On April 27, 2010, Bibi Ngota died in Kondengui prison in the tiny West African nation of Cameroon.  According to prison documents made public by his family, Ngota perished because of “abandonment, improper care,” by prison authorities, and “failure to render assistance.”

Ngota wasn’t a career criminal. He was a journalist, the editorial director of the publication Cameroon Express. He was imprisoned for investigating alleged corruption involving Laurent Esso, a high-ranking politician who serves as both secretary general of the president’s office and chairman of the state-run oil company.

Ngota’s death was one of many reported instances of human rights abuses in Cameroon over the 27 years it has been ruled by the same man. But the death of the prominent journalist was widely reported, and drew criticism anew for Cameroon’s harsh regime. Less than two months after Ngota’s death, Cameroon moved decisively to burnish its tattered international image. The government hired a public relations specialist. But not just any public relations specialist. Cameroon hired the Atlanta-based lobbying firm GoodWorks International for the job of “developing a roadmap” to improving US relations. GoodWorks International’s executives include former U.S. Ambassador Andrew Young, once a close aide to Martin Luther King.

For Cameroon, at stake was not just enhancing the nation’s reputation but millions of dollars in US foreign aid.

GoodWorks stated in government filings that its main focus is to press the U.S. State Department’s Millennium Challenge Corporation for foreign aid dollars. The corporation awards funds to struggling countries with the aim of promoting development and reducing poverty. The program promises to decide which nations get millions of dollars in international aid based not on connections and favoritism, but objective measures.

It gauges democratic reforms, education, public health initiatives, human rights and corruption. The agency assigns numbers for each factor, then calculates a final grade. The aim is to award aid to deserving nations.

Cameroon reported paying $350,000 so far, but after one year the effort has done little to help, according to newly released country scorecards from the State Department.

Despite modest gains in some categories, Cameroon failed in two of the three categories of indicators and actually scored worse in multiple sectors, representing an overall decline, especially in the key category of “ruling justly.”

The Millennium Challenge Corporation has not changed its stance. Cameroon is still not getting aid under the program.

Cameroon is a nation ruled by the same president since 1982, and last month reelected him despite claims of voting irregularities. Facing State Department criteria for selection, Cameroon is deemed deficient because of .corruption and lack of good governance

Critics, like Dr. Melvin Ayogu, of the advocacy group Africa Growth Initiative, consider the Cameroon government a “sham.”

“The independent electoral commission is not independent,” said Ayogu.  “And the people will sell their votes for money because they are hungry and they’re so poor.”

GoodWorks—along with Andrew Young, who founded the lobbying and PR group—has a history of representing governments and corporations with reputations for corruption and troubling human rights records.

GoodWorks represented the government of Rwanda in 2005, shortly after the Second Congo War—arguably a byproduct of the Rwandan civil war and subsequent genocide—in an effort to “enhance Rwanda’s public image,” in the eyes of both the US government and the American business community.

Young was also hired by Nike in the wake of its child labor scandal in the late 1990s.  Young visited Nike factories in Asia and compiled a report stating that though Nike “can and should do better,” there was no widespread mistreatment of workers, and that Nike was doing “a good job in the application of its code of conduct” despite reports to the contrary from NGOs.

According to the Millennium Challenge Corporation, there is no application process for partnerships.  Rather, it selects recipients based not only on its qualifications, but also the chances the aid will reduce poverty.

Countries that are close, but do not yet qualify for a full support may be selected to enter into what is known as a “threshold program,” a stepping stone to a full, continued financial aid.

According to the corporation, petitions from recipient governments—and their representatives—have no bearing on the selection process.

Nonetheless, in November of last year, GoodWorks arranged a meeting between a visiting delegation from the Cameroonian government and the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s director of threshold programs.

The Millennium Challenge Corporation denied having been contacted by GoodWorks, but said that meetings with governmental delegations are common, saying that it would be nearly impossible to pinpoint any particular meeting.

The Cameroon government acknowledges hiring GoodWorks, calling it part of an ongoing process to not only improve its image, but its government.  According to Jean Atangana, head of the communications unit of Cameroon’s Ministry of Economy, Planning and Regional Development, lobbying is warranted when the statistics do not reflect the reality.

“This is not paradise, but it is not hell either,” said Atangana through a translator.  “When they describe Cameroon, you wonder if it is the same country you live in.”

According to Atangana, it’s the State Department’s sometimes “ideological” interpretation of statistics that’s detrimental to Cameroon’s chances.

“Is the glass half full or half empty?” asked Atangana, describing the statistical analyses.  “It depends on what you want to convey as a message.  If I want to show that there are efforts, I say the glass if half full.  If it is to show that there is no effort, I’m going to say the class is half empty.  So the field of interpretation, I think, is just free.”

GoodWorks has also been criticized in the past for its involvement in African business deals, particularly in Nigeria.  GoodWorks associate Carl Masters was accused of brokering a deal between Nigeria and Jamaica in which the former sold 15,000 barrels of crude oil per day to the latter at $12 per barrel, less than three times the market price at the time.

GoodWorks was alleged to have received 15 percent of the revenues from the deal, while then president Olusegun Obasanjo received 20 percent.  Jamaica then traded the oil on the open market, earning a profit in the process.

Femi Falana, president of the West African Bar Association, was a critic of Young’s dealings in Nigeria.  According to him, Young knew of corruption in the Obasanjo administration, and that several of the deals were in violation of Nigerian law.

“The way you are supposed to get a contract from the government, you are supposed to pass through due diligence,” said Falana in a telephone interview from his office in Lagos.  “And that never happened for much of business that he did for the government.”

The money from these deals, Falana claims, never benefitted Nigerians directly, and as a result, Nigerians’ opinion of Young is quite low.

“They seem him as an opportunist, one of those black guys in the United States who comes around taking advantage of their color to cheat our people,” said Falana.  “And even when they know the government engages in corruption, they don’t use their influence to tell the government to behave properly.”

In the documents filed by GoodWorks with the Foreign Agents Registration Unit of the U.S. Department of Justice, the firm agreed to represent the interests of the Cameroon government to American businesses and investors.  In November of 2010, GoodWorks organized a luncheon for the business members of the Corporate Council on Africa and the same visiting Cameroon delegation that met with the Millennium Challenge Corporation.

During the same week, GoodWorks hosted an event at the Cameroon embassy in Washington, which was attended by the Cameroon delegation, along with several think tanks and NGOs, including some of the valuator agencies which supply the Millennium Challenge Corporation with the data it uses to score potential partner nations.

In May of 2011, GoodWorks produced an informational pamphlet based on the findings of a weeklong fact-finding trip to Cameroon.  In addition to citing a “top-down eagerness” for foreign investment, and listing Cameroon’s advancements in areas relevant to the MCC selection criteria, the pamphlet blamed, in part, a cultural aversion to bragging for Cameroon’s poor scores in several fields.

“Cameroon’s ambassador in Washington observed that in Bantu culture, it is considered boastful and arrogant to boast of one’s own achievements,” read the pamphlet, “though he agrees that Cameroon needs to do a better job of disseminating the facts.”

As of press time, GoodWorks International had not responded to requests for comment despite repeated requests.

Thomas Boker stalked a 30-year-old woman for blocks as she walked a familiar path to her apartment in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood.

He shadowed her as she headed to the Van Dyke housing projects. He stepped into the elevator she got on. When the doors opened on her floor, the woman stepped into the hallway and Boker grabbed her from behind.

He brandished a knife.

“I will kill you if you don’t stop screaming.”

Boker, according to news reports, pulled his victim into the stairwell and forced her to climb. When they reached a landing on the 14th floor, he raped her.

It was a crime that police claimed would be a lot harder to commit. A multi-million dollar surveillance camera system staffed by police officers is supposed to catch suspicious actions. But Boker’s rape highlights key shortcomings in the video network.

The hour-long nightmare in 2008 occurred in sight of Van Dyke’s surveillance cameras. Live footage streamed onto 30 television screens monitored by two police officers in a room within a block of the woman’s building.

But the officers on duty said they saw nothing.

It wasn’t the first crime Boker pulled off under the eyes of Van Dyke’s surveillance cameras. Over four weeks in early 2008, Boker committed three rapes and two robberies in New York City’s public housing buildings.  Each time, police in the surveillance room said they saw nothing.

That is not the only case where the city’s crime-fighting system failed to prevent assaults, and is a dramatic example in the dispute over whether video surveillance stops crime. Though police insist the cameras help solve cases, the overall track record is unclear. City officials, in turns, cite contradictory figures, fight requests to release crime figures and, after a public records request lasting more than a year, disclosed details that cast doubt about whether cameras have led to any significant effect at Brooklyn projects.

At the same time, some city officials are questioning whether the camera system- developed for more than $50 million, and requiring millions more in maintenance and operating expenses – are worth the cost. And New York is not alone: studies elsewhere have raised questions about how well video systems really work in fighting crime.

These video surveillance systems have proliferated throughout New York City’s public housing complexes during the past 14 years. Today, cameras are wired in about a quarter of the New York City Housing Authority’s 336 projects.  The equipment is a key part of a police program called Video Interactive Patrol Enhanced Response, or VIPER.

Police officials tout it for working on three levels: deterring criminals from striking, catching crimes underway, and providing key evidence to solve crimes.

In Boker’s case, VIPER struck out on all three.

After failing to see the crime when it was happening, the New York Police Department went back through the video tape. Police told reporters that Boker was actually captured on 30 minutes of video as he stalked, threatened and raped his 30-year-old victim. But video images were of poor quality. Pictures of him were indecipherable. The images were so bad that investigators needed a sketch artist to draw a composite of Boker’s face so they could circulate a picture of him to the public and help with his capture.

When Boker was finally arrested two weeks after the rape, it wasn’t video of the crime that did him in. It was old-fashioned evidence: his fingerprints in the stairwell and a victim’s identification of him in a line up.

That isn’t how the video system was supposed to work.

Since the first cameras were installed in New York public housing in 1997, officials from the police and housing agency have touted VIPER and its less-expensive sibling, Closed-Circuit Television, as successful in fighting crime.

VIPER is owned and run by the NYPD, and is wired in 15 city housing authority developments across the city, including Van Dyke, according to 2010 data from the housing agency. In addition, CCTV systems are run by the public housing agency. Its images are not live streamed. Instead, they are recorded, stored for seven days and retrieved when crimes are reported.

All these cameras are mounted in busy areas like lobbies, or in secluded places prone to crime, like elevators. They are also placed outside buildings to monitor courtyards, playgrounds and walkways. No cameras track residential floors because of tenant privacy concerns. Police officers monitor live images from VIPER cameras in surveillance rooms tucked away nearby in the projects.

Despite all the effort – the expense of developing the surveillance network and the staffing by police – a key question is whether the system has cut crime.

The police and housing authority have credited video system with rapid drops in lawlessness.  At Van Dyke, for instance, 117 major felonies were committed in 2000, according to NYPD data. VIPER cameras were installed in 2001. The next year, 78 major felonies were reported – a 33 percent drop. That far surpassed the reduction in crime elsewhere in the city, where the major crime rate fell just 17 percent.

