Newtown Creek, a 3.5-mile (6-kilometer) long tributary of the East River,[1] is an estuary that forms part of the border between the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, in New York City.

Channelization made it one of the most heavily-used bodies of water in the Port of New York and New Jersey and thus one of the most polluted industrial sites in the United States,[2] containing years of discarded toxins, an estimated 30,000,000 US gallons (110,000,000 L; 25,000,000 imp gal) of spilled oil, including the Greenpoint oil spill, raw sewage from New York City's sewer system,[2] and other accumulation from a total of 1,491 sites.

Combined sewer overflow (CSO) pipes drain into all four major tributaries, as well as the East Branch of the creek; during rainstorms, these handle raw sewage.

[1][9] Its outgoing flow of 14 billion US gallons (53,000,000 m3) per year consists of CSO, urban runoff, raw domestic sewage, and industrial wastewater.

[2] The Lower Montauk Branch of the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), used primarily for freight, runs along the north bank and across the Dutch Kills via a small movable truss bridge.

Dutch Kills starts at 47th Avenue and 29th Street in Long Island City, and empties into Newtown Creek on the right bank.

[19][20] It drained parts of what are now the neighborhoods of Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint in Brooklyn; and Maspeth, Ridgewood, Sunnyside, and Long Island City in Queens.

[23] The pastoral land around the creek became "a vast interconnected complex of wharves, stills, tanks, and pipelines,"[24] to service not only the refineries, but also the facilities of related industries such as manufacturers of paint and varnish, and chemical companies which produced sulfuric acid.

It is estimated that, in all, these industrial facilities produced 300,000 US gallons (1,100,000 L; 250,000 imp gal) of waste material each week, which was burnt off, or discarded into the air or the water of the creek.

[24] By the mid-19th century, Newtown Creek had become a major industrial waterway, with the City of Brooklyn[25] starting to dump raw sewage into it in 1866.

Public protests over the degradation of the waterway and the surrounding area, and frequent newspaper exposés did little to ameliorate the problem, considering the economic benefit of the industries located along the creek and nearby.

Even a report from The New York Times in 1885 that Standard Oil was dumping sludge acid into the creek, covering the banks at low tide, made little difference.

Across the creek, in Laurel Hill, later called West Maspeth, chemical plants and copper smelting facilities also polluted the waterway.

When the USPS discovered unacceptable levels of heavy metal waste from the smelting process, the U.S. Attorney's office forced Phelps Dodge to void the sale, take the property back, and to clean it up, which, as of 2016, has not been done.

The canal would have flushed out the stagnant water from Maspeth Creek and created a direct route between the two waterways, but was opposed by residents of central Queens, who were against the industrialization of what was then farmland.

[27] In 1914, surveys were made for the construction of a 5.4-mile (8.7 km) canal to connect Flushing River and Newtown Creek, plans for which dated back at least a century.

[3] The first steps towards cleaning up the toxic environment of Newtown Creek came in 1924, when the federal government passed an oil pollution law, albeit one which had been weakened by the industry as it made its way through Congress.

[35] Located on the south bank near the creek's mouth in Greenpoint, the plant handles a large portion of the drainage from the East Side of Manhattan.

The plant's unusual aesthetics, especially its 140-foot (42 meter) tall metallic "digester eggs" which are illuminated at night with blue lights, have made it a local landmark.

[38][39] Later, the North Brooklyn Boat Club built a boatyard and education center with funds from the Exxon's settlement with the state to allow access to the creek.

[37] When that occurs When sewage loads exceed the capacity of the Newtown Creek Sewage Treatment Facility trash, pesticides, petroleum products, PCBs, mercury, cadmium, lead, pathogenic microorganisms, and nutrients which reduce the dissolved oxygen content of the water are dumped into Newtown Creek.

CSOs can be triggered by as little as a tenth of an inch of rain.Essentially anything that gets washed into the gutters from the street, anything that households and businesses flush down the toilet or dump down the drain, has a fair chance of being expelled directly into Newtown Creek or New York Harbor untreated.

[45] Although the wastewater treatment plant has been expanded, even small amounts of rainfall can overwhelm the system and lead to the dumping of raw sewage and street runoff directly into the creek from 23 different locations.