PRESS RELEASE: With Release of New Water Quality Criteria, Save the Sound and Riverkeeper Challenge DEC to Make NYC Waters Safe for Swimming

In response to the Department of Environmental Conservation’s announcement of new water quality criteria for the waters surrounding New York City and up to the Bear Mountain Bridge, Riverkeeper, the leading environmental organization dedicated to protecting the Hudson River, and Save the Sound, the leading environmental organization dedicated to protecting Long Island Sound, call on New York […]

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Like a broken record

On a corner storefront in the Village of Mamaroneck, about a block from where the Sheldrake River turns away from I-95 and splits the neighborhood from commercial to residential, the wall is wrapped with three horizontal blue stripes in paint and painter’s tape. The lowest line, several feet above street level, is marked by red […]

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Climate Week NYC 2023: The time to talk Renewable Rikers is now

The collective voice of New Yorkers has filled City Hall Park for centuries. It was where they protested the Stamp Act in 1765 and raised the first Liberty Pole a year later. On July 9, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was read there, in the presence of General George Washington. In the late morning of […]

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Journey of a Water Sample

For the end of National Water Quality Month, here’s deep dive into our longest-running water quality monitoring program, which completes its annual 12-week season on Sept. 1. Our field and laboratory staff, seasonal techs, interns, and 20+ community scientists collect water samples from 60+ sites in Westchester County, Queens, and Greenwich, CT, and analyze them […]

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See something? Smell something? Say something, so we can do something

National Water Quality Month began for Peter Linderoth, our director of water quality, with a halting message. He arrived to our office in Larchmont on the morning of Tuesday, Aug. 1, settled in behind his desk, and checked his email. Near the top of his inbox was an audio file of a voicemail, forwarded by […]

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The Wade and See Approach

The waders did not go over well.  A couple of the half-dozen teenagers gearing up on the sidewalk of the East 3rd Street Bridge connecting Mount Vernon and Pelham struggled to tell the front from the back of their uniforms du jour. Every last one of them objected to the fashion misstatement made by this […]

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The Unglamorous Work of Water Sampling Season

From the second week of June through Labor Day Weekend, they are out there. A collection force of 20-something Save the Sound full-time and seasonal staff, and community scientists, hiking through woods and wetlands, withstanding the drizzles and deluges, mosquitoes and mugginess, maybe wading out into a creek or balancing on loose rocks on the […]

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Water Quality Standards: The Key to Swimmable Waters (Someday) in NYC

To those kayakers skimming across Eastchester Bay—City Island to one side, Rodman’s Neck jutting out from Pelham Bay Park on the other—it wouldn’t seem like such an outlandish idea. Nor would it to the paddleboarders putting in at Little Bay Park, setting off past the stone curtain of Fort Totten toward Bayside. And definitely not […]

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