But the story since then is far less clear. City officials give contradictory accounts about crime reduction, have fought inquiries to disclose more details, and, perhaps more troubling, under an open records request, were unable to show any overall significant success in Brooklyn.

STATISTICS THAT DON’T ADD UP AND NOT DISCLOSED

City agencies sometimes cite figures that are at odds. For instance, months after Boker’s series of rapes and assaults at Van Dyke in 2008, Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne told The New York Times that VIPER has been a success. He claimed that housing projects saw crime drop an average 35 percent a year after being installed. But just a year earlier, the city housing authority, in a published newsletter, told residents that the average drop in crime was 25 percent.

NYCHA spokeswoman Sheila Stainback couldn’t explain the contradictions.

“I have no idea” where the numbers came from, Stainback said. “I don’t know if those numbers were made spontaneously and could not be supported.”

Statistics are not an academic discussion. Police and housing officials cite successes regularly when they press the cash-strapped city to fund the massive video surveillance operation.

Meanwhile, city officials fought repeated requests by the CUNY news service to provide more details about crime in city housing projects, and in areas with VIPER cameras. For more than a year, both the housing authority and the police refused repeated requests to release crime statistics for public housing developments where video surveillance has been installed.

Housing authority spokesman Brent Grier told the CUNY news service at one point that the agency refused to disclose data because “there are certain statistics they wouldn’t want published.”

It was not the first time city officials refused to release detailed accounts about crime in housing projects. While the police publish weekly summary statistics about major crimes in each precinct across the city, they do not release separate figures for murders and other serious offenses in public housing projects.

The New York City Council criticized this lack of transparency in a 2004 investigative report about safety problems in housing projects. In that report, the City Council recommended police change, and have its housing bureau post summary figures for crime in housing projects.

“Members of the public, and NYCHA residents in particular, are entitled to know the incidence of crime in public housing developments,” the report stated.

Then-Queens councilman Eric Gioia, who chaired the Council committee that wrote the report, said “it’s incredibly disappointing” that the housing authority is not more transparent about crime rates.

Gioia supported spending for video surveillance systems while in office. But he believes housing authority needs to better assess the video system’s effectiveness. “What you find with public housing is it’s close your eyes, cross your fingers and hope for the best,” Gioia said. “You need to measure [the crime rate] before you can manage it.”

BROOKLYN HOUSING CRIME DROP NOT CLEAR

Perhaps no better place underscores the use of questionable crime statistics than Brooklyn.

Under a CUNY news service request citing state open records laws, the agency relented after more than a year and provided details about Brooklyn housing projects where cameras have been installed.  The data outlined major crimes that occurred in 21 housing developments during the last year before the cameras were operating, and the first full year after they were in use.

There were clear indications of success. Six developments saw crime drop more than 35 percent over two years. Eleven others also saw crime fall, but less than 35 percent.

But there were also places where crime did not drop. Four developments – Williams Plaza, Atlantic Terminal Site 4B, Gowanus and Independence Towers – saw crime rates actually increase after the cameras were installed.

All told, Brooklyn sites where camera systems were installed averaged a 3 percent increase in crime.

Housing authority representatives repeatedly refused to discuss the increase in crime in their Brooklyn projects.

Meanwhile, Stainback said the housing authority is reconsidering the impact of its 14-year-old video surveillance system to determine if the cameras are worth mounting maintenance costs.

While the city pays for buying and installing the surveillance systems, the cost of upkeep comes out of the housing authority’s budget.

“They are even more expensive to maintain,” Stainback said. “We’re re-evaluating the system.”

The agency was slated to spend $30.9 million in capital project funds on its video surveillance systems last fiscal year, more than it budgeted to spend on heating and plumbing in 2010. For that amount, the police could fund the salaries of 8,500 entry-level cops for a year.

And the cash put into maintaining the security cameras each year has soared more five times since 2006, when NYCHA spent just $4.8 million on maintenance.

NEW YORK NOT ALONE

But New York’s housing projects are not the only place where questions have been raised about whether cameras cut crime. Surveillance cameras have proliferated in cities around the world during the past two decades. Yet, studies of their effectiveness have drawn varied conclusions about whether they work.

A 2008 study by the University of California in Berkeley found no significant change in the number of homicides, rapes, assaults and robberies in the areas surrounding two-year-old surveillance cameras installed in San Francisco’s most dangerous neighborhood, according to The San Francisco Examiner.

Just last year, a New York University study of crime rates in two private Manhattan housing complexes, Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town, concluded that there was no evidence that video surveillance had an overall impact on serious crime.

In Great Britian, a 2005 report for the United Kingdom’s anti-terrorism department found just two of 13 security systems evaluated recorded a statistically significant reduction in crime.

Yet, the authors warned against drawing conclusions from those figures because not all serious crimes are reported. At the same time, it criticized government agencies for overstating the benefits of video surveillance and setting unrealistic expectations: “In short, [CCTV] was oversold – by successive governments – as the answer to crime problems.”

TENANTS WAIT FOR CAMERAS

The number of surveillance cameras installed in NYCHA housing properties more than doubled between 2005 and 2010, reaching 6,300. The cameras cost about $175,000 each. Funding has come primarily from the New York City Council, which has earmarked an increasingly large chunk of its discretionary dollars and federal funding to the security project since 2004.

City Council members said they are responding to residents’ demands for the cameras.

For instance, after years of lobbying from the Louis H. Pink Houses tenants association, elected officials, including Councilman Charles Barron, allocated $4.5 million to install CCTV systems there and in three other East New York developments. The funding was unveiled with great fanfare. Barron and housing chairman John B. Rhea held an enthusiastic press conference with other city officials in October 2009.

“Beginning tomorrow and after we install these cameras, you have much more sense of security in terms of how you feel, but also in reality,” Rhea told the crowd of residents. “The data has shown that crime goes down 25 percent – 25 percent – immediately after installation of cameras in housing developments.”

Then he added, for emphasis: “That is real.”

Though Brooklyn has the most public housing apartments in the city, surveillance cameras are far more common in Manhattan and Queens.

Agency figures show that, as of 2010, in Brooklyn, there was a camera for every 42 apartments. In Manhattan, there was one for every 32. And in Queens the rate was far higher — one for every 12 apartments.

And the demand is not receding. Roberto Napoleon, president of the Baruch Houses tenant association on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, wants the surveillance system. He said he as pressed elected officials for several years. “Nothing has happened,” he lamented. “According to public officials and housing, they don’t have enough money.”

He said the lack of cameras has led to crime. The area saw a rash of attacks against Asian women in the spring of 2010 — five assaults in one week. Most of the attacks occurred at the Baruch Houses. Napoleon believes that’s because of the absence of video cameras.

“They are afraid of the cameras,” he said of criminals. “Those people are afraid of those cameras because they know they’ll be able to identify them. They’ll think twice.”

At Brooklyn’s Van Dyke Houses, where Thomas Boker’s 2008 rape spree went undetected by the development’s VIPER system for weeks, current tenants association President Lisa Kenner conceded the system’s track record is spotty. Still, she thinks it’s worth the money.

“The cameras really help with the crime here, I believe,” she said. “I’m not saying people don’t get robbed. But I remember when it was shoot ‘em up bang bang. Those cameras brought crime down.”

Kenner said unlike the Boker assaults, there are also cases where cameras worked. She cited a robbery last year, when two men took jewelry from a groundskeeper. The crime was captured on video and the pair was later arrested, she said.

But she admitted there were other times the cameras did not live up to their promise. A senior resident has been robbed twice this year by people who followed her into the elevators. They had hats to hide their faces from surveillance video, and attacked her in an unmonitored hallway outside of her apartment door.

Kenner said the problem is not just the cameras, but shoddy housing maintenance that leave wide areas dangerous because of lights not working at night. “If a person gets robbed down by that walkway and the lights are out, if there’s people sitting in the [VIPER] surveillance room, how are they gonna see it?” she questioned.

A mirrored pink beauty salon, a tiki lounge, basketball courts and a movie theater. Nestled among trees more than 200 miles from New York City, the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center seems worlds away from Gotham’s public schools–yet most of the children in the classrooms at this New England boarding school hail from the five boroughs.

The controversial facility, known for punishing special needs children with electrical shocks, has been fighting to prevent New York from joining a growing list of states that have stopped government funds paying for students to go there.

The Massachusetts school relies heavily on getting students from New York. Millions of dollars, and perhaps even the school’s existence as it now stands, are at stake.

With lobbying in Albany, courtrooms battles and advertisements on the airwaves targeted at poorer minority communities, an investigation by the New York City News Service found the Massachusetts school spends hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to press its case in New York. Its efforts have ensured that New York state spends millions of dollars every year to send more than 100 students to the school, and so more keep coming.

And it has worked. At a time when New York state education officials are slashing programs because of budget shortfalls, New York City alone paid more than $30 million last year to the private Boston school. That covers about two-thirds of the facility’s annual operating budget, according to its most recent publicly available financial statements.

This despite the fact a top United Nations’ torture investigator last year decried the institution’s methods and called for further investigations. In February 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an inquiry into possible civil rights violations at the school.

The Judge Rotenberg Center is not the only special education school to fight hard to attract New York City special education students, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars that come with them. But it may, in spite of decades of controversy, be one of the most successful.

Electric shocks, Investigations, and Reticence from Other States

The story of the Rotenberg Center’s controversial methods has been told. But few have looked at how, in the face of continued opposition, the school has continued to flourish. To understand, it helps to look at its evolution.

Founded in the 1970s by a Harvard-trained psychologist named Doctor Matthew Israel, the Rotenberg Center was a small institution for the severely autistic and mentally disabled children and adults. In the nineties, the school began to broaden its scope, accepting increasing numbers of school-aged children with “emotional disturbances” ranging from Attention Deficit Disorder to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to issues stemming from abuse. Many of these students came from New York City, skipping from school to school. Many had spent time in psychiatric hospitals. Some came straight from Rikers Island jail.

Under federal law, all students are entitled to a “free and appropriate” education until they are 21 years old. But New York City and State do not have enough beds in residential schools–public or private–to provide that education. With its “near-zero rejection” policy, the Rotenberg Center welcomes the nation’s most difficult students.

In an interview last fall, Dr. Israel described the patterns at other schools that often turn students away. “You’ll find that when they get the really difficult students they expel them—and then what’s the poor parent to do?”

Many parents call Dr. Israel a miracle worker, and have approved for their children a broad range of experimental behavioral treatment meant to curb bad behavior–some were denied food or sprayed with ammonia, others submitted to a noise helmet or four-point restraint boards.

In 1989, Dr. Israel developed a proprietary device now infamous. Students approved for the device wear it throughout the day in a backpack or fanny pack. Wires snake out and attach to their legs and torso. When they engage in a prohibited activity, the press of a button by an administrator jolts them with a two-second electrical shock.

