticized his first position; all winter and spring worried congressmen sent him inquiries; hundreds of citizens wrote him and demanded that he take steps to protect the beaches. New York City officials communicated with him too. Already running out of places to put ordinary garbage, city officials didn’t want to abandon their sludge dumping program, or the twelve-mile site. A former engineer, Dewling could appreciate the city’s awful refuse problems. And he probably did worry about the anticipated tripled sludge loads. So he struck a compromise. His plan to send the ships to deeper waters in 1976 would double the cost of dumping, but it would also give the city almost a decade, and maybe forever, to tackle the very expensive and difficult problem of land-based sludge disposal. At the same time, his plan to open a new dump site would satisfy demands that he do something to ensure the coastline’s safety.

He’d handled the situation with aplomb, despite severe criticism. He made his compromise sound like a victory for all sides. But the argument wasn’t complete. Dewling hadn’t arranged for the protection of the sea.

Solutions spawn problems. When Dewling announced that sludge production would triple by 1977, everyone realized he was right. The Federal Water Quality Improvements Act of 1972 required municipalities throughout the country to provide at least “secondary” treatment, which removes up to 70 percent of waste solids from sewer water, for all waste water they piped into bays, rivers, lakes, and oceans. The law’s deadline was 1977. Its intention was to reduce water pollution.

But when treatment plants remove wastes from sewage, those wastes don’t disappear. They become sludge. Because of the Water Quality Act, sewage treatment would increase dramatically. Rivers around Manhattan would grow cleaner, but sewage sludge volumes would rise to record levels. And most people felt, with Dewling, that the tripled sludge volumes could endanger the beaches if dumping went on at the twelve-mile site. So, in legislating a partial solution to a general environmental problem, the Congress had exacerbated New York’s old sludge disposal problem.

By now literally hundreds of scientists were working to unravel the mysteries of sewage sludge and the effects of other man-made things on the New York Bight. One of them was a thirty-nine-year-old marine geologist named Tony Cok. He had been hired by NOAA to make a map of the bottom.

Exploring the seabed off New York, with a spring-loaded bucket not unlike Dr. Harris’, Cok had found an underwater hill of petroleum-rich sediment known as dredge spoils: red sterile sediments, the result of acid wastes, and sewage sludge.

Cok is, by his description, “very environmentally oriented.” Now and then, when he is biking along the urban seashore with his wife and sees somebody dropping trash in the water, he will stop. A large man in glasses. Cok lectures the offender, and his bushy, sandy-blond moustaches shake. A professor at Adelphi University, he lectures students on something he calls “the out-of-sight-outof-mind syndrome.” He tells them that one of the important ways in which polluters “get away with their, uh, their work" is to hide pollution from general view. On the wall beside his office hangs a poster saying, TO SAVE THE WHALES STOP JAPANESE SALES. But Cok doesn’t have much use for what he calls “self-styled ecologists.”

Cok and most scientists I talked to thought Harris had overestimated the beachward movement of sludge, and had therefore exaggerated the immediate threat to the waterfront. On the other hand, Cok allowed that sludge from the dump site was probably adding to the general murkiness of the waters off places like Atlantic Beach. He conceded that tripled loads dumped at the twelve-mile spot might reduce the water quality to a point where the EPA would have to close the beaches. So whether Harris’ estimates were correct or not, the alarm he spread seemed justified.

But Cok regretted the emphasis on beaches. “I’m least concerned about the beaches,”said Cok. “That doesn’t mean I’m not concerned with them, but the severe impact of dumping sewage sludge is offshore.” He had in mind the fact that the sea releases much of its energy into waters near a surfscoured beach. Not many animals live in the surf zone; Cok calls it “a death zone.”In his hierarchy, bays and wetlands are most important, because, among other things, that is where animals are born. Second in importance are the areas beginning in about thirty feet of water and extending out to the end of the continental shelf. Most creatures spend their adult lives in these offshore seas. Sludge out there kills more marine life and ruins more habitats than sludge in a surf zone would. So Cok worried less about the beaches than he did about the EPA’s plans to transport sludge to virgin waters.

Those plans had disturbed other oceanographers besides Cok. Back in the spring, when Dewling asked NOAA officials to help him find a new dump site, some of NOAA’s scientists felt they should refuse. The dissident scientists were considering the past performance of the sludge. Marine biologists hadn’t uncovered all the ways sewage sludge affected sea creatures, but they knew that almost nothing lived in the dump site itself, that sludge blackened the gills and eroded the shells of crabs and lobsters. They knew that sludge was rich in heavy metals, which are toxic to both fish and men at certain concentrations. Although they’d never be able to name all the concentrations and effects of the metals, they knew that unnatural amounts of things like cadmium and mercury had entered the Bight’s food chain. The Bight is a rich fishery. In the Bight, mostly in areas close to the city, biologists had discovered fish with missing fins, with whole tails gone, with skin hemorrhages and skin ulcers. Some fin-rotted fish were blind. Naturally, the great majority of fish they caught weren’t diseased, but among the infected ones they found bluefish, weakfish, butterfish and blueback herring, northern sea robin, northern kingfish, northern puffer, bay anchovy, winter flounder, summer flounder, windowpane flounder, crevalle jack. Out of their nets they pulled diseased scup, silver perch, white hake, red hake, white mullet, Atlantic needlefish, Atlantic silversides, mummichog and striped bass. Some scientists who handled sludge and dredge spoils for a while found warts sprouting on their hands.

