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JUDY WOODRUFF: Now we turn to our ongoing coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.
Tonight, special correspondent Rick Karr looks at environmental concerns in New York City. Many residents in Brooklyn want to know more about the risks of chemicals that may have spread when the storm surge hit.
RICK KARR:The area around Brooklyn's GowanusCanal could be New York City's answer to Amsterdam. At least, that's what some real estate developers are betting. The canal's neighbor to the north, Newtown Creek, can offer up its own beautiful vistas, but both waterways are also surrounded by heavy industry, as they have been for more than a hundred years.
And so they're among the most polluted in the country, so bad that the Environmental Protection Agency has designated both as superfund cleanup sites.
THOMAS BURKE, JohnsHopkinsUniversity: There are persistent contaminants there, like PCBs, like heavy metals, that have been there probably for a good part of the last century.
RICK KARR:Thomas Burke teaches about the environment and public health at JohnsHopkinsUniversity.
THOMAS BURKE:There are also kind of combustion byproducts—that sounds like a fancy term, but that's from the old plants there, coal tar plants and plants like that, so there's heavy petroleum molecules too.
RICK KARR:Some of those chemicals in the water have been shown to cause cancer in animals. Others can damage the central nervous system. Both the creek and the canal overtopped their banks when Sandy's storm surge reached them. The water lapped onto sidewalks and poured into buildings nearby.
Here in the Greenpoint neighborhood, the Newtown creek is less than a quarter-mile away. And one of New York's biggest sewage treatment plants, which was also in the flood zone, is just around the corner. Resident Jacqueline Lombard says water poured into her house from both directions.
JACQUELINE LOMBARD,New York resident: The evening that Sandy hit, we were hit with an eight-foot storm surge that basically flooded my basement up through the ceiling and my landlord's basement here up through their first floor. So it was a very smelly, noxious mix.
RICK KARR:The floodwaters drained out of Lombard's basement quickly, but left a lot of muck behind.
JACQUELINE LOMBARD:There was a lot of silt, a lot of mud, a lot of debris, sewage that flowed in and then flowed out. And the residue was left.