A Massachusetts probate court must approve the treatment before a student starts on the device, known at the Rotenberg Center as the Graduated Electronic Device. While the Rotenberg Center contends its unorthodox methods help severely autistic as well as emotionally and behaviorally troubled children, the results are not always good.

In 2006, the mother of a child named Antwone Nicholson, 17 at the time, sued the school, saying her son was subjected to inhumane treatment because electrical shocks were used far more often than she was led to believe. Nicholson was one of about 140 New York State students enrolled at the school.

The suit prompted an investigation by the New York State Department of Education. The experts sent to the school found a wide range of problems, including lack of oversight on how students are shocked, restrained and denied food as punishment. The use of electrical shocks “raises health and safety concerns,” according to the report. Withholding meals “may impose unnecessary risks affecting the normal growth and development” of students. Education at the school was deemed “insufficient.”

Nicholson’s case was settled last year, but the controversy continues. Massachusetts authorities have tried unsuccessfully to shut the school down several times in its 40-year history. A prosecutor recently settled charges against the school’s longtime director that workers, in a prank gone wrong, inappropriately restrained and shocked two students–one was shocked 77 times in a row.

The incident helped convince Washington, D.C., to no longer send students to the Rotenberg Center. Tameria Lewis, assistant superintendent of special education, described her inspection of the institution, “We continuously heard this howling and screaming through the facility of students reacting to pain from their punishments.”

“It was difficult to see what was happening at JRC under the guise of helping,” she said in an interview last fall.

Washington, D.C., was not alone. States including California, New Jersey, Illinois and Connecticut have virtually stopped sending any students to the school. Maine and Nevada have both banned methods that include electric shock therapy, stopping any public dollars from paying for students to go to the Rotenberg Center.

New York, too, has now banned the use of electric shocks on nearly all its students. But more than four years after the stinging New York State Department of Education investigation, New York remains the suburban Boston institution’s largest customer.

The Rotenberg Center once saw students from states around the country. Now, despite efforts by New York State to curb enrollment there, about 90 percent of its school-aged residents now come from New York. The majority is from New York City.

As of last spring, there were 144 school-aged children enrolled at the Rotenberg Center. New York City accounted for 118 of those children under 21.

In addition to students, there are about 80 disabled adults at the Rotenberg Center. Some had been at the facility as children, and remained there as they got older. And some of those are also from New York, and continue to get state aid to remain at the facility.

Records from the New York City Comptroller show the city alone paid nearly $32.5 million to the Rotenberg Center during fiscal year 2011. Of that, $16.8 million comes from the city Department of Education. The balance comes from the Administration for Children Services. Hundreds of thousands of dollars also come from other local school district funds to pay for students from elsewhere in New York State.

New York State continues to be a leading source of students and money for the Rotenberg Center despite several recent measures that attempt to address concerns about its operations.

Lobbying For Government-funded Students

The Rotenberg Center has fought hard to keep students coming. To combat the possibility that New York and others will pull out, the institution has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years to contest regulations that would prevent students from going there at public expense.

The debate around “aversive therapy,” which includes shocks, is one of the most contentious in special education. States around the country have rejected the school’s methods. Districts in Illinois, California, Pennsylvania and elsewhere no longer send students there. Maine and Nevada have issued bans against any school that uses electrical shocks.

Last year, the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would do the same at the federal level. Congress people in the house and senate have for years introduced, and failed to pass, legislation that would severely limit or ban the use of restraint and seclusion in schools, including the use of aversives.

California Rep. George Miller’s bill died in the house last year. “In the year since this legislation passed the House but failed to become law, more children were abused in school,” said Rep. Miller in a statement. He has re-introduced his bill, called “Keeping All Students Safe Act,” this year. “This legislation makes it very clear that there is no room for torture and abuse in America’s schools,” he said.

Federal records show the Rotenberg Center spent more than $116,000 to lobby against such legislation in the halls of Congress last year. The bulk of that went Bracewell and Giuliani, the firm of former New York City mayor Rudolf Giuliani.

It was not the school’s first foray into intensive lobbying efforts. Since 2005, JRC has spent at least $1.2 million to fight measures that would curb or bar the use of such controversial measure. State disclosure records show that in 2010, the school spent $123,000 to lobby in New York State alone.

Steven Sanders, a lobbyist with the firm Malkin and Ross, has represented the Rotenberg Center. He is a former New York State assemblyman, and served on the state education committee for ten years until stepping down in 2005.

He acknowledged objections raised by opponents, but countered that its programs work.

“Some people believe aversives should not be used on children, even though they are perfectly legal,” Sanders said. “These kids are in school, they are learning. Their violent behavior is controlled.”

Still, despite these efforts, New York City recently began to officially warn parents about its concerns, and it now recommends students go elsewhere.

“We don’t agree with the school’s behavioral approach,” said Matthew Mittenthal, deputy press secretary at the New York City Department of Education. “Parents of students who attend JRC have been advised that we are uncomfortable with the school’s practices, and that we strongly recommend they attend a different school.”

Radio Ads and Basketballs

Yet students keep coming, in part because the Rotenberg Center has reached out to their parents in a variety of ways.

It has paid for radio ads, including one broadcast on the popular FM station Hot 97, the city’s most prominent outlet for hip-hop and R&B. “Is your child autistic or emotionally disturbed?” it began. “Unmanageable, failing in school or refusing to attend or stuck in psychiatric or correctional setting?” At the end, the advertisement offers a number to call for “free consultation and placement assistance.”

Documents and interviews with parents describe how those who show interest in the school receive home visits from the school’s marketing representatives. According to a 2006 New York State Education Department report that included a review of the Rotenberg Center’s internal records, representatives “provide the family with information and gifts for the family and student.” The presents include gift bags for family members and basketballs for students. In all, tax documents from 2008 show the school spent more than $390,000 on advertising and promotion that year.

The school also markets to professionals at psychiatric and juvenile justice conferences, who then suggest the school to parents and guardians. Some children also come directly out of the foster system.

Helping Families Sue New York

Once families decide they want to send their children to the Rotenberg Center, the next step may well be in a courtroom.

New York City is legally required to pay for special education services when it cannot provide them itself. Parents who want to send their children to the Rotenberg Center argue that is exactly why they need the Rotenberg Center – that no place in the state provides the same approach that help those with severe special needs.

That is because, under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, states must provide a “free and appropriate” education to all students. If a school district cannot provide that education, it must pay to send a student to a school in New York, or outside the state, that will help them.

The Rotenberg Center has remained on the New York State’s list of approved out-of-state schools. Indeed, when New York City students go to an out of state school, the one that has the largest single enrollment is the Rotenberg School.

The city Department of Education often fights parents who seek to send their children to the Massachusetts facility, contending in court that those families can get similar services closer to home.

Lawyers have been a key to the school’s success. The Rotenberg Center has guided parents to particular lawyers to help fight their way into the school. Those attorneys have worked on behalf of parents within the special education system to negotiate the scope of a student’s individualized education plan.

The school declined to say how many New York students have gone to court in order to attend the school. Government records that would detail the scope of litigation are not public.

In an interview last spring, school founder Dr. Israel said the Rotenberg Center directs New York City parents to one attorney: Brooklyn-based Anton Papakhin.

There are few public records that reveal the number of clients Papakhin has represented to go to the Rotenberg Center. He declined to reveal that number. Lawsuits involving special education students are largely protected by privacy rules, and are conducted behind closed doors. One of the few times these cases become public is when lower court decisions are appealed.

Papakhin is listed as the attorney of record on at least seven appeals, which become public record when they move to higher appellate state courts.  In cases in which parents prevail, Papakhin may also be awarded attorneys fees, paid for by the city.

Papakhin has also been paid directly by the Rotenberg Center. At the same time that Papakhin has represented families in legal proceedings to convince courts to send students to the Rotenberg Center, he is also listed by the school as a contractor. The most recent financial filings, for 2008, show he was paid more than $270,000 for his work that year. Papakhin declined repeated requests to clarify the nature of the services provided to the Rotenberg Center in 2008. The Rotenberg Center declined to provide further details on its relationship with Papakhin.

In a brief interview last spring, Papakhin explained he works closely for about four years with Arthur Block, another New York attorney with a background in special education law, who is documented as having earned more than $600,000 in 2007 and 2008 for unspecified “legal services” for the Rotenberg Center. Block, too, declined repeated requests to discuss his work for the school.

It is not illegal or unethical for an attorney who is paid by an organization to represent people and benefit financially from the arrangement. Professor Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York University, said, “There’s nothing wrong with a person who is not a client paying the lawyer to represent a client.”

Lawyers are used for more than just getting students into the Rotenberg Center. The institution also makes efforts to keep students at the institution after they “age out” of the state school system’s jurisdiction when they become 21 years old. The Rotenberg Center has launched lawsuits for back payment from school districts and states for care provided to these forgotten students.

Meanwhile in Massachusetts, the fight over aversive therapy continues. This month, Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration put forward new regulations that would ban all aversive therapy going forward, and impose yearly reviews on individuals already receiving such treatment. The Rotenberg Center has already begun to fight back.

Check out an archive of documents related to this story

Patrick Lynch lies on an examining table, squirming in pain. Kunal Kalra, a doctor at the Harkness Center for Dance Injuries, has just plunged a 4-inch-long needle into Lynch’s swollen left quadriceps.

Moments before, Kalra had examined the partly-healed incisions on Lynch’s knee. The marks were caused by an operation Lynch, a professional dancer for the last 20 years, underwent 10 days earlier to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL. Today he has come to Harkness’ weekly Dance Clinic on East 18th Street for his first post-op visit.

Lynch’s surgeon, Dr. Donald Rose, who is the center’s director, and Kalra, an intern observing Dr. Rose, want to relieve the swelling in the thigh muscle above the incisions.

“Taking out the fluid will make a difference in the pain,” Kalra said. “We’re gonna have to drain the blood out.”

“That sounds like fun,” Lynch mutters as he lies on his back on the table. Then he laughs out loud.

Lynch stands 6-feet-4 inches, and has long legs and a barrel chest. His brown hair, blue eyes and quick wit were endowed by his Irish immigrant parents. When Lynch is not auditioning for or performing in operettas as a dancer and singer, he teaches yoga at Bikram NYC. He is 45 years old and still dancing. Or was before he snapped his ACL doing the limbo at a wedding.

Kalra probes the dancer’s thigh with the long needle. Lynch arches his back and grimaces as the intern draws back the plunger. The barrel remains empty.

Dr. Rose, the city’s premier ACL surgeon and a leading champion of dancer orthopedics, steps in to demonstrate as the intern looks on.

“Small prick,” Rose advises as he expertly inserts a larger syringe with a 60-ml barrel to hold the built-up fluid.

“What?” Lynch’s eyes widen in mock horror. This time, the vial fills immediately with bright red fluid. “Ohhh, it’s better,” Lynch says, relieved. Kalra nods.

Unlike a painter or a musician, who generally can produce paintings or compose music into old age, a dancer’s ability to create art depends almost entirely on keeping his or her body healthy and fit.

