That gray, trash-studded snowbank on the corner is not just an eyesore. It is a chemistry project waiting to go wrong.
Gothamist recently scooped up samples from some of New York’s nastiest sidewalk snow piles in Williamsburg, Washington Heights and under the elevated 7 train in Jackson Heights. Lab tests found those filthy mounds are acting like little contamination traps, concentrating road salt chemicals, elevated lead and fecal-associated bacteria.
What the tests found
Lab analysis of the three neighborhood samples turned up lead levels of 279 parts per billion in the Jackson Heights pile, 125 ppb in a Williamsburg pile and 113 ppb in Washington Heights. The Jackson Heights sample also clocked the highest concentration of Enterococcus, a fecal-associated bacteria, as reported by Gothamist.
Jack Caravanos, an environmental public health professor, put it in kid-level terms. “A kid is skimming some snow and putting it in their mouth, they would get a decent dose of lead,” he warned…