On a hot morning in August, biologist Mark B. Bain straddled buckets aboard the research vessel Acipenser as it bobbed on the Hudson River just offshore from where the World Trade Center once stood.
Bain leaned over a gunwale and pulled a hinged, clam-shaped device called a grab sampler into the boat. Minutes before, the grab sampler had scooped a gallon or more of mud from the river's bottom. Surprisingly, this first sample of the day brought up a batch of clams and worms clearly still alive, "a testament to life's ability to survive just about anything," Bain said.
He is studying the effects of the Sept.11 attack on the fish and invertebrates that live on the bottom of New York Harbor. After the attack, a miasma of smoke and fragments of the trade center drifted around lower Manhattan, eventually settling onto the Hudson's surface. This choking cloud, containing high levels of dioxins, PCBs and metals, showered the harbor with toxins. Within days, much of the particulates sank, blocking shipping channels and smothering the aquatic life beneath the Hudson's surface.
"Marine creatures in this area sustained a double whammy from the events of 9/11: the fallout of thousands of tons of airborne debris, and subsequent digging up by dredging that deepened channels to allow barges in to carry out the rubble," said Bain, who is affiliated with Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.
Bain's research, conducted along Lower Manhattan from the Battery through 59th Street, involves the Hudson River Park and Hudson River Estuarine Sanctuary, which was created by the state in 1998.
Dredging and debris removal are supported by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), said Laurie Silberfeld, vice president of the Hudson River Park Trust (HRPT), which manages the park and sanctuary. "An assessment of the environmental status of Hudson River Park waters will provide information needed to follow FEMA's 'smart recovery' philosophy of integrating the environment into disaster planning, response and recovery decision-making," she said.
Bain and colleagues such as Cornell's Geof Eckerlin and Anne Gallagher are comparing the results of their two-year effort to previous studies of the lower Hudson. The research, funded by the HRPT, began this July and involves monthly expeditions to count bottom-dwelling invertebrates and fish.
On this day, the biologists worked near Pier 40, not far from where major dredging occurred after Sept. 11. At Pier 79, dredging removed more than 25,000 cubic yards of river bottom; at Pier 25, 120,000 cubic yards; and at Pier 6, 58,000 cubic yards. According to the state Department of Environmental Conservation, the bottom near these piers had not been dredged for 40 to 50 years, leaving marine life there undisturbed for decades.
Dredging physically removes many animals and stirs up contaminants locked in the muck, potentially releasing long-buried toxins into waters above the river bottom and affecting both mud-dwelling invertebrates and fish. Sediment deep under the harbor near Piers 79, 25 and 6 is contaminated with decades-old deposits of dioxins, PCBs, DDT, cadmium, copper, lead and mercury. Scientists at state agencies are monitoring post-9/11 levels of these toxins in harbor sediments.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reports from last October said the planned dredging was "not likely to affect any federally endangered or threatened species or its critical habitat."
The research vessel Acipenser is named for a federally endangered fish, the short-nosed sturgeon (Acipenser brevirostrum), which, Bain said, inhabits the harbor. "How much the sturgeon's habitat was impacted, though, remains to be seen," he added.
The whine of the Acipenser's winches signaled the dropping of a trawl net into the Hudson. Minutes later, student research assistants Matt Horn and Tyler Kaune wrestled the heavy net back over the boat's stern. Silvery, inches-long butterfish scattered across the deck, their scales shining in the sunlight. Gallagher untangled the net, and gleaming anchovies joined the butterfish. Horn and Kaune grabbed while Gallagher and Eckerlin measured and weighed each fish.
Trawls to date also have caught three kinds of flounder -- winter flounder, summer flounder and windowpane flounder -- a good sign, Bain said. "Flounders live right on the bottom, so if they're still there, it's a positive indicator," he said.
The net's haul also produced blue crabs, fish called scup and iridescent creatures called comb jellies. As the jellies' oval shapes turned in a plastic container of river water, the comb plates lining their bodies shimmered like rainbows. "Clearly," said Bain, "the lower Hudson, she ain't dead yet."
Management and design consultant Albert Masetti hopes Bain is right. Masetti, president of Masetti and Associates, remembers exactly where he was on the morning of Sept. 11: watching the Hudson's fish from the World Trade Center's 73rd floor. "I'd been watching schools of fish as they moved up- and down-river," Masetti said. "If you had access to an upper-floor window in the trade center towers, you could have sold your services as a professional fish-spotter to fishermen out on the river."
Within minutes of the first plane's strike, he said, "the whole area near the financial district, including the river, was showered with dust.
"You know it all has to have had some effect, once it sank down into the water."
Then, he said, the dredging started. "That I watched on TV from the safety of my home in New Jersey, but I was still thinking about the fish I'd seen, swimming around out there by the hundreds."
People interested in the long-term health of the Hudson are frequently coming out to the harborfront to check on the river, Bain said. "Although no one thought much about effects on the harbor when 9/11 first happened, they're beginning to be concerned about that now."
At this stage in the research, said Bain, it's too soon to know how far-reaching an impact the debris fallout and, later, dredging have had.
"Osama bin Laden, among other things," Masetti said, "failed to file an environmental impact statement."
|
If you have come to this page from an outside location click here to get back to mindfully.org |