Until recently, dancers’ fitness was determined by their youth. Dance careers used to end around the ages of 30 or 35, if they were lucky. Dancers’ hips, knees and backs were worn out by strenuous overuse and dancing on too-hard floors. Injuries, often misdiagnosed or improperly cared for, also cut careers short.

But today, improved specialized care for dancers, more complete education and a holistic approach to dance training is helping dancers continue into their 40s and beyond.

EDUCATION AND TRAINING

In 1941, Nora Shattuck dropped out of high school in Ottawa to move to New York City where she joined the School of American Ballet. A year later, at age 17, she was accepted into the Ballets Russes. For six years, Shattuck toured with the itinerant company eight months a year, performing eight shows a week.

At the time, ballet dancers practiced a prescribed set of movements that originated from a centuries-long tradition of French ballet later refined in Russia. Exercises at the ballet barre remained relatively unchanged from those ballerinas had done centuries before, exercises developed to be aesthetically, rather than ergonomically, pleasing.

“We had no anatomy and no kinesiology,” Shattuck said of her dance training. “You didn’t learn much about your body.”

Although she was never injured herself, Shattuck saw numerous friends and colleagues drop out in their prime because of injuries. Shattuck, who was lucky enough to work with famed choreographers George Balanchine, Alwin Nikolais, and Martha Graham, said she envies dancers today who have greater opportunity to study dance at academic institutions where anatomy is part of the curriculum.

Dancers today know more about anatomy and the physiology of exercise than ever before because more of them are pursuing college degrees. About 5 percent of American university students obtained performing arts degrees in 2008, compared to 3 percent in 1970, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And anatomy classes are a regular part of the curriculum for most university dance departments.

The Juilliard School requires all students in the Dance Division to take a six- credit anatomy course, which examines movement strategies to enhance stability, control and develop musculo-skeletal problem-solving skills applicable to dance. Irene Dowd, who teaches the course, explained that when dancers without anatomical awareness experience discomfort or pain, it can be difficult for them to know whether to push through it, change technique, or stop dancing entirely.

“Familiarity with anatomy makes dancers more likely to listen to their bodies,” Dowd said.

Medical practitioners agree—one recent study shows that 74 percent of dance specialists think that it is important for dancers to understand human anatomy to avoid injury and to know when to report injuries to medical professionals.

Alison Deleget, a Harkness clinician, said the dancers she sees who are aware of how their bodies work tend to have fewer or less severe injuries. These dancers are better able to manage overuse syndromes, such as heel, knee and back injuries.

Still, knowledge about the body would not increase dance longevity without a complementary change in dance training. Nowadays, dancers and teachers incorporate anatomical awareness into what they do in the dance studio. They are adjusting traditional dance positions to place less stress on the joints and build strength for specific dance shoes.

Shattuck said when she toured with the Ballets Russes, she moved from one classic ballet to another, switching from ballet shoes to character shoes without proper training. The muscles she had developed in pointe shoes did not translate to the strength necessary to dance in high-heeled character shoes.

“It’s a wonder we ever got out of this without killing ourselves,” she said.

In those days, ballet teachers used to tug their students’ feet into first position, so that their heels and toes were forced into a perfect, if unnatural, 180-degree turnout. This placed a great deal of torque on the knees. In the past decade, teachers have begun to teach turnout from the hip down, so that knees and feet are aligned, alleviating stress and preventing common knee injuries.

Another development in training is combining exercises from different movement traditions. Rather than learning only the dance vocabulary particular to one technique, like Graham, Horton, or Limon, now dancers cross-train. A modern dancer may complement 15 hours a week of dance classes and rehearsals with five hours of yoga or Pilates. These alternative movement practices are popular among dancers because they focus on proper alignment and strengthening, but lack the jumps and other rigorous movements that can lead to stress fractures and broken bones.

As a yoga teacher, Patrick Lynch is hyper-aware of his body. During his doctor’s visit he describes his aches and pains in detailed anatomical terms, mentioning “meniscus,” “tibia,” and “quadriceps,” at various moments.

“My yoga has made me in tune with what was happening in the body at the point of injury, surgery, and then recovery,” he says after his visit with Dr. Rose.

“I can put my faith in it.”

Lynch’s friend Catherine Thibault, 54, danced professionally in France for 15 years before moving to the United States to dance for Alwin Nikolais in the 1980s and ‘90s. She has retired from a performance career, but still takes ballet class every day and performs in a folk dance company—her life as a dancer is hardly over.

Thibault credits cross training as the thing that has allowed her to dance into her 50s.

“I stretched like any dancer would as a young girl, but 14 years ago I started doing Pilates,” she says. “That’s where you really improve preparation for the body to dance. Now I always do yoga after ballet class to relax my hips and knees and rebalance both sides of the body.”

IMPROVED CARE

Like most dancers, Thibault is no stranger to dance-related injuries and the doctors who treat them. Dancers have one of the highest rates of nonfatal on-the-job injury, as high as 97 percent according to one study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thibault has broken four toes and, like Lynch, torn her ACL. In 1996, she broke her big toe and was disappointed by the care she received from dance specialists. She said her doctor, whose name she requested not be mentioned, had been running a dance clinic for a half dozen years but still misdiagnosed arthritis in her feet and legs and set her toe improperly. It is now crooked.

But dance medicine has improved dramatically since the 1990s and many injuries that were once career ending have become manageable. This past October, Thibault slipped as she pirouetted in a class at the Ballet Arts studio in New York and broke her right arm. She found herself being cared for by the very same dance specialist who had treated her 14 years before. This time, the doctor knew more about scar tissue and set her bone more efficiently than he had 14 years ago.

“The years of experience made him better,” she said. “Now they can help dancers heal faster.”

Thibault now plans to get back into the studio within two months of the injury— one that, years before, might have barred her from ballet because it demands full range of motion in both arms.

Wendy Whelan’s experience with scoliosis offers another example of how advancements in medical treatment have lengthened dancers’ careers . A principal dancer for New York City Ballet, Whelan still performs with the company at 43, an age that few professional ballet dancers reach as performers. (Notable exceptions include British prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn, who danced into her 50s.) As a girl, Whelan was diagnosed with scoliosis, a curvature in the spine. At the time, she was treated with stretching machines and plastic braces. Now, acupuncture and massage help Whelan manage the disease between performances.

The quality of care has improved as more doctors have entered the field. The Harkness Center, which has provided dancers of all ages with specialized care since 1989, is a teaching hospital. Over the years it has trained hundreds of residents about the unique orthopedic issues dancers face and published more than 25 research studies on dance-related injury in journals like American Journal of Sports Medicine and Journal of Dance Medicine and Science to reach thousands more doctors.

Since the 1980s, dance medicine also has expanded to include physical therapists and athletic trainers, in addition to orthopedic surgeons. Today it is common for companies like New York City Ballet or Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater to have dance athletic trainers as on-site consultants.

Physical therapists, or PTs as they’re known, work with dancers long after the surgeon has said “you’re O.K.,” and signed off. They help dancers recover from injuries and prevent future ones.

“Physical therapists are the heroes of the dance field,” says Lynn Garafola, Professor of Dance at Barnard College. “Now physical therapists really help people get through injuries that once would have been career ending.”

Physical therapists and trainers who specialize in dance are often former dancers. Like nearly all of the certified athletic trainers (ATCs) at Harkness, Megan Richardson, was a dancer before she became a trainer. She attended George Washington University on a dance scholarship and graduated with a Bachelor of Athletic Training and later earned a master’s in kinesiology at Indiana University.

On a practical level, ATCs’ familiarity with dance allows them to communicate better with dancers.

“We speak their language,” Richardson explained. And it’s not simply knowing basic dance terminology like releve or plie, but jargony, unofficial phrases that have never been written down.

In one consult at the Harkness Center, a doctor asked a 16-year-old girl what she was doing in her Graham technique class when she hurt her knee. The girl mumbled, “Tumble on down.”

Richardson, who accompanies the doctor on all consults, responded, “You mean, go down to the floor?”

The ATC twirled as she dropped her body to the floor. The girl nodded. Knowing this, helped Richardson and the physician diagnose the specific nature of the injury. Richardson recommended that while she healed, the girl modify her Graham floor exercises by doing them in a chair.

Harkness’ Alison Deleget recalled how chronic tendonitis in her left ankle caused by hours of ballet was treated without success for nearly a decade until, during college, she saw an athletic trainer who specialized in dance. Deleget was finally able to manage her injury after the ATC took her pointe shoes apart and spotted the problem. The revelation re-routed her into a career as a dance-specialized ATC.

As communication among doctors, PTs, ATCs and dancers has improved, dancers have started trusting medical professionals more.

A study published in 1994, found that just 20 percent of dance injuries were reported to doctors. Only 43 percent of dancers who did seek medical treatment would stop dancing to recuperate and follow through with physical therapy prescriptions. With the dawn of dance specialized trainers and PTs, Barnard’s Garafola said, dancers are much more likely to follow through with treatment.

Lynch walks into the Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy Center on a Thursday in late October, three weeks after his surgery and one week after his post-op visit with Dr. Rose. Harkness patients like Lynch receive physical therapy at the center, located on the fourth floor of NYU Langone Medical Center’s Hospital for Joint Diseases. Lynch limps slightly, wearing shorts that reveal his muscle loss. Compared to his right calf muscle, which bulges like a balled fist under his skin, the flesh on Lynch’s injured leg is slack where the muscle has melted away.

First stop is an exam bed, where therapist Sally Donaubauer massages around the incisions on Lynch’s left thigh to prevent the scar tissue from adhering to surrounding muscles. Then he moves to the center of the room to do exercises designed to strengthen his quad. Lynch turns toward a mirror with an attached ballet barre to practice balance. Stepping with his injured leg onto a squishy foam square, he wobbles, then stabilizes. In the mirror, Lynch checks to see Donaubauer is not watching and then pulls his healthy leg into a ballet attitude and rounds his arms above his head, a classic ballet silhouette.

“I get bored easily,” he says as explanation.

Lynch may be bored, but he follows Donaubauer’s prescribed exercises carefully. He credits the speed of his recovery to Donaubauer’s exercises before and after the surgery—and his own willingness to listen to his doctors and PT.

During his massage, Donaubauer urged him not to push his body too much, because at six weeks the repair is at its most vulnerable.

Recalling that moment, Lynch said, “Having such a fast recovery, it’s having the intelligence to really hear that. I would have pushed myself. I would totally have gone back to class,” he says as he completes his reps.

“She’s a life-saver.”

Still, Lynch can’t resist pushing just a little. His eyes dart to the mirror to make sure Donaubauer isn’t watching and then he strikes another off-limits pose.

ACCESSIBILITY

Without the surgery Lynch would most likely have had to retire from his life as a professional performer, which for him was not an option. “I don’t want to give up dance,” he says. “I want to do it as long as I can.” Although 10 percent of dancers who experience torn ACLs can return to dance without surgery, Dr. Rose felt that Lynch’s age made surgery the best option.

