The Hudson River provides wonderful opportunities for boating. There are dozens of community boat clubs and public marinas along both shores from Manhattan to Troy. But maintaining these facilities in an environmentally-protective manner can be challenging.

(photo credit: Reed Super)

The gradual accumulation of silt in boat basins reduces the depth of slips and, without periodic maintenance dredging, would render them unusable. However, due to years of industrial activities on the Hudson, the dredged sentiments may be contaminated and therefore should must be contained in a manner that prevents pollutants from re-entering the environment. The sediment contamination, however, is largely not caused by the boat basins themselves, but by other polluters such as General Electric’s PCB capacitor plants. Standard practice of decades past was to dump dredged sediments into deeper open water. As this was phased out, the spoils were sent to upland to solid waste landfills for use as cover material. But today, there are few if any local landfills available to accept these wastes. Thus, due to the scarcity of disposal locations and the extremely high cost of transport and disposal, very few marina operators have been able to obtain maintenance dredging permits over the last ten to fifteen years.

Without dredging permits, some marina operators have resorted to the illegal and polluting method of "prop washing" their slips (i.e., revving a boat’s engine in shallow water to disperse sediments). Meanwhile, more powerful interests, particularly public agencies operating in New York Harbor, are readily permitted to dredge and dispose of spoils in open water or at upland locations. Riverkeeper is dedicated to working with boaters, marina operators, and New York State's Hudson River Estuary Program to find a solution that will facilitate environmentally-safe maintenance dredging for recreational boat basins on the Hudson.