Big Day for Brooklyn: Gowanus Canal Clean Up Begins

Kevin Duggan reports from Brooklyn, where a project to dredge the Gowanus Canal, in the works for a decade, is finally underway.

Duggan offers some of the credit for the clean up project to the advocacy of a group called the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club. The dredging is expected to clear out pollution caused "more than a century’s worth of industrial use and hundreds of millions of gallons of sewage that flush into the waterway during storms each year," explains Duggan.

The Dredgers started their advocacy by taking trips to raise awareness, adding canal-side concerts, movie screenings, and water-borne operas in recent years. While the cleanup project is underway, "recreational boating would be banned for the duration of the cleanup anywhere north of the Ninth Street Bridge, so smaller vessels don’t interfere with the heavy machinery atop barges."

More coverage of the Gowanus clean up project is available from Brownstoner, Yahoo News, and Dredging Today.