Lynch is uninsured. So the operation’s $24,000 price tag—nearly his entire annual income—might have made that option out of the question. That figure does not include the additional tens of thousands of dollars in physical therapy costs that are so essential to recovery.

Lynch had the good luck to be referred by a friend to the Harkness Center. His income, around $30,000, qualified him for Charity Care. The NYU Langone Medical Center’s Hospital for Joint Diseases absorbed the cost of surgery and physical therapy, which should then be reimbursed by the state.

Physical therapists may be the lifesavers and the heroes for the dance world, but without access to these specialists the longevity of a dance career would remain unchanged. As medical insurance has been—and continues to be—unobtainable for most dancers, more dance specialists offer sliding scale fees and free clinics. Harkness’ Deleget says that the majority of dancers, those not employed by big companies, are functioning in an uninsured or underinsured state.

“Dancers for Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey, or City Ballet are all insured through their companies and are well-compensated. But they are the minority of the dance population in New York,” Deleget said.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 1,370 dancers were employed in the New York metropolitan area in 2009. The study acknowledges that the number does not include dancers between engagements or who make a living through another means entirely, like Lynch and Thibault. Still, the official number probably reflects the number of dancers employed by companies that can afford to provide health insurance. And that leaves thousands of others who are uncovered.

Now, those uncounted dancers in New York have more options in obtaining health care. The Actor’s Fund’s Al Hirschfeld free clinic, founded in 2003, offers subsidized health care services. Dancers must prove they earned at least $3,000 of income generated through dance to qualify for care.

Another invaluable resource is the Artists Health Insurance Resource Center. Created in 1998, it assists people in the arts to find affordable health care and coverage.

The Harkness Center, which offers a free orthopedic clinic and subsidized surgery remains one of the city’s most well known organizations committed to dance medicine. Unlike Al Hirschfeld, it waives an income requirement, because, as Deleget explained, most downtown modern dancers do not earn an income from dancing.

“If you say you’re a dancer, we believe you,” Harkness trainer Megan Richardson said.

Most Harkness patients earn more than $24,000, the cutoff to qualify for Medicaid in New York state, but not enough to afford private insurance. As of September, nearly one quarter of the 879 patients who visited the Center this year were uninsured. The majority of those with some kind of coverage were underinsured, or, covered only for catastrophic incidents like being hit by a bus and emergency room visits. The average deductible for dancers with this insurance is around $2,000, a hefty amount for a group whose income hovers in the low five-figure range.

“If they can’t afford us, we’re not doing any good,” Deleget said. “We want to subsidize dancers so they can get care and still make a living.”

Harkness Center considers it part of its mission to help dancers find financial assistance to pay for their care. The institution encourages New York residents to apply for Charity Care, or federally funded financial aid, through the NYU Center for Joint Diseases. The state reimburses the hospital for all incurred costs by Charity Care recipients. And for out-of-state dancers, Harkness offers the Special Assistance Fund. The Fund, supported by the LuEsther T. Mertz Advised Fund of the New York City Community Trust, covers “pretty much all costs” of surgery and physical therapy, according to Harkness administrator Leigh Heflin. And when all else fails, the Center offers a sliding fee scale for visits from $250 to $110.

An injury is difficult for any dancer to overcome, but the difficulties are acutely felt by dancers above 40. For young dancers, losing control of their bodies through injury can be dismaying, but they still have time to enter a new career. For older dancers, the thought of finding a new career can be disorienting.

“The visits can be emotional,” Richardson said. “This is their identity.” An identity that dancers intend to keep for as long as they can. Dancers ages 40 and above are clearing a new space for themselves in the world of dance. From 1991 to 2006, Nederlands Dans Theater III, a company for dancers over 40, proved that dancing was not the sole province of the young. It paved the way for other dance groups like PARADIGM. The New York-based company started by Gus Solomons, Jr. and Carmen de Lavallade is made up of dancers over 60. In non-performative settings even more older dancers can continue to practice their art. For example, the 92nd Street Y’s Dance for Life series offers Ballet for the Older Body to accommodate these dancers’ needs and limitations.

In describing Wendy Whelan’s value as a mature dancer, Barnard’s Garafola seemed to capture the importance of the entire population:

“There is a deep pleasure in her dancing. She’s happy, even joyous I would say, doing what she’s doing. And while her physicality is diminished, there is no question, there is not the same physical exuberance that one saw in her dancing 10 years ago, there is another quality that is deeply satisfying and rich.”

For Patrick Lynch, who, going into his sixth week post-op, is told by Dr. Rose he has made an above-average recovery, the experience of the injury has been transformative. It gave him a new level of caution as he has realized what dance means to him: “Dance is my life. I can’t live without it.”

Even so, he is realistic about what he can and cannot expect from his aging body. “At my age, I’m 45, it’s not like I want to go have some big solo career,” he says over coffee following his final check-up. What is comes down to, what these advancements in dance have given him, is the freedom to self-determine when and how he will see out his career. “I want to be able to do what I want to do with it. And I want to dance.”

~By Hannah Rappleye~

One night a few weeks before the 2010 World Cup, 33-year-old Terrance Mbuleo lay bleeding under a street lamp, on a narrow strip of dirt separating thousands of shacks from a handful of brick houses.

That afternoon, men set shacks ablaze and slashed wires that diverted electricity from their houses, subsidized by the South African government, to a sprawling network of tin-and-cardboard dwellings called Protea South, a shantytown about a 45-minute drive from Johannesburg. Like the estimated 2.1 million South Africans who live in slums, Protea South’s residents lack basic services such as electricity and clean water. But they knew how to take electricity from the houses, leaving the homeowners to foot the bill for thousands of people.

After the men disappeared back into their homes, a group of shack dwellers set fire to the transformer that stood between the houses and the shacks.

They did it to send a message: if everyone can’t have electricity, then no one will.

The embers of the transformer fire were still glowing red in the blue dusk of that Sunday in late May, when a smaller group of homeowners left their houses and stood across from the street lamp where Mbuleo would die. They seemed to be planning something. People watched from inside their shacks, nervous about what the men would do.

And then, as Mbuleo began to walk across the path to a small, makeshift store that sold basic goods like cigarettes and soap to the shack dwellers, one of the homeowners pulled a gun from his pocket.

It was then, at a time when the South African government was desperate to prove to the international community that South Africa had both the infrastructural and civil capability to host the world’s largest sporting event, that Mbuleo fell to the ground.

He was dead because his community was forced to fight each other for the most basic of services.

While South Africa’s impressive economic growth has pushed some out of poverty, and brought homes, shopping malls and middle-class tastes—like wine-tasting festivals and swimming pools—to formerly impoverished black townships, millions of people are being left behind. Today, over 2.1 million South Africans live in shacks. They live in cramped, sprawling slums without basic services, like electricity or clean water. South Africa recently surpassed Brazil as the most unequal society in the world, with 1.6 percent of the population earning a quarter of all personal income. Life expectancy is 52, the lowest it has been since 1970.

Only 41 percent of the population has a job.

In Protea South, and many other communities across South Africa, there is often a very thin line between the haves and the have-nots—a narrow patch of dirt separates the poor from the houses of the emerging black middle class, houses with wrought iron and brick gates that safeguard satellite dishes and brand-new cars. When the poor live pressed against the middle class and a government hesitates to implement policies that promote equality, the turning of ordinary men into vigilantes and innocents into murder victims seems explicable, but no less tragic. What happened in Protea South, and to Terrance Mbuleo and his family, is just one example of a recent spate of violence between the poor and the middle class—and sometimes, the South African government.

“They are the working class,” one resident told me as he stood near the spot where Mbuelo died, across the path from a brick house. A teenager leaned against the house’s gate, nodding his head to the music on his iPod. “They have houses. We have nothing.”

By the 1950s, control of how and where blacks—and other South Africans of color—lived formed the linchpin of apartheid ideology. The Group Areas Act of 1950 and 1966 made it illegal for blacks to live in cities, and by the end of the 1950s the regime had begun demolishing black neighborhoods and forcibly relocating blacks to rural “homelands,” situated on uncultivable, desolate land, that were often far away from urban areas. By the end of the 1960s, the government slowed housing construction in many black townships or stopped it altogether, while simultaneously enforcing anti-squatting laws, thus forcing thousands of displaced blacks to find refuge in the homelands.

But the regime had to allow some blacks to live near the cities, which depended on cheap, black labor. Many of the homelands were close enough for their inhabitants to commute daily to the cities, but black men also lived in mining hostels or slums outside of the cities while they worked to support their families in the homelands.  Massive shack towns bloomed in townships outside cities like Johannesburg, Capetown, and Durban.

Homeownership in the townships was a rarity: by the 1980s, at the height of resistance to apartheid, banks and other lending institutions regularly practiced redlining in the townships, where residents participated in rent strikes and violence occurred on a daily basis.

Once apartheid finally fell in 1994, the new government, led by Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, had inherited a staggering housing crisis. Over 10 million South Africans lived in shacks. Housing was at the top of the new nation’s agenda. The party campaigned on the slogan “Houses for All,” and promised to build one million houses in its first five years.

In October that year, Joe Slovo, formerly the leader of the South African Communist Party and the new democracy’s first Housing Minister, traveled to Botshabelo, a former “homeland,” to make official the first non-discriminatory housing policy in South African history.

Botshabelo, which means “place of refuge” in the Sotho language, was established as a homeland in 1979. The government gave each relocated family a 15×30 meter plot of ground, a tent, three days worth of food and told the families to build a shack as quickly as they could. The tents would be needed for the other families who were arriving on a daily basis. Infectious diseases ran rampant in the desolate homelands, and infant mortality was high. During a typhoid outbreak in Botshabelo in July 1980, researchers found 258 adult graves in the homeland cemetery and 269 children’s graves.

By 1985, over 148,000 migrant workers and their families lived in Botshabelo. Workers commuted daily to Bloemfontein, the judicial capital of South Africa, about 55 kilometers away. For six years, Straun Roberston, a South African photographer and writer, traveled with the aid group Operation Hunger through rural South Africa. His subsequent book, titled The Cold Choice: Pictures of a South African Reality, paints a brutal and accurate picture of Botshabelo, which he saw with the daughter-in-law of a former ANC leader, Dr. J.S. Moroka:  “She guided us over the hills to Botshabelo. I was aghast as each new fold of ground disclosed more and more of it. Tin shanties and sod huts, each with its brown tin outhouse, stretched on and on. Every ridge showed us yet another vista. In the bleak grey light under the low clouds, with rain veils sweeping across it, the township seemed to go on forever. Mrs. Moroka told us that 80 per cent of the people were unemployed, living on remittances from working relatives or on government pensions which are too low for subsistence…Ine [Moroka] said: ‘This whole place is an obscenity.”

At the ceremony, surrounded by activists, ANC leaders and citizens, Slovo outlined South Africa’s new housing policy. It was important that the document was going to be signed near the shacks of Botshabelo and not in one of South Africa’s “many fine conference centers with a golf course attached,” Slovo said.

