Ever Wonder What Those DEP Ships Were Carrying Back & Forth All Day Long?

Today’s Gothamist reports on a story published in the New York Times regarding the opening of a nature trail alongside the “Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the city’s largest sewage processing unit, currently undergoing a makeover that will cost more than $3 billion.”

For anyone that lives on Roosevelt Island that has with any frequency found themselves looking at the DEP ships that pass up and down the East River’s West Channel you have seen either the Newtown Creek or the North River, either riding high or low depending on how full the tankers are with cargo.

So, if you were not otherwise aware those two ships each literally has a “poop deck” or rather inside is carrying such. Technically the City refers to each vessel as sludge vessels which carry “liquid sludge from waste water treatment plants that do not have dewatering capabilities.”

Let’s just say when I learned what these ships were my view of them each day changed a wee bit. But then again without these ships doing their jobs the City would be a bit worse for the air.