Month: April 2009

April 30, 2009

Checking out a hotly litigated corner of
Albany’s Pine Bush on a hot day

Check out this first photo. Take a guess where it was taken:

Some Strange Land?

If you said North Africa or Mongolia you’d be mighty wrong. This photograph was taken the other day within the borders of the second oldest city in the United States, the capital of the State of New York, the former Dutch colony of Beverwick, renamed later in honor of some degenerate English lord who never visited the place. This, my friends, is the City of Albany.

I’m happy to say that this is not the South End, although this might be what my neighborhood would look like today if the Jennings administration had been allowed to have it’s way. This photo is of the part of our Pine Bush called Blueberry Hill. Those are pitch pine trees rising out of the bare sand, the only visible life forms remaining on this strange planet.

This last weekend we had a record breaking heat wave, so The Wife and I decided to cool off with a four hour midday hike through the Pine Bush sand dunes. At The Wife’s insistence, we wore heavy clothing to protect ourselves from deer ticks bearing the dreaded west nile virus. I’m telling you, by the time we finished our hike I was as parched as the mahogany desert.

The Trailhead At The Dead End Of
Pitch Pine Road

We entered the Pine Bush at the trailhead at the dead end of Pitch Pine Road, an unnecessary suburban sprawl “development” from the 1980s. The cheaply constructed houses, which were looking a little tattered, generally command higher prices because they butt up against the Pine Bush preserve. The added “value” comes from the guarantee that no “developer” can build more crap houses behind these.

I noted with disgust that many of the houses sported unhealthy monoculture lawns, which are created by applying a combination of pesticides, weed killer and antibiotics. Most houses ringing the preserve appear to casually dump these dangerous chemicals on their sad grass. For sure this crud is seeping into Pine Bush preserve, quietly killing flora and fauna.

A Short Way Up The Trail

After entering at the trailhead we took the first trail to the left and almost immediately this astonishing barren vista opened up. Neither I nor The Wife, who proudly calls herself an armchair environmentalist, had been to Blueberry Hill for years. So both of us were shocked and surprised by what we saw, hearing about something and seeing it for yourself are much different things.

What happened? According to The Wife (and others I’ve talked to) back in the 1970s Blueberry Hill was classic Pine Bush, a complex and diverse ecosystem of karner blue butterflies, blue lupen, buckmoths, scrub oak bushes and worm snakes. And there were ridge upon ridge of blueberry bushes. Old timers around Albany still talk about going out every year with baskets to collect the wild blueberries.

Due to a misguided policy of fire suppression, the Pine Bush ecosystem around Blueberry Hill became overgrown. This overgrowth destroyed the low lying blueberry bushes and scrub oak along with the creatures that depend on them.

After several decades of overgrowth, decaying leaves formed an unnatural layer of mulch on top of the sand. This mulch became a breeding ground for invasive species. That’s when fast growing and quick spreading white poplar and black locust broadleaf trees took over, choking out the surviving ecosystem.

Pitch Pine Tree Choked By Poplars

For the last ten or twelve thousand years, fire would sweep over the original 40 square miles of Pine Bush every ten or twenty years. As strange as it sounds, the plants and animals are not only adapted to periodic fires, they need fire to live. But we civilized people can no longer tolerate fire in the Pine Bush because of all these crappy sprawl houses with poisonous lawns ringing the preserve, so alternatives to fire have had to be found.

The Albany Pine Bush Preserve Commission is a quasi-governmental agency created as a direct result of lawsuits filed by Save the Pine Bush. The Commission actively manages the preserve, they created this stark landscape of bare sand dunes.

The Commission decided that Blueberry Hill was so degraded by overgrowth that the only alternative to a wildfire was to strip it down to the sand and start over, keeping only the surviving pitch pines. A radical decision to be sure, full of optimism that a ten thousand year old ecosystem can be rebuilt from the bottom up. The organisms that are needed to repopulate the stripped area are right nearby, but I wonder how long it will take to establish the original complexity, if that ever can be recreated.

