Williamsburg and Greenpoint still stink.
Residents of the neighborhoods that are home to a glut of waste transfer stations, where trash is unloaded from trucks onto barges, are imploring the city to hurry up and build other facilities around the city to ease what they say is a daily bombardment of foul smells and heavy equipment that curls nose hairs, shakes homes, and rattles nerves.
“You can smell that putrid smell all summer,” Rolando Guzman, an organizer with Organization United for Trash Reduction and Garbage Equity, a local group pushing to stem the tide of garbage. “People in their apartments feel the vibration from trucks all day long.”
The stations handle three tenths of the city’s refuse, or 7,000 tons a day, which leads to high rates of asthma and poor air quality, according to the group.
“Some of the transfer stations are constant clouds of dust,” said Guzman.
The Council drafted a plan in 2006 to lighten the burden on Williamsburg and Greenpoint, as well as parts of the Bronx and Queens, by building or revamping five stations around the city. But nine years later, only one station has been completed and neighborhood opposition campaigns have slowed the development of facilities in Manhattan and in Brooklyn’s Bath Beach neighborhood.
A local pol said that the city needs to go full speed ahead with construction of the other stations to lighten the putrid load on the area he represents.
“The communities in Greenpoint and Williamsburg need the Solid Waste Management Plan implemented now,” said Councilman Antonio Reynoso (D–Williamsburg). “Our communities bear an unfair burden of trash in New York City and action needs to be taken to reduce this burden.”
