Swimmable River: Hudson River Water Quality

Each year millions of citizens spend time in or on the Hudson River and the waters surrounding New York City. Since the passage of the Clean Water Act, water quality has improved dramatically and over the past several decades, citizen activism has made it increasingly unacceptable for government and industry to treat our rivers as dumping grounds.

Riverkeeper’s Swimmable River Campaign is comprised of our Water Quality Testing Program plus advocacy and litigation on better water quality policies, better wastewater treatment infrastructure and better monitoring and public notification of river conditions.

In addition to eliminating raw sewage overflows, the goal of the Swimmable River Campaign is to provide a useful resource that will empower individuals to make informed decisions about recreating on the river, and to inspire discussion and action toward better pathogen monitoring and increased environmental and public health protection.

“Swimmable River: Towards Better Water Quality Monitoring in the Hudson River Estuary” a Riverkeeper report

• Our Water Quality Testing Program

  Riverkeeper’s Water Quality Testing Program is the first program to regularly test Hudson River water quality from New York Harbor to Albany and to make the data publicly available within days. Water quality data from local, state and federal authorities can take months or years to be made public.
  View our sampling data

  Riverkeeper is grateful to the Wallace Research Foundation and our partners at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Queens College for their support of this important program.

• Current Testing Standards – State and County

  Though large volumes of sewage enter the river during storms, water quality has improved drastically over the past several decades, due in large part to increased enforcement and advances in pollution control technology. However, the counterintuitive result of this improvement is the need for additional monitoring and a change in the way the public is notified about conditions on the river. Now that the conditions on the river are often acceptable and people are increasingly using the resource, additional information is needed.
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• Aging Infrastructure, Precipitation, Sewage and Hudson River Water Quality

  The great strides in pollution control that have been established since passage of the Clean Water Act cannot be overlooked. Rivers that were once considered open sewers are now well protected and substantially less polluted. But many of the treatment facilities constructed in the 1970s or earlier have now reached their expected life span and the combined sewer overflows (CSOs) and sanitary sewer overflows (SSOs) they discharge continue to plague our waterways.

  These overflows, generally triggered by wet weather events, send an unsafe amount of pathogens into our waterways. Pathogens – biological agents that cause illnesses and diseases – put the public at risk and greatly impede the Clean Water’s Act mandate of attaining fishable and swimmable waters.

  Combined sewage overflows, sanitary system overflows, failing wastewater treatment plants, and cracks in pipelines and holding tanks send billions of gallons of untreated sewage and polluted stormwater into the Hudson River and New York Harbor each year.
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• Riverkeeper RecommendationsImproving Water Quality

  If New York is to fully realize its goal of restoring the Hudson River to a swimmable condition from the Adirondacks to New York City, there must be a renewed focus on:
  
  1. Better water quality policies
  2. Better wastewater treatment infrastructure
  3. Better monitoring and public notification of conditions.

  Riverkeeper’s Swimmable River Campaign is focused on this three-prong approach.
  Learn More