Well, the Commission is doing the best they can with what they’ve got. The stripping of the dunes is done mostly with bulldozers and a device called a hydro-ax. And unfortunately they also apply chemicals to kill and dissolve the stumps of certain invasive trees, particularly the black locust. And as can be seen, they haul off all of the vegetation and mulch.

Recovering Dune In The Foreground

These dunes are bare because they had been stripped last year, but they won’t stay that way long. In short order we came upon the dunes that were stripped a year or so earlier, an we could see the low lying growth had becoming reestablished. This quick recovery is how we know we are in the northeast US and not in a real desert.

It’s kind of interesting that our entire country is currently facing a quiet crisis in the slow but steady loss of our precious layer of topsoil. But here in the Pine Bush we are removing the topsoil, mulch is the enemy that destroys.

The entire day we saw only one other visitor like us, a bicyclist who stopped to talk to us. I noted when I climbed up a dune (which I’m not supposed to do) that there were absolutely no other footprints in the sand besides mine. I decided I’d better not do that again and stay on the trails, if every tourist did what I did the dunes would have a hard time recovering.

Bags Of Open Pinecones

Out in the open The Wife found a couple of bags of pitch pine pine cones left by the Commission. Pine cones cannot germinate unless they open first, and usually pitch pine pine cones don’t open unless they are exposed to fire. This is one example of how plant life in the Pine Bush needs fire to survive, thus these these open pine cones are important seed stock.

Leaving the stripped down dunes hiked through some of the remaining overgrown areas, heading toward the power line right of way. This is a corridor maintained by the power corporation monopoly so they can have ready access to their lines. As the stupid and self destructive Albany Common Council continues to approve encroachments upon this corner of the Pine Bush, this power line corridor becomes more and more important as an unassailable link between pieces of the surviving ecosystem.

Power Line Corridor

The power corporation mows this corridor once or twice a year. Believe it or not this is a good thing because it prevents overgrowth. While no trees or bushes can grow here, this artificially maintained open area supports a thriving low lying community of plant life.

We were delighted to see that the corridor was carpeted with blue lupen, the primary food and breeding ground for endangered karner blue butterflies. Now, these famous pretty little bugs are not the only threatened species in the Pine Bush, but for many years they were the main legal handle and poster child for Pine Bush preservation. Thus many of the older efforts to save the ecosystem have centered around the well-being of the karner blues.

Blue Lupen At The Power Lines

We were surprised to see a couple of wire fence enclosures on the corridor, meant to protect baby pitch pine trees from hungry deer. Indeed we saw several deer foraging around the power lines. In late winter and early spring they will eat anything they can digest including young trees, their foraging habits can prevent any forest or preserve from regenerating itself.

The deer problem is common to many or most natural preserves across the country, that is why I am in favor of encouraging bow hunting of deer in the Pine Bush. But lupen plants are safe from the deer because they are toxic to mammals., presumably this is why blue lupen is preferred by the karner blue butterflies. Not only are the lupen a safe place to lay eggs, it’s possible that the karner blues, like some other species of butterflies, absorb the the toxins and become unpalatable to predators.

Butterfly Hill With Pyramid Crossgates Looming Behind

The power lines led to the sad Pyramid Crossgates “Butterfly Hill” over the border of the City in Guilderland. This big sand dune was “set aside” as a “mitigation measure” for the construction of that big pile of crap known as Pyramid Crossgates Mall. From the very beginning the dune has been enclosed in a fence which cut it off from the rest of the ecosystem.

In the early years of the mall (or “maul” as The Wife likes to spell it) the Butterfly Hill was treated seriously by the thugs in suits who run the Pyramid Corporation. Or at least they put on a show of doing so. To everyone’s surprise this isolated piece of Pine Bush thrived, eventually supporting the largest population of karner blues in the region. Partly this was because of the fence, which not only kept out marauding humans but also hungry deer.

It turned out that the hill thrived also because it had a high water table that supported the dry ecosystem on the surface. But in the late 1990s, true to form, the Pyramid suits ripped open one side of the hill with bulldozers so that they could carry out one of their endless expansions of the maul. It is clear to me that these people “set aside” the hill for future “development.” rather than “preservation.”