“We were determined that the most significant gathering of people involved in the South African housing process should take place in an area which makes clear the size and importance of the task we face. Botshabelo allows us to see and to experience the disastrous legacy of apartheid’s botched attempt to manipulate housing and the people. Botshabelo tells us about shortages—not only of housing but of work and of many of the social amenities which form the basis of community life.”

Long before Slovo signed the Housing Accord, various activist groups, trade unions and financial and construction groups had been working on crafting a sustainable housing policy for the country. They called it the Reconstruction and Development Programme, a program that blended free-market principles with government intervention. The program encouraged private home ownership, rather than public housing: the poor would buy their own homes, built by private developers, and would be assisted by a government subsidy of up to 15,000 rand, or about $3,200. By 1996, however, the most basic house cost around 45,000 rand. The remaining cost to the prospective homeowners— 30,000 rand—was over three times what the poorest two-fifths of South African families made in a year.

While the ANC made big promises of “Houses for All” during their election campaign, in the years after the first democratic election in South Africa’s history, in meetings and in statements to the press, the new officials took a more realistic, if wary, stance. “Let us be quite frank,” Slovo’s successor, Sanki Mthembi-Nkondo, told the South African paper The Mail & Guardian in 1995. “The maximum subsidy of R15 000 will seldom, if ever, buy outright the kind of house people imagine when they turn to daydreaming. But it will do something South Africa has never seen before. It will provide the poorest people in our country with a tangible and workable housing opportunity.”

By 2010, the South African government had built about 2.7 million houses, an impressive feat considering what the ANC had inherited. But development has not kept pace with demand. According to the South African Department of Human Settlements, in August 2010 the housing backlog was estimated at more than two million. Currently, more than 12 million South Africans need homes.

Most development experts and academics say that corruption at the local level has prevented houses from reaching many South Africans. The recession has also slowed housing delivery and forced many families into slums. In 2010, 12 percent of South African households lived in RDP houses, but in places like Gauteng Province, home to Protea South, over 22 percent of residents lived in “informal dwellings,” or shacks.

And sometimes, initiatives simply never take off. A new, mixed-income housing strategy called Breaking New Ground, intended to integrate poor black communities and rich white communities—who live in suburbs close to city centers, in gated compounds with swimming pools and black gardeners—has failed to get off the ground. The debate about the Breaking New Ground strategy inevitably hung on the question that is always posed by the upper and middle-class residents of upper and middle-class neighborhoods of South Africa, the majority of whom are white, whenever such strategies are proposed: does the movement of black residents into their neighborhoods mean higher crime rates and lower property values, and thus an end to a particular way of life?

In 2009, a mob of men attacked Kennedy Road, a large slum outside of Durban. The men chanted ANC slogans while they forced people out of their shacks, looted their belongings and tore down walls and smashed roofs. The men beat anyone who resisted. Over 1,000 residents fled Kennedy Road with their meager belongings—clothes, baskets, shoes, sometimes mattresses—atop their heads. By the morning, helicopters circled over the slum and paramedics loaded people into waiting ambulances. Many were injured, two were killed.

The incident made headlines around South Africa. Reports circulated that local ANC politicians instigated the mob, because the party felt threatened by an organization called Abahlali baseMjondolo, which had been growing in the Kennedy Road settlement since the mid-2000s. Abahlali baseMjondolo, which means the Shack Dweller’s Movement, had initially been formed by shack dwellers as a “development committee,” a way to organize the community for better sanitation and safety, but quickly grew throughout Kennedy Road and surrounding slums into an outspoken grassroots movement of the poor, agitating for service delivery and safe, affordable housing.

S’bu Zikode, a short, soft-spoken man who had moved into the shacks in 1997, emerged as the leader of the movement. Zikode grew up in rural Kwa-Zulu Natal with a single mother who worked as a domestic worker for a white family.

He entered law school in 1997, only to quit months later because he could not afford the fees. He moved into a shack in Kennedy Road later that year.

“It was hard to accept that any human being could live like that,” Zikode said in early November. He was sitting at a kitchen table in an activist’s house in Astoria, Queens, wearing a white polo shirt with the words “Land and Dignity” ironed on to it. He had been invited to the United States by a number of progressive housing organizations and asked to speak about the movement he spearheaded, which had grown into a network that reached into most major cities in South Africa, including Johannesburg and Capetown. “People there, they don’t have water, they don’t have toilets, they don’t have lights.”

“As a result,” he went on, “we have had to create our own space. We had to acknowledge that the government is not for us, and is not with us.”

After he moved into Kennedy Road, Zikode joined the ANC and was elected chairperson of his local branch. He tried, he said, to bring up issues of housing and development. But he soon grew frustrated by the other members, who drove fancy cars and, in his eyes, did not care about the poor. “What disturbed me most was the top-down system that was there,” he said. “You go to a meeting, you have issues, and you have mandates from the shack settlements.

But when you get into the meeting, suddenly an agenda is already there. There is no window to discuss anything. I believe in a bottom-up system. This is a democratic country. People mandate you. People elect you because they trust you.”

Zikode left the ANC soon after. By 2006, he was invited to speak on local radio stations and was interviewed for news reports about service delivery and housing. That same year, Zikode was arrested and tortured by a local white police superintendent and began to receive threats against his life. Shacks had spread like wildfire across the country, and it was becoming common to hear of township and slum residents holding marches and other demonstrations to protest against the ANC and the fact that they had no electricity or safe water. The ANC retaliated by evicting residents from slums, without court orders, and sending police to break up peaceful protests. Residents of the slums, many of which sat next to dangerous mine runoffs or other hazardous areas, were often evicted from the land by the government, without notice, and placed into dingy “transit camps.” The camps were meant to be temporary stopovers until the residents were given better land or placed in housing. But the temporary camps were, more often than not, permanent.

Some believe that what happened on Kennedy Road represented a turning point in the ANC’s history. While the party was once considered to be the party of the poor, many academics and other South Africans regarded the incident as the first organized attempt to stifle dissent amongst the poor.

“It’s important to see this in the wider context because this turn towards supporting vigilante ways of doing things hearkens back to apartheid, when the government would arm paramilitary groups or try to prevent unrest in the townships to try to undermine the fight against apartheid,” Jared Sacks, Executive Director of Children of South Africa, told me. “At the local level, in South Africa, there is very little democracy going on. The councilors are very authoritarian and they often instigate violence. What happened has a lot of side effects for poor people because now, there is this fear of reprisals when you speak out. That prevents a whole lot of communities saying things that need to be said.”

Zikode was out of town when the attacks on Kennedy Road occurred, but his wife and four children were there. They fled to a family member’s house and, when ikode came back, neighbors told him that men had been looking for him and his family. With the help of Amnesty International, Zikode moved underground for six months. Now, he considers himself a political refugee.

“The ANC is in power now,” Zikode said as he folded his hands on the table. “If you are opposing them, they will say you are anti-revolutionary, and they will call you thugs who are being funded by foreign agencies to destabilize the country. Our hard-won democracy. That’s what they often say. Our hard-won democracy.”

In early July 2010, while soccer fans flocked to Soweto’s Soccer City stadium—a few minutes drive from Protea South—to catch the last games of the World Cup, I talked with Soloman Mdakane, Mbuleo’s father, while he sat with his wife in their shack and cried.

“Even now we can’t cope,” he said. Mdakane, a rail-thin man with a goatee, looked up at his wife. She sat across from him and looked down at the floor, as her shaking fingers pulled at the end of her shawl. Tears streamed down her face. A group of women, her neighbors, huddled around her and laid their hands on her shoulder. It had been months, Mdakane said, and still, she couldn’t talk about it.

The homeowners had shot another young man from the settlement, but he survived, and the day I arrived in Protea South, he refused to come out of his shack. His neighbors said that he had been afraid to leave his home ever since he was shot in the leg. But Mdakane wanted to talk about his son’s death because, he said, nobody—not the police or the media—seemed to be paying attention.

As Mbuleo lay dying and his father knelt by his side, shack dwellers called the police and an ambulance. Mbuleo was dead before they arrived. The ambulance carted him off to the hospital, and the police stayed behind. But, shack dwellers say, they refused to take down statements from the many who witnessed the shooting. They arrested a few homeowners but released them soon after, without any charges. Mbuleo left behind four children and a wife.

“We know those people were arrested but now released,” Mdakane said. “The police don’t come. I ask myself, ‘Why he was killed?’ He was just going to buy cigarettes. I should have been killed.”

In Protea South it is crowded. Like in any slum in any part of the world, people live pushed up against each other. The United Nations estimates that throughout the world, over 827 million people currently live in slums; the number stands to grow to 889 million by 2020. In Protea South, the government estimates that over 6,000 families live in the shacks.

There, where between cardboard and corrugated iron shacks, rats traverse tiny, trickling rivers of urine and old dishwater, people were less than thrilled about the development possibilities of the World Cup.

“They say we should ‘Feel it, it is here,’” Maureen Mnisi said, scoffing at one of the slogans of the World Cup. Mnisi is a well-respected housing organizer who lives in Protea South. “But how can we feel it when we live like this?”

Mnisi, a black woman with bobbed hair and strong arms, stood in front of her home in the slum and pointed out where a group of marauding homeowners tried to set fires the same night that Mbuleo died. They were trying to force her out of her home, she said, because they knew she was an activist and a symbol of power: she encouraged the shack dwellers to organize and agitate for services.

“They can build a stadium for billions of rand,” she said. “But they can’t build homes for the people.”

She paused for a moment, and then she said something that many other residents of Protea South told me: “This government has failed its people.”

For the thousands in Protea South, there are only a hundred or so portable toilets. For many women in the settlement, the toilets are symbols of rape and sexual assault—too many times, they said, they have met a drunk or violent man inside one of the toilets at night.

Many of the men are unemployed here, residents told me, and are often forced into petty crime to support their families—or they simply wash their pain away with home-brewed beer. Women, as they did under apartheid, often travel hours to work as domestics in mostly-white suburbs or, barring that, take in sewing or laundry to make ends meet.

In the face of all this, the residents of Protea South struggle to maintain normalcy. They plant tight rows of vegetables in front of their shacks and do their laundry and send their children to school. Women collect dirty water from a nearby creek for their families to drink. And they try to get electricity in whatever way they can.

Above the shacks, tall wooden poles thrust into the air, their tops bound with wires that give electricity to some of the shacks. The wires, residents said, mean that their children can study at night without inhaling smoke from the paraffin lamps. Electricity also means they won’t have to worry that their shacks will burn down—paraffin oil tends to spit and jump from the lamps, causing fires.

But the homeowners object to the stealing of their electricity, and that is understandable—they end up footing the bill for the entire settlement.  None of this would be a problem, most shack dwellers say, if the ANC fulfilled its promises.

“We haven’t got toilets, we haven’t got water, we haven’t got electricity,” Busisiwe Tawala, a 22-year-old resident of the settlement, said. “We need houses. And we keep being promised that in such and such day and in such and such year the government will build houses. But nothing is done.”

