Results tagged “environmentalconservation”

Crews are working to remove oil from Long Island shoreline that spilled into the ocean sometime on Thanksgiving Day and started washing ashore. Surfers called the Coast Guard to report "tar-like balls of oil." A number of agencies, including the Coast Guard and NY State DEP, are working on the cleanup. The spill seems to be about 500 gallons of no. 6 oil, an unrefined bunker oil, and Newsday reports the samples from the spill...

The hunting season only started on Saturday, but one New Yorker is already in a lot of trouble after some pretty stupid moves. Rosebank resident Alfons Ndokaj was charged with unlawfully hunting a bear cub amongst a number of other violations.

A school in Aberdeen, NJ, was locked down yesterday after a deer jumped through a classroom window. More specifically, it was a buck that joined a fifth grade class that was finishing up a vocabulary lesson.

If the Weather Service forecast is right, today will be the hottest day of the year. There's been three days, including yesterday, where the high has reached 92 degrees. The NWS is forecasting a high of 94 in the city today. The Weather Channel and AccuWeather don't see us getting that warm. Then again, AccuWeather said yesterday's high would be 85.

The saga of red-tailed hawk Pale Male on Fifth Avenue continue! Lincoln Karim, one of Pale Male's most passionate advocates, witnessed a construction worker on the roof of 1040 Fifth Avenue spitting and throwing rocks at Pale Male. Karim detailed the incident on his website, PaleMale.com, and wrote:

A most despicable display of human behavior on 1040 Fifth Avenue (the Jackie O Building).

Continue reading "Pale Male Attacked!"

It's a gunk alert day! Add warm air, high humidity, plenty of sun and not much wind and you get an air stagnation advisory. The advisory is in effect from ten this morning to eleven tonight as we'll be dealing with elevated ozone amounts in the city and surrounding counties. To reduce adverse health effects the state Department of Environmental Conservation recommends avoiding strenuous activity while outdoors.

Democrat Micah Kellner won the special election to fill the Upper East Side Assembly seat vacated by Pete Grannis (who was appointed the Department of Environmental Conservation commissioner by Governor Spitzer). Kellner received about two-thirds of the vote over Republican opponent Gregory Camp.

A few weeks ago, the Brooklyn Paper suggested that the Red Hook grain terminal might become a storage facility for building materials. The NY Times follows up with a look at the progress so far and the building's decrepit appeal. John Quadrozzi, who wants approval to store materials for concrete and cement there, said the silos could hold 70,000 tons of cement and is essentially built like a bomb shelter because they used to hold "combustible grain" (!). The Department of Environmental Conservation is currently reviewing plans for renovation.

Gothamist is hoping for an inch of rain today. It's not going to happen, but we're hoping anyway. Why? An inch of rain would make this the wettest April ever, topping the 14.01 inches that dumped on Central Park in 1983. The rain from the nor'easter a couple of weeks ago alone was enough to make the current month the fifth wettest on record. Add to that Friday's two inches and we were within striking distance of the April milestone.

Yesterday, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that the State will sue ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Keyspan and Phelps Dodge over a 17-million-gallon oil spill in Newtown Creek that has spread underneath Greenpoint over 100 acres. The spill was detected in 1978, when a Coast Guard pilot noticed an oil plume; oil seeped underground from ExxonMobil refinery and storage operations since the 1950s. Attorney General Cuomo said:

This is one of the worst environmental disasters in the nation, larger than the Exxon Valdez and slower in the cleanup. ExxonMobil must and will be held accountable. The toxic footprint of ExxonMobil is found all over this area. It is ExxonMobil’s oil that remains under the homes and businesses. And it is ExxonMobil that has dragged its feet and done as little as possible to address the dangers that it created.”

Hmm, it must have been some dump truck that stole 500,000 pounds of concrete and brick from the site of the future Red Hook Ikea. The Daily News reports that the leftovers after demolishing 10 Civil-War era buildings is considered a larceny by the police. The 300 cubic yards of rubble had been there for months and was intended to be used as fill; if Ikea has to buy new fill, it may be very expensive. Still, Ikea doesn't believe the missing fill will impact the projected 2008 store opening.

There was a funny story about deer in Staten Island in The Advance earlier this week. Deer have been grazing on the green at the Staten Island Golf Practice Center, and apparently they are not afraid of golf balls or humans! The Advance has tips for deer-and-human safety (like what to do when they run in front of the car), but the best factoid was this:

Some of Gothamist's favorite stories in the city were about the animals of New York City. Here's how animals ruled the Big Apple in 2006:

One part of last week's NY State Department of Environmental Conservation press release about the Greenpoint oil spill was "information on planned vapor and indoor air sampling will be discussed" during next Wednesday's meeting. And it looks like it means sampling in homes, as the Daily News reports that Greenpoint homeowners are being urged to sign up for emergency gas testing. The fear is that toxic gases have been affecting people's health. While ExxonMobil says, "there is no indication of any methane or benzene impacts to local residences," residents are concerned and one woman even has a pipe in her backyard so toxic vapors can be released!

Earlier this year, State Comptroller Alan Hevesi asked that the Department of Environmental Conservation not negotiate a settlement agreement with ExxonMobil about a 1978 oil spill of 17 million gallons (bigger than the Valdez spill) off Newtown Creek. And now, tests that the DEC performed show there are "elevated levels of the carcinogen benzene and the potentially combustible gas methane in the soil". Oh, dear.

That's what State Comptroller Alan Hevesi is asking. He advised the Department of Environmental Conservation not to negotiate an agreement with Exxon over the Greenpoint oil spill clean up because the spill needs to be thoroughly examined. Back in 1978, a Coast Guard pilot noticed an oil plume off Newtown Creek: It turned out that 17 million gallons (more than the 11 million from the Exxon Valdez spill) of oil had been spilling since the 1940s and 1950s, and in 1978, the spill covered 55 acres. We've found it odd that the Greenpoint oil spill hasn't been a bigger deal - maybe that's because there aren't any photographs of Alaskan animals in an oil slick - but it's possibly scarier, as it the oil has been seeping into the soil and exposed in an urban area.

Could it be that the coyote that captured New Yorkers hearts when he was capture amid a Central Park visit died from mistreatment? The Department of Environmental Conservation is investigating the cause of death for Hal, and some sources say he was "aggressively hogtied" when being transported from the city to an upstate wildlife center. Hal did have heartworms, but apparently Hal suffered internal bleeding when he died. Another hypothesis is that he might have eaten rat bait, and some people think that using a catch pole to capture him may have caused too much stress to his poor system (we read that he was 35 pounds, which sounds light to us).

Hal, the Central Park Coyote captured last week, died before being released into the wild. He was being transported to California Hill State Forest upstate in Putnam County. The cause of death is still being determined.

Friday was not a terrible day for New York's greener organizations. Why not? Well, because the New York City Environmental Fund awarded 69 grants worth $763,200 to community-based environmental projects in New York City and Westchester.