The Staten Island borough president is demanding an investigation after an apparent sewage leak into lakes at a local park, where he said faulty piping has continuously spewed raw sewage into an interconnected waterway.<\/p>\n
“If this was Central Park and this was the issue, we had raw sewage in the lake at Central Park, people would be flipping out justifiably,” said Borough President Vito Fossella.<\/p>\n
He and other local leaders are calling for the formation of a task force with appropriate state and local agencies to address what they described as a clear public health hazard at Clove Lakes Park. Inside the park, Clove Lake itself is connected through waterways to Martling Lake and Brooks Lake.<\/p>\n
“All neighborhoods, all communities come here for the playground, for the strolls, for the parks,\u201d said Debra Altman, a local resident.<\/p>\n
Altman said a foul odor has lingered for years.<\/p>\n
“There have been times that I have walked down on the lake and you could smell how bad the sewage is,” she said.<\/p>\n
The lakes had been open to people to boat and fish in, but are now closed following testing conducted by the Department of Parks and Recreation.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the department told NBC New York in a statement: \u201cNYC Parks is not aware of any sanitary sewer lines flowing into Clove Lake. We are coordinating with relevant agencies regarding next steps.\u201d<\/p>\n
Staten Island lawmakers said they believe there is a straightforward fix.<\/p>\n
“This is not rocket science. This is plumbing, for crying out loud.\u201c said State Sen. Andrew Lanza.<\/p>\n
Some parkgoers said they simply want the issue addressed.<\/p>\n
\u201cStaten Island deserves a really nice park and this is a gorgeous park so hopefully they can figure it out.\u201d said Delilah Atanasio.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection said they would be a part of the task force lawmakers called for on Monday.<\/p>\n
This story was originally reported for broadcast by NBC New York. AI tools helped convert the story to a digital article, and an NBC New York journalist edited the article for publication.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Staten Island borough president is demanding an investigation after an apparent sewage leak into lakes at a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":353215,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,3242,9,24,63,134],"class_list":["post-353214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-environment","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-staten-island"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353214\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}