First step taken to clean up filthy Newton Creek

Just across the East River from midtown Manhattan's shimmering skyscrapers sits one of the nation's most polluted neighborhoods, fouled by generations of industrial waste, overflow from the city's sewage system and an underground oil leak bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill.

It's easy to see -- and smell -- the filth in and around Newtown Creek, which runs through an area of working-class homes, warehouses and industrial lots straddling Brooklyn and Queens. The odor of petroleum mixes with the smell of sewage, particularly on rainy days when the city's treatment plants can't handle the volume and municipal pipes send trash and human waste straight into the creek.

Oily, rainbow-slicked water is filled with soda cans, plastic bottles, raw sewage and decaying food. Ditched vehicles are stuck in the mud on the banks. And what was once a creek teeming with fish, surrounded by marshland, is now a dull gray waterway that cannot sustain life.

"It's the byproduct of our society," says environmentalist John Lipscomb of the Riverkeeper clean-water advocacy group. "What was originally a watershed is now a sewage shed."

After generations of neglect, the first, small steps are being taken in a multipronged cleanup that could take at least a dozen years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. But even the most hopeful officials acknowledge the watershed may never be clear of all pollutants.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared Newtown Creek a Superfund site in 2010 -- "one of the most polluted urban water bodies in the country," according to EPA regional administrator Judith Enck.

Today, the creek's bottom is lined with a 15-foot-thick layer of petroleum-based pollutants that scientists have dubbed "black mayonnaise." The ooze penetrated the shoreline and now sits on top of the water table dozens of feet under Brooklyn's gentrifying Greenpoint neighborhood. More than 300,000 people still live within a mile of the creek.

Scientists are using sonar to probe the muck in the 3.5-mile waterway in hopes of determining the best way to conduct the cleanup, which will be financed by six entities that inherited the pollution: Exxon Mobil, Texaco, Phelps Dodge Refining, BP Products North America, National Grid and the New York City.