Inside The Butterfly Hill With
The Open Fence

After the Pyramid bulldozers attacked the sand dune the water table poured out for weeks, so much that the water had to be pumped day and night into the storm drains. Almost immediately the living community on top of the hill began to wither. And the once vigorous population of karner blues crashed the next year, never to recover their former numbers. Still, the community on the hill is important, and some karner blues survive.

We found the gate to the fence open, it looks like it had been open all winter. That’s how we walked into the enclosure, and it was evident that deer were wandering in. We could see stripped baby pitch pine trees all over the hill, gnawed to a stubble by the deer.

After this we had to walk out onto the pedestrian unfriendly roads of suburban Guilderland, dodging cars as we skirted around the maul. Our destination was the last outpost of more or less contiguous Pine Bush, the proposed site of the Marriot Hotel.

Proposed Hotel Site

Much of the site has been graded and covered with gravel, turned into a sort of unused parking lot. But as can be seen in the photo, a good portion is still classic Pine Bush. And while the graded areas may look ugly, there is more to the landscape than immediately meets the eye.

For example, the graded lot has turned out to be the habitat of the worm snake, an interesting reptile that has not been seen in upstate New York for more than twenty years. This snake, which looks like a big earthworm, has given Save the Pine Bush quite a bit of help delaying destruction of this site. No one knows quite what to do about the snakes, so for now everything is on hold.

Bizarre Sign On The Hotel Site

As we could plainly see during our hike, stripping down the Pine Bush, can often be the best thing for the ecosystem. In court documents, the developers and the Jennings administration have claimed that the hotel site is degraded beyond restoration, but this is false. The Commission has proven that parking lots such as this one can be turned back into thriving habitat with minimal management

The Pine Bush is extremely vulnerable to the slow march of invasive species, in this sense the ecosystem is fragile. But when it comes to roaring fire or anything that resembles the destruction caused by fire the Pine Bush is tough and irrepressible. Fire is as much a part of the Pine Bush as pitch pines, karner blues and sand dunes.

The sand is what makes the Pine Bush different from the surrounding habitats, but it is fire that keeps the Pine Bush unique. I have seen burned pitch pine trees that looked as dead as blackened two by fours spring to life in a matter of weeks and become riotously healthy.

After a wildfire, such as the one in April of 1999, the whole Pine Bush explodes with life. The ecosystem is a living phoenix which rises periodically from the ashes in joyous rebirth. It’s an astounding thing to see and contemplate, you just don’t get the same effect with management techniques.

Tromping Through Overgrowth

The Pine Bush Commission has the skills and equipment to eradicate all of the invasive species except one, the worst one of all. We could see this nasty creature’s shelters all around the edges of the beleaguered Pine Bush, habitations with their characteristic asphalt surfaces and short poisoned grass. If only we could drive out these creatures with some innovative management techniques, then maybe the Pine Bush could return to the way it was.

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April 18, 2009

Is Albany Med flushing raw sewage and medical waste into the
Hudson River . . . via my neighborhood?

UPDATE – this is a difficult issue that I’ve been trying to wrap my head around for some time. Joe Cunniff has graciously provided some corrections to the article, hopefully everyone will come to understand this up until now invisible but vital issue better. The central point remains intact, some concern is dumping raw sewage into the Beaverkill, and that concern smells a lot like Albany Med.

We’re having a big problem with the capacity of our sewers here in the City of Albany. It’s not a new problem, and it’s not unique to our particular New York urban community. But it should come as no surprise that our current Albany City administration has so far utterly and completely ignored the problem as much as they can. That makes Albany unique.

The latest estimates are that it will cost ONE AND A HALF BILLION dollars to fix the combined sewer overflow problem in the City of Albany alone.

The Stinking Grate In The Ravine In Lincoln Park

So far the fallout from the sewer overflow problem has been easy to overlook by the Jennings administration. It wasn’t until this year that Mayor Jerry Jennings admitted publicly that there might possibly be a problem with the drainage systems in Albany. This was at the Council of Albany Neighborhood Associations (CANA) meeting in February.

