Footage shows black sludge dumped into Hudson River
Recently a video showed a pipe that was intentionally leaking black sludge into the Hudson River. At one point, the camera even panned to the right which showed the Jersey City business district in the city. As you may have guessed, this sight wasn’t a particularly nice one and may have caused damage to the local environment. This sight may be even more concerning if you had plans of taking a swim in the Hudson River too.
According to the person who filmed the incident, they also claimed that it smelled of sulfur and rotting eggs. At first thought, it would be easy to jump to conclusions and fear the worst. However, it turns out that this may not be as bad as it first seems.
The video was originally uploaded to Reddit where the filmographer curiously asked about the nature of the sludge and its origins. According to one local, it wasn’t as bad as it looks as they claimed: “Water from the bottom of the river has more sediment and debris from over the years. It gets pumped with a wall like that to build docks, bridges etc.”
In fact, a geotech engineer even had their say on the matter which backed up this claim, as they wrote: “Geotech engineer here who has sampled plenty of river mud in the NYC rivers. The river mud is usually black in color and has a petroleum-like odor due to high organic matter (or also could be from dumped foreign material)”
This shows that sometimes even the craziest stories have the most mundane backstories, and even though this looks gross and disturbing, it’s most likely nothing to worry about.