What she said next is illuminative of the massive shift in thought for thousands of South Africa’s poor, many of whom organized or rallied for the ANC during apartheid or grew up under the transition: that the party of liberation had become the party of the status quo. “The poor people should stop voting the rich in,” she said. “It was better under apartheid.”

Throughout the slums, it is a common refrain: life was better under apartheid. How could anyone say this?

“We feel that we have been betrayed by our brothers and sisters that we trusted the most,” Zikode had told me that morning in Astoria. “Most people were voting for the ANC. Most people were part of the struggle to end apartheid. A lot of people worked hard within the ANC to end old rule. But it has become clear that the government has turned on us. It is clear to us that even the apartheid we fought against, yes, it was there. But it’s not the race question anymore.”

“Some people talk about the farmers, the Boers,” or the Afrikaaners, Zikode continued. “That stole our land. But today, we have black Boers. We have black elites that have enriched themselves. This government has turned into a business. There are government ministers that are now multi-millionaires. You have a ituation in South Africa where you cannot differentiate between the private business sector and the government. The gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Those that are in power have become blind to our suffering. They pretend not to see, but they were once with us. They should know how it is to be in the shacks.”

“It is better to be betrayed by your enemy, than your brother,” he said.

Later that month, a few miles away from the shacks in Protea South, a hundred or so people danced and sang anti-apartheid protest songs on the side of a highway. The blinding afternoon sun hung high over the dancing people as they kicked up dust over the black tarmac and women ululated. A man stood in front of the crowd and shouted into a bullhorn. A police car was parked in front of the man and two policemen stood leaning against its open doors, watching.

Across the road, a handful of private security guards and an ANC councilor were also watching the crowd. They stood on a corner where the highway intersected with a long, dusty road that receded far into the distance. On that road, between the security guards and the horizon line, was a patch of newly constructed affordable housing units. From the other side of the highway, one could make out the dinosaur-like neck of a yellow bulldozer moving between the squat, red-roofed homes.

The people in the crowd gathered that day to protest. They said that the houses rightfully belonged to them, but their local ANC councilors told them the houses had already been allocated to new owners. The man with the bullhorn, a housing activist from Soweto named Sipho Nhlapo, told the crowd that they would not move from the highway.  They would appoint “security guards,” he said, to wait on the corner from morning until night, waiting to see the families who had been given the homes.

The people cheered. Old women moved to the front and shuffled their feet back and forth as the crowd of swaying bodies morphed to form a semi-circle. The old women held up laminated copies of their applications for subsidized housing. Most of the applications dated back to 1996. Nhlapo moved in front of the women and pumped his fist in the air. The crowd kept singing. The police leaned against the open doors of their car, and the security guards across the street crossed their arms at their chests.

But nothing happened.

Eventually the crowd stopped dancing and the hundred or so people without homes stood and craned their necks over the police car to catch a glimpse of the security guards and the houses behind them.

Women began to crowd around, desperate to tell their stories. “I have been living in a shack since 1996,” one of them told me. “I have no job. There are no jobs.”  “We all live in one room together,” said another. “My mother, my sister, her children, and my children. There is not enough room.” “I have been waiting so long,” said another woman. She wore a kerchief on her head and she shut her eyes and clenched her fists in frustration. “How much longer can I wait? I have no money to build a house, and no land.”

Many of the women did not live in shacks, but in rented rooms or one-room houses, stuffed full of children and extended family members.

“I feel like crying, or killing myself,” Emily Moleane, 50, who lives with her sister and large extended family in a small room in Soweto, said.  She began to cry. “How can you wait 14 years for a place to live? Even with the previous government it was not like this.”

Nhlapo, the housing activist, and a tall, dark man named Samson Nembudani stood near a stop sign, next to a handful of women resting their round bodies on a patch of yellow grass. Nhlapo clutched the bullhorn in his hand. They suspected, Nhlapo said, that the government was giving away the houses not to South Africans, but to “rich foreigners.”

“They are taking foreigners and putting them in these houses,” he said. “We are not promoting xenophobia, we just want everyone who applied for housing in this country to get it.”

Citizens in any country suffering from a scarcity of housing, jobs and other resources tend to search for someone, or something, to blame. South Africa is no different. A diplomat once told me that some of South Africa’s problems lie in the fact that it was an “island of prosperity in a sea of suffering.” South Africa’s cities have long been a promised land for migrants desperate for jobs and a better life for their families. Some migrants are highly skilled and come to the country legally to work. Most, however, cross the South African border in secret, smuggled in the back of trucks or simply on foot in the middle of the night.

The neighborhoods of Johannesburg’s inner city teem with immigrants from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Botswana, Nigeria, Mozambique, Central African Republic and, perhaps most controversially, Zimbabwe. Zimbabweans share a border with South Africa and have always migrated back and forth between the two states, but as the political and economic situation in Zimbabwe began to deteriorate in 2007 Zimbabweans flocked to South Africa in droves. Migration to South Africa increased even more in 2008, after Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party launched a brutal campaign of torture and political repression against ordinary Zimbabweans. Today, South Africa has the largest population of Zimbabweans outside of Zimbabwe, and most of them live in abject poverty.

For those fleeing violence, war and economic insecurity, life in South Africa is much better than the alternative. But both successful immigrants — Somali or Pakistani shop owners, for example—and poor immigrants, like many Zimbabweans, face harassment from native South Africans. Sometimes the harassment turns violent. The narrative goes, much like it does in the United States, that these immigrants lower wages for native South Africans with their willingness to do any job at any price.

Locals make jokes about Zimbabweans being as common as cockroaches and hold rallies accusing immigrants of spreading HIV/AIDS and crime. In the years since apartheid ended, acts of violence against foreigners, including murder, rape and beatings, although not common, have occurred with enough regularity to make some worry that the seams of the “Rainbow Nation” were coming apart.

In May 2008, South Africans’ distrust of immigrants and their frustration with the high unemployment rate hit a fever pitch. Across the country, local ANC councilors up for re-election roused anger in the townships and shantytowns by publicly blaming immigrants for poor service delivery and scarcity of employment. Riots spread across the country, and soon news outlets around the world carried photos of a man, a suspected foreigner, being burned alive in a slum.

During the riots, 62 people died. Refugee camps built by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees sprung up on the outskirts of Johannesburg to house those fleeing the violence.

As the world waited for the 2010 World Cup, South African papers began to publish rumors that xenophobic violence would return after the games ended.

And when they did, immigrants began to leave the cities en masse, armed with bus tickets back home. But aside from a few beatings around the country, predictions of violence on a massive scale were largely unfounded.

So it was, perhaps, not surprising that Nhlapo and his associate, Samson Nembudani, were standing on the side of the highway that day in late July, with no doubt in their minds that the problem here was not only the corrupt ANC councilors standing between them and a safe, clean place to live, but also foreigners, who had jobs, money and, therefore, a chance at being placed in a government-subsidized home.

But it was frightening, nonetheless.

Nembudani said that the group would appoint “guards” to watch who went in and out of the houses. “And then we will ask to see their papers, to see if they are citizens or not,” he said.

I asked him if he thought that might encourage violence.  He shrugged. “Violence is a thing you cannot guarantee. We cannot guarantee nothing will happen. If you’ve applied for housing since 1996 and you don’t get it, how do you feel?”

Nhlapo nodded and looked across the road.

“We will go into the houses and drag them out by force,” he said.

An unusual man, David Pecheco decided at the age of 50 that he wanted to live the rest of his life in the treacherous South Pole, his wife Tina by his side. In October 2003, he took a job as a journeyman plumber and moved to the McMurdo Station in the southernmost tip of Antarctica, the hub of the United States’ scientific research efforts in the region.

The thrill didn’t last long.  On the morning of January 28, 2007, David Pacheco was sent to an empty building to drain and put antifreeze on pipes without knowing that the electricity was still on. When the water slashed out of the pipes, it conducted two lines of 277 volts throughout his body.

He flew 20 feet in the air. For a minute his heartbeat stopped.

“Your brain works but your body doesn’t work and you start shaking like a fish and then you try to get up and you can’t,” he said. “It’s like winning a lottery that I am alive.”

When his supervisors finally arrived, it took them an hour and a half to turn off the electricity.

“I saw them running around with blueprints,” said his wife Tina Pacheco who worked at McMurdo as an administrative assistant. “They couldn’t even figure out where the switch was to turn off the electricity. And then later they blamed David for not turning it off. And that’s just, on so many levels, that’s ridiculous.”

After several years of physical therapy for brain and nerve damage, Pacheco is still not expected to fully recover. Liberty Mutual, Raytheon’s insurance and worker’s compensation carrier, didn’t give total disability compensation and never paid his medical expenses. When he tried to seek compensation, he learned the hard way that American labor laws barely apply in the secluded world of Antarctica.

More than 3,500 Americans live in Antarctica to support scientific research for the National Science Foundation’s United States Antarctic Program. Those brave enough to work during the three months of Antarctic winter in perpetual night, at temperatures sometimes averaging –80 degrees, are called winterovers. They have to pass a special psychological test to prove their ability to bear the constant darkness and confinement. Temperatures are so cold that planes usually can’t land in the winter, leaving winterovers trapped; evacuations are often impossible in those challenging austral winter conditions.

What do you do when nothing works at 80 below zero? It’s the cutoff temperature at the South Pole where equipment that would work on warmer continents suddenly stops functioning, resulting in numerous accidents every year.

There are 27 nations, including India, China, and the United States that send scientists and logistical support to Antartica to conduct research, but none of these countries technically owns the vast, icy land, and so deny jurisdiction over workplace injuries.

The Supreme Court decided that Antarctica was a sovereignless country out of its jurisdiction in 1993 when Sandra Jean Smith lost a wrongful death action in the name of her husband who died in Antarctica.

Hundreds of injuries have occurred in Antarctica since 2001, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, but only three cases have been reported to the U.S. Department of Labor. This, despite the fact that Antarctic contract employees are entitled to special insurance benefits under the Defense Base Act laws and contract companies are required to report all injuries to the Department of Labor. But Raytheon Polar Services (RPSC), the company hired to run the U.S. Antarctic program, failed to comply with the law.

The continent’s unclear political status makes it almost impossible for employees to appeal denied worker’s compensation claims and assert their Defense Base Act rights in American courts. They have to pay state and federal taxes but are not considered to be American employees and are not covered by most labor laws.

“We pay the taxes and do not get the rights,” one South Pole worker wrote in an email.  She injured several times working three winters in a row outdoors at South Pole in tempatures that averaged 75 below.

She was on crutches this past season after breaking her ankle after falling face down a flight of metal stairs. Her employer failed to provide her her with the proper equipment, she says.  Her goggles fogged and then froze up in an instant of hitting winter temperatures, she wrote. Her mittens had no grip or traction and fell apart  with little use.

“We are inadequately protected against the elements we deal with. We are not provided with sufficient training or gear to do what we need to do,” she wrote.

In 2008, the National Science Foundation in Antarctica could only retain 60% of its contract employees from the summer season, according to safety and injury reports obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request. Auditors also found out that the  work sites had outdated and unusable equipment.