Tony Cok showed me sludge in the ocean one night. Laughing into the salt wind, while his old research ship tossed its bow seaward, Cok declared a solution to all sewage problems. “Cut the population of New York in half.” His hair flew in the wind. “A Swiftian solution. You know.” Later he pointed ahead, where the moon wake lay on the waves, and said, “Right now there should be a monster coming up. with coil upon dripping coil.”

When we reached the twelve-mile dumping place, we dropped the spring-loaded bucket, then hoisted it back onto the floodlit deck. It was dripping black water. In the dim light of the ship’s lab, I bent over the reeking stuff in the bucket. Cok stood off to the side, and in a professorial tone of voice described the wet sludge as “a black mayonnaise” and “a quivering pudding.” It was something clearly out of place, that seemed to be his message. Of course Cok had dredged up hundreds of buckets of sludge before, and he looked on calmly as I probed through the muck with a spoon. But it seemed amazing to me that we had pulled this fierce-smelling black stuff, bristling with human hair, out of twenty fathoms of water, twelve miles out at sea.

On August 2, all the main sludge activists, many reporters, politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, and a few ordinary citizens gathered at Senator James Buckley’s hearing on the situation. We listened to Harris, who sat and read his statement, pipe in hand; and to Dewling, who knew his by heart and stood up when he spoke. Most positions were reiterated. Harris said he hoped he was wrong. Dewling said he thought he was. A well-known oceanographer named Grant Gross and NOAA’s local chief, Larry Swanson, said they thought the immediate threat had been overstated. The senator sat at a table elevated above the crowd. Activists and a few politicians told him that no one could afford to doubt Harris anymore.

The setting was a dining room at Jones Beach. Judging from the speeches, most of the politicians spent their childhoods serving hot dogs to the public at this very spot.

Some politicians urged an immediate relocation to the proposed deepwater sites. Dewling cautioned against moving the site before scientists had time to examine the area that everyone called “out there.”

Several speakers talked about ending ocean dumping altogether, saying that the necessary technology existed, and all that was needed now were the will and revenues to use it. Dewling concurred, but warned of difficulties. A technique known as the Zimpro process turns sludge into ash. But coupled with the problem of building the necessary incinerators, Dewling pointed out, is the problem of what to do with the ashes.

Recycling sludge, either selling it to farmers as a soil conditioner or using it on city-owned land, seemed the most attractive, timeliest solution. Laying sludge on soil can contaminate groundwater, but it was a proven method of disposal. The problem was, Dewling felt, that New York City might have trouble marketing its sludge.

Several months before this hearing, the city tried to coax the town of Cadiz, in Harrison County, Ohio, into taking some ordinary garbage and using it as landfill at a strip mine site. As bait, the city offered Cadiz $40,000 a year. A Cadiz official said, “Harrison County does not need nor does it want to be known as the garbage dump of New York City or any other city,” and turned the offer down. Dewling also thought there would be a general bias against a compost largely made of human excrement.

The city might get around those problems by purchasing its own land, as Chicago had. But Chicago’s sludge disposal program had stirred up trouble too. Chicago was being sued right now, because of the odors rising off its fields. Dewling generalized again: “There is no way of disposing of sludge without causing some impact.”

With time and money, the EPA would find a suitable disposal method and the city would develop it. But not before 1981, unless something extraordinary happened. “Give us eleven thousand acres outside the metropolitan area and we’ll stop ocean dumping in two years,” Dewling told the senator. But Dewling didn’t seem to think they’d get the land. And the senator, who may have been thinking about upstate voters, didn’t take up the suggestion. When it was all over, he told Newsday reporter Harry Pearson. “The question we have to determine, after we get a team of scientists to evaluate the evidence presented here, is how much time we can shave off that 1976 date, how much sooner we can move the site.”

A quiet period followed. The sludge ships still cruised daily in and out of New York. In August. Tony Cok went down in a submarine to look at the proposed offshore dumping sites through a window. He watched large schools of fish swim by, and on the bottom he saw huge beds of scallops, crabs, and ocean clams. “Probably enough to feed most of the American Indian population, if you want to talk in those terms.”

If New York hid its sewer wastes down there, most of the bottom life would be destroyed, Cok said. Sludge dumped in that offshore area might also travel, maybe back toward land and maybe into the Hudson Canyon, a teeming fish migration route.

Cok returned to land, saying, “Ahhh, Buckley’s full of it,” and was more opposed than ever to Dewling’s plan. Sludge at the twelve-mile dump site had degraded about twenty square miles of ocean. Cok expected that sludge sixty miles offshore would have similar effects. It would contaminate the bottom and literally bury bottomdwelling creatures as it fell. Dumping out there would fill another region with dangerous concentrations of heavy metals, and might establish a new center for the spread of fin rot disease. And sludge dumped in the recommended offshore areas would probably travel more widely than it had around the twelve-mile site.

He talked optimistically about stirring up international wrangles and lawsuits that would prevent the ships from dumping farther offshore. But by fall, his optimism seemed depleted. In October, when I spoke to him again, I asked, “As far as public policy toward the ocean goes, what are your hopes?” I pressed him for an answer.

“To be brutally frank, I don’t have any,” he said.

On October 2, 1974, the EPA sent a letter to all sludge-dumping municipalities in the area, informing them that plans to send the ships “to a new location” about sixtv-five miles offshore were now “firm.” And so sewage sludge would continue to cascade down onto the backs of fish and crabs. Only now it would happen in unspoiled seas.

I don’t know who was to blame for this unfortunate turn in events. The problem was well advanced by the time players like Harris and Dewling entered the scene, and in the end they seemed helpless before the rising tide of metropolitan sewage. But the situation remained preposterous. Years after the first sludge warning hit the papers, engineers were still removing wastes from water only to have sailors dump the wastes back in the water again. □