While talking around some other issue to the assembled crowd of neighborhood activists, The Mayor suddenly tossed into the middle of a sentence “…the sewer overflow problem may cost as much as a hundred million dollars to fix.” As He said this, I noticed a scared look come over His face, and his eyes darted from side to side as He looked for a reaction. Hearing none, the confident mask again slid over His visage and He quickly changed the subject.

I almost laughed out loud. Most of the CANA representatives listening to His Majesty knew perfectly well that the final cost of the overflow crisis may actually exceed TWO BILLION dollars in the City of Albany. But no one bothered to correct or challenge Him. We all gave up trying to educate The Mayor at public meetings a long time ago, let Him figure it out on His own.

What would be even funnier if it wasn’t such a potential disaster, is that the Capital District Regional Planning Commission (CDRPC) has been working on a plan to solve the sewer overflow crisis. Of all the local municipalities, only the City of Albany has refused to cooperate with creating both a plan and a pool of cash to deal with the problem. The Jennings administration consistently refuses to send a representative to the CDRPC meetings.

Elberon Street, Looking Down The Old Course Of The Beaverkill Toward Washington Park

The combined sewer overflow crisis is already causing problems all over the City of Albany, and guaranteed to cause a lot more before the problem is fixed. Some of these problems are obvious, such as sewers backing up into basements in the Pine Hills neighborhood, or the spectacular geysers that shot out of manholes on South Pearl Street last summer. But some much more ominous problems are not so noticeable, such as the poisoning of the underground river in my neighborhood.

An underground river called the Beaverkill runs eastward through downtown Albany and empties into the Hudson River. Around 1840 the once pristine aboveground river had become an open sewer, so in the interest of public health the authorities confined the river to a big underground pipe. In the 20th Century the Beaverkill became part of the City’s storm drain system, collecting rain and snow melt from our streets.

The Beaverkill comes from the west down the middle of Elberon Street. Years ago I stuck my head into a manhole on Elberon, the pipe was easily five feet in diameter and the water rushed by in a loud and scary torrent. From Elberon the river enters Washington Park and emerges as Washington Park Lake.

The lake in Washington Park drains into another big pipe which crosses Madison Avenue and runs underneath the lower part of New Scotland Avenue. At the base of the hill, upon which sits the ever expanding Albany Medical Center complex, the Beaverkill makes an abrupt left turn and runs underneath Myrtle Avenue past the Stratton Veteran’s Administration hospital smokestack.

From there the Beaverkill snakes behind Hackett Middle School, and from there crosses Delaware Avenue into Lincoln Park. This is where, down in a ravine across from the elementary school in the park, the Beaverkill can be briefly observed through a grate, rushing loudly like a major waterfall. Sometimes in the spring, on a quiet morning, one can hear the river from up above on the road through the park. I always think of the sound as the ghost of the buried river.

The Beaverkill Rushing Madly Inside The Grate

But holy hell on a horse does that grated opening stink. Like raw sewage, like sulfurous decay, like an army of dead things rising up from underground. It smells like the Rapp Road “landfill.” The horrible odor pours out of the grate, fills the ravine and crawls up onto the roadways to sicken passersby.

Now wait a minute here. Washington Park Lake emits a variety of odors, but I have never heard anyone complain that it smells like raw sewage. But after the river emerges from underground at the grate in Lincoln Park the rushing water is obviously carrying a lot of raw sewage.

We are forced to conclude that somewhere between points A and B, between Washington Park and Lincoln Park, the Beaverkill collects large quantities of raw sewage before it empties untreated into the Hudson River. And there is strong evidence that the Beaverkill is carrying a lot of disease causing pathogens.

Of course we can’t say exactly who is responsible for dumping large quantities of raw sewage into the Beaverkill, but we can deduce the most likely culprit. There is only one enterprise along that route that has been undergoing expansion this past decade, adding toilets and bodies to fill them. That would be Albany Medical Center.

You see, my neighbors first started noticing the stink from the grate in Lincoln Park about ten years or so ago. At first the sewage stink would rise out of the ravine only after a big rainfall then go away after a day or two. But as time went on the odor would linger longer and spread farther after the rains.

