Nature might be healing alongside New York City’s East River. For the first time ever, people have observed a group of rays swimming in one of NYC’s most polluted waterways: the Newtown Creek.
The Newtown Creek Alliance announced the sighting last week, while also sharing an accompanying video on its Instagram account. Though it’s not clear why these fish visited the area, it may be a sign that ongoing efforts to cleanup and curb further pollution of the creek are indeed working.
A history of muck and renewed life
The Newtown Creek is an estuary sandwiched between Brooklyn and Queens. Its waters flow west for about 3.8 miles long before emptying out into the East River. And it’s infamous for being one of the most polluted industrial sites in the whole country.
Starting in the mid-1800s, refineries and other businesses along the creek used it as a dumping ground for their waste products, while oil leaks and spills added even more toxic muck. One spill in particular, the Greenpoint oil spill, is believed to have left behind more oil than the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Though these major pollution sources are no longer around and the creek now has a waste treatment center to handle sewage sent its way, rain storms that overwhelm the system still routinely help dump substantial amounts of raw sewage into the creek.
In 2010, the Newtown Creek was designated a Superfund site by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a label intended to help accelerate cleanup efforts. These efforts include the formation of programs like the Billion Oyster Project, which is restoring oyster populations at various sites around NYC, including Newtown Creek, to help naturally filter the water. And while cleanup in general hasn’t gone perfectly smoothly, there does seem to have been some real progress made lately.
According to the Newtown Creek Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to restoring the estuary, wildlife is starting to return to the area. People have spotted blue crabs at the creek’s mouth, fish swimming in its waters, and various species of wetland plants reclaiming areas abandoned by industrialization. So this latest sighting seems to be another bit of good news.
The rays seen in the video appear to be cownose rays, according to the Alliance, which are native to the area and much of the western Atlantic Ocean. And though it’s possible these fish had gotten inadvertently lost or stuck in the creek, the mere fact that they were traveling as a group (also known as a fever of rays) suggests otherwise, Willis Elkins, executive director of the Newtown Creek Alliance told Gothamist last week.
“Most of the time, especially if it’s a [group], they’re coming because there’s food,” Elkins said. “The whole group swimming as one was really awesome to witness.”
There’s still a long way to go before the creek will be anything like it once was before humans mucked it up. In 2022, the Environmental Protection Agency substantially delayed its deadline for cleaning up the creek from 2023 to 2032. But perhaps someday relatively soon, rays won’t be the only aquatic life eager to pay a visit to the Newtown Creek and other waters in New York City.
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