As of late last night it had rained for roughly 24 hours straight here in Brooklyn.  During that time there were times of heavy rain from thunderstorms and it only stopped raining overnight. 

Earlier this afternoon we headed down to the 69th Street Pier in Bay Ridge and found a truly gross site, the NYC water treatment facility was, from our view, surrounded by water that appeared to be the brown kind that one flushes down the toilet.

This is because some genius thought that it was a good idea to connect boththe pipes that collect sewage from homes, businesses and apartment buildings with the very same pipes that collect all of the run off from the corner storm drains.

The effect, just about whenever it rains in NYC, the raw sewage treatment facilities are flooded and as a consequence are forced to send untreated waste water out into the surrounding rivers.  (The New York Times had a great article about it several years back.)

Anyway, the above photo has the Owl’s Head water treatment facility on the far right, withLower Manhattan in the far background, Jersey City, NJ in the middle and the Hudson River where it connects with the Narrows in between.

We marked the photo with yellow dots to highlight the deviation line of where ‘normal water’ and ‘poop water’ is – with the poop water being everything that was closest to us.  Can you see difference in water?

Oddly enough, despite there being a literal river of poop around the pier, the pier still had about ten men with their fishing poles in the water.

The pier should have a sign that says, “Only fish here if you left your common sense at home!”