Today the stink is almost constant. During a dry spell the smell becomes less but it never quite goes away, not anymore. This increase of deathly odors in Lincoln Park coincides directly with the ongoing expansion of Albany Med. The more they build up there, the more we smell their shit down here in the South End.

Where The Beaverkill Turns Left From New Scotland To Myrtle Avenue. The Albany Med Complex Can Be Seen Above And Behind This Intersection

Albany Med has always been a bad neighbor, imposing its will upon surrounding neighborhoods, generating unnecessary noise, operating an illegal burn plant and pointedly refusing to cooperate with CDTA to provide and encourage public transit. Of course the hospital administrators don’t give a rat’s rear end about the sewage generated by their endless expansion projects. Who’s going to bother them about it, Jerry Jennings?

We could easily find out if Albany Med is responsible by dumping blue dye down their toilets and seeing if it comes out in the Hudson River. But I would be willing to make a small wager (I do not gamble) that the Albany Med administrators will desperately fight any attempt to determine if they are responsible for dumping raw sewage. After all, they are a profit making enterprise, taking responsibility for dumping medical waste does not enhance their “bottom line.”

Wait, it’s going to get worse. The next year or so the amount of sewage pouring through the Beaverkill is only going to increase in volume. You see, Albany Med is behind the “revitalization” of the part of the Park South neighborhood at the corner of New Scotland Avenue and Morris street. Basically, a lot of old two and three story houses are currently being torn down and replaced with massive multistory office buildings.

New Scotland Avenue Below Myrtle. Note The New Five Story Building And The Houses Slated For Demolition

Of course these big new office buildings will connect every single one of their new toilets to the nearest working sewer line. Perhaps they will all connect directly into the Beaverkill. If not, then most certainly they will connect to the undersized sewer line that is spilling contents into the Beaverkill.

I have yet to hear anyone suggest that the Albany Med expansion should include increased sewer capacity. Indeed, it has become clear that the Beaverkill does not exist as far as the regional planners at CDRPC are concerned. This major drainage route does not even appear on their most detailed maps. This can only be deliberate, otherwise how can the CDRPC planners ignore the Beaverkill?

This brings us to the other problem besides odor. How much of that raw Albany Med sewage is medical waste? Exactly what communicable diseases are spilling through Lincoln Park and entering the Hudson River?

One of the major things that distinguishes the good old USA from third or second world countries is our excellent sewage treatment and disposal system. Because of our excellent system coupled with strong environmental laws, dysentery type diseases such as cholera and typhus are almost unknown in this country.

South Pearl Street In Albany, 1913

The last waterborne outbreak of disease in Albany was the Typhus Epidemic of 1913, less than a hundred years ago. Caused by filthy Hudson River water backing up into the City’s water distribution system during a massive springtime flood, the epidemic raged up out of the South End and struck at the City and State legislators and their families perched uphill above the flood waters.

The politicians resolved to protect themselves from a repeat of the typhus epidemic, an extremely unpleasant disease. The state leaders created Great Lake Sacandaga to control the water level of the Hudson, and the City politicians began to build the inland reservoir system that provides fresh drinking water, far from the Hudson. Both of these water systems, much abused and taken for granted, are in good working order today.

But now we appear to be going back to square one. Check out these two charts which I pulled with great difficulty from the nearly unavigable CDRPC site:

Click on the image to see both charts at full size

The two charts show e. coli and fecal coliform in the Hudson River at various test sites along our part of the Hudson. That red line is the amount of crap and disease that New York State allows in the water. You can bet that the state standard is not very strict, they allow more filth than we really want in our river.

Notice that the worst crap and disease laden spot is the Port of Albany… which is just a little ways downstream from the enormous pipe that comes out of the parking lot of the U-Haul building. This is the terminus of the Beaverkill.

In the photo below, you can see that I’ve cajoled The Wife into paddling her canoe up to the mouth of the Beaverkill. She is complaining bitterly about the odor, and is telling me to hurry up and snap the picture so she can get away from the stink. How that woman suffers for me.

