“There is on average about 10 feet of sediment that has accumulated because of industrial waste and New York City discharge. The color is like lava, really black. It just kind of oozes. There is a stench associated with it. And it has the texture of thick mayonnaise, so it’s very unpleasant stuff. It’s a mixture of products, and a mixture always scares you because you don’t have a handle on it. You don’t know what it is.” —Christos Tsiamis, the Environmental Protection Agency Superfund project manager in charge of determining how dirty sites are and how best to clean them up, has no idea what is at the bottom of the Gowanus Canal [NYT]