Where The Beaverkill Meets The Hudson

So in conclusion, there is strong evidence that Albany Medical Center is pouring infectious diseases into the waters of the Hudson along the South End. But first, they are stinking up my neighborhood and possibly exposing my neighbors to infectious disease. Why should they care about those of us who live in the South End? Why should Jerry Jennings?

Like most municipalities in New York, there are two drainage systems in the City of Albany. One is the sewers, that friendly underground series of tubes that quietly carry away your business after you flush your toilet. This dirty water goes to one of several sewage treatment plants where the water is cleaned quite well and then sent into the Hudson.

The other drainage system is the storm drains, the grates on the streets that collect runoff from rain and snow. This water, though not exactly clean, does not carry the kind of bacteria that likes to breed in raw sewage, such as cholera and typhus. Because there is no infectious medical hazard the water is generally dumped directly into the river.

The two systems are separate, as they should be, except at the overflow points. These overflow points are built into the system so that if, say, there is a massive rainstorm that is too much for the storm drains, the clean rainwater running underground will slop over a concrete wall into the dirty sewer water system. One could say that the overflow points act as safety valves for the storm drains during torrential storms.

Fine, as long as the clean water occasionally mixes with the dirty water, no big deal. That’s what it’s supposed to do. But what’s happening is that dirty sewer water is regularly and consistently slopping over into the storm drain clean water conduits. The storm drains, in effect, have become open sewers. And some of these open sewers stink like hell.

Obviously, this problem did not happen overnight, it took a lot of neglect and irresponsible behavior by a succession of City administrations. Basically, as the City of Albany has sprawled westward over the past sixty years or so, there has been no requirement for planners or developers to modify the two drainage systems. There was no effort to build new drainage for the new houses, roads and later on, endless parking lots extending out into the suburbs.

Washington Park Lake: Clean Water

Instead, starting in the 1940s, the new sewers and storm drains were plugged directly into the existing drainage system in downtown Albany. This was when most of the Pine Hills neighborhood was built on pristine Pine Bush land, thus the name. And because Pine Hills was the first of the new developments after World War 2, this is where the household sewer lines back up and fill basements.

You see, Pine Hills has the first of the wider gauge higher capacity sewer and storm drain pipes. Everything built to the west of Pine Hills also has wider gauge pipes. Which is great, all those uptown toilets and parking lots need those extra capacity pipes.

Except for one problem. The ancient downtown drainage pipes, which worked just fine before the City sprawled westward, are of a smaller gauge. When there’s a big storm, all that water from uptown (and beyond) runs downhill smack dab into those smaller gauge pipes that start on the eastern edge of Pine Hills. The water has gotta go somewhere, that’s when the homeowners of Pine Hills get basements full of poop.

It was in the late 1990s that the sewer lines in Pine Hills first started to back up. And it was about that time that my neighbors first noticed the stink of Albany Medical Center wafting through Lincoln Park. The problem, like a graveyard full of rotting zombies from a bad movie, began at that time to rear up from under the dirt in various locations around the City.

You know, that spot in Lincoln Park where the Beaverkill emerges is beautiful spot. A hundred years ago, before the Beaverkill was transformed into a storm drain, “The Ravine” was a tourist destination that was the subject of postcards, such as this one from 1907:

The Ravine In Beaver Park, Now Called Lincoln Park

And today it’s a lovely spot:

The Ravine, Photo Taken Last Spring

A wonderful place to have a picnic, except for one problem. Anybody with even a marginal sense of smell who tries to have a meal down here is more likely to throw up than eat. And nobody can stand to spend more than a few minutes admiring the natural rock walls.

I’d sure like to be able to have a picnic down there, to see the ravine once again become a place of pride. But I’m afraid that the odor and the risk of disease is only going to become worse in the next few years. I’m not holding my breath waiting for something to be done… or rather, I am.

 

Thanks to Joe Cunniff of the Pine Hills Neighborhood Association for providing some of the information for this article. And thanks to both Joe and First Ward common council member Dominick Calsolaro for regularly attending the CDRPC meetings on their own time.

 

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