In 2004, a Massachusetts district held that the Fair Labor Standards Act overtime pay rate is not applicable in a foreign country such as Antarctica. The court based its decision on the 1961 Antarctic Treaty, which specifies that Antarctica is not under the sovereignty of any government.

But the IRS held that Antarctica was not a foreign country for tax purposes. The United States Tax Court ruled against Dave Arnett in 2006, the lead case for 150 RPSC employees who thought they didn’t have to pay taxes since Antarctica was a foreign country.

Raytheon Polar Services found more than one hundred instances of health and safety non-compliance in 2006 after the contractor inspected its facilities, according to safety and injury reports obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Raytheon also found out that the buildings didn’t have enough equipment available. Much of it was outdated and unusable. Research stations are deteriorating from age and use, according to the audit report. For every major injury that occurs, there were 29 minor injuries and 330 near misses or unsafe acts, the reports shows.

Raytheon Polar Services is supposed to follow the federal regulation of the Safety and Health Administration’s federal regulation (OSHA) and reports all OSHA recordable injuries to the National Science Foundation. They can result in restricted or lost work time. Raytheon Polar Services blamed budgets cuts, which caused them to reduce the summer staff from 750 to 670. The report also suggest that injuries are related to less job specific training before the start of the summer season.

Before they leave for the Ice, employees are warned about the medical risks that come with living and working in the coldest of all continents. Most of them work at the three year-round stations of South Pole, McMurdo and Palmer to support scientific research and logistics. During the Antarctic summer, from November to March, the population in Antarctica is at its highest, about 1,000 workers at the McMurdo station and 250 at the Scott-Amundsen South Pole station.

All NSF-Sponsored personnel traveling to Antarctica have to sign a form informing them that “travel to Antarctica imparts certain risks to the traveler, because of harsh environmental conditions encountered, limitations in the medical care available in Antarctica, and difficulties, in emergencies, of providing timely evacuation to tertiary medical care facilities on New Zealand, South America, or in the United States.”

Heavy machinery accidents were numerous with an employee’s left leg run over by a Mattrack, another worker crushed by a heavy flat bed trailer, and an employee injured while driving a bulldozer by the ice pier.

“About any legal opinion will reach the conclusion that workers may be entitled to DBA [Defense Base Act] benefits,” Bruce H. Nicholson, Defense Base Act attorney, said. “But clearer answers require people asserting their rights to compensation and treatment.”

A building commissioned in January 2008 was not up to the OSHA and the National Fire Protection Agency American codes, a South Pole senior safety employee wrote. Fire sprinkler heads were not in the right place, handrails, siderails and toekicks were missing leaving large gaps and exit signs were incorrectly hung.

“They rely on a flux of people that changes so that problems just sort of go away with the next season’s turnover,” she wrote.

In Antarctica, Pacheco saw a lot of accidents go unreported.

RPSC employees only have access to Raytheon doctors and fear that reporting injuries may lead to a reduction of their annual bonuses and affect their chances of being rehired. There is a medical underground of medical technicians and physician assistants that are not employed as such on the Ice but treat injuries when workers fear that it may reflect on their job evaluations, workers said.

Since employees are technically always on their job site, any injury even off-duty or recreational should be covered by RPSC’s insurance carrier Liberty Mutual. But it doesn’t always happen. The average worker’s comp cost per injury is $13,261. Liberty Mutual managed to reduce claims by about $1.2 million in 2002, Raytheon reported.

Liberty Mutual, Raytheon’s insurance and worker’s compensation carrier, never paid Pacheco’s $14,000 New Zealand hospital bill.  In the United States, the Pachecos were left to pay for most of their medical expenses. They’re now $20,000 in debt on credit cards.

“I am in the mercy of Liberty Mutual right now,” Pacheco said.

This is common, Raytheon employees say. “It is easier for Liberty Mutual to deny one of our claims because by the time we contact them we are unemployed, or between contracts,” a worker wrote.  “Liberty Mutual is renowned for and feared by RPSC employees for not accepting worker’s compensation claims for those injuries for which there may be any personal blame.”

Raytheon Polar Services, a subsidiary of defense contractor Raytheon based in Centennial, Colorado, took over the management of American activities in Antarctica in 1999. Last year, the government allocated about $295 million for RPSC to run the U.S. Antarctic Program. Their contract is supposed to end on March 31, 2012 but the contractor hopes to win the next contract bidding by then.

Pacheco said that Jim Scott, the head of McMurdo told him that Raytheon didn’t receive enough funding to update the building to safety standards.  Pacheco feels lucky for receiving any compensation and doesn’t hope he will ever receive full compensation from Raytheon.

“Nobody wants to take the case because it’s out in Colorado, and then it’s another nation, it’s not a territory. It’s nothing,” Pacheco said. “It’s a sweetheart deal in the fine print.”

Before 9/11, as told by New Yorkers who call Little Pakistan home, their neighborhood in Midwood, Brooklyn was a true microcosm of the old country 7,000 miles away. Today, this enclave, desolate and reclusive, wrestles with population loss and ignorance. And fear.

Residents say the community was thriving with few available parking spots and plenty of jewelry stores, music and DVD outlets, sweet shops, immigration and tax service shops, traditional clothing shops. People would travel from Queens and New Jersey to shop, eat and worship there.

“It was a very lively area,” said Bazah Roohi, 36, a small business owner and long time resident of “Little Pakistan.” “The restaurants [were] busy. Boutiques [were] busy. The grocery store was all the time busy.”

This all changed when the federal Department of Homeland Security created the Special Registration initiative, or Entry-Exit Registration System, a system for registration of non-citizens. It’s primary target is Muslim-majority countries, like Pakistan. Special Registration began in September 2002 in an attempt to remove members of al-Qa’eda and other terrorist organizations from the United States’ borders.

The Council of Peoples Organization (formerly Council of Pakistan Organization) was started in 2002 to respond to the crisis and fear in Little Pakistan that ensued after Special Registration.

According to CoPO, up to 45,000 of the South Asians in Brooklyn left voluntarily or were deported after Special Registration. Those who left voluntarily did so because they were illegal and feared eventual deportation or for other reasons.

They estimate that this cut the immigrant population of Little Pakistan in half.

CoPO also reports that in addition to the closing of 30 major businesses – mostly jewelry stores  – aimed at the Pakistani-American community those businesses left standing incurred losses of between 30 and 70 percent. Restaurants and the remaining jewelry stores were hardest hit.

“Could you imagine a knock on your door and a guy is holding a card like this and you don’t speak English?,” said Mohammed Razvi, the executive director of CoPO. He was holding a tattered, overstuffed album filled with the business cards of FBI and CIA agents with notes handwritten on the back.

“In this school next door to us, 50 students packed-up and left,” said Razvi, seated at his office desk in the heart of “Little Pakistan.” “Fifty students. You’re talking about fifty families.”

Residents have also suffered from post-9/11 discrimination by other locals.

From a worn, heavy, 3 inch thick binder, Razvi read accounts of harassment: A man was stabbed out of retribution for being Muslim, but didn’t tell the police because he was undocumented and feared he deportation. Another account was of an 11-year-old girl walking to school wearing her traditional headscarf. The girl was called a “sand nigger” and spit on by a woman on the street and was told she should be sorry for dropping the Twin Towers.

Where did they go?

“They went to Canada, seeking asylum from the United States, ironically. They went back to Pakistan or Bangladesh,” said Razvi. The residents of Little Pakistan also report that many of those who left went to other states.

According to reports from the Canadian Globe and Mail newspaper, Pakistanis represented five percent of people requesting refugee hearings in Canada in November 2002 and 58 percent in February 2003.

The desperation of this community is being felt all the way down to the economic level, and by everyone.

“They don’t want to spend money. If tomorrow they’ll have to leave things and fabric, everything will be [left] here. At least they have cash. They can get to their country. That’s why they are not spending money,” said Mrs. Jilani, 50, and co-owner of Zoque Fashion on Coney Island Avenue. Mrs. Jilani has been living in the area for 30 years and opened her shop, which sells traditional Pakistani women’s clothing, in 1994. She reports that business is still down for her.

The economic situation in Little Pakistan is particularly acute as the majority of residents are employed as cab drivers, or as small business owners, reports Al Jazeera English. In 2000, the per capita income of a Pakistani in New York City was $11,992 with 28 percent of the population living below the poverty line.

And the global recession isn’t helping.

According to Razvi, besides not being able to speak English, many community members did not know their rights after Special Registration began and many still don’t. CoPO also addresses these problems and offers ESL – English as a Second Language – classes and legal workshops in Urdu, Punjabi and Bengali.

According to numbers from the Office of Immigration Statistics, the number of Pakistani-born aliens deported from the U.S. only began to drop to levels similar to those of 2001 during this past year.

“And now what’s happening is it’s starting to come back,” said Razvi about Brooklyn’s South Asian population. “But it’s coming back from all the filings from family members who had filed [for immigration] for their loved ones for all these years because their cases become current.”

And the numbers demonstrate this. While Pakistanis are still coming to the U.S., they are doing so in fewer numbers. Nonimmigrant admissions for Pakistanis is still down: by 20 percent, for 2008, compared to 2001. But as previously filed immigration cases become current, the number of Pakistanis obtaining U.S. legal permanent resident status has actually increased: 40 percent higher than in 2001.

Razvi estimates it will take up to 15 years for the area to return to the way is was before 9/11.

“It’s starting to come back, but it’s still not there,” Razvi said. “Because even the cab driver was prospering at that time, prior to 9/11.”

According to residents, the deportations have not come to an end, either. Community members with citizenship are reportedly being paid by the FBI when they give information about an undocumented immigrant.

“They complain to the FBI and they [say] ‘He is illegal. She is illegal. They are illegal.’,” said Roohi. “They receive $500 from the FBI. They work for the FBI, still they are working for the FBI. And everyone knows who they are. They are very well known persons. I don’t want to mention their names.”

“A lot people, still, they are scared and don’t want to shop around here,” said Roohi.

The headquarters of one of the longest-running independent record labels in America– and certainly the longest in its genre – is hidden in a squat orange warehouse on Fourth Avenue at First Street in Gowanus. The graffiti-scrawled space houses Projekt Records, run by Sam Rosenthal since he founded the brand in 1983.

With asymmetrical black hair, a small, wiry frame, and strong, jutting features, Sam could play the part of a late-90’s emo kid, perhaps without the naïveté. Then again, who knows? His label has consistently released music into a niche market of dark and introspective listeners. Often, both the music and the audience are described as Goth, a term somewhat negatively associated with mall-core, if not for theatrics or want of a more practical worldview. In critical circles, arguing the more juvenile of Goth, emo or death metal is like naming shades of gray – obsessions with new-Romantic motifs the three share seem to have run their course. But Sam, and by extension Projekt, happens to be more pragmatic about his business than Goth implies. And besides – it’s only a label.

“Goth was an appropriate description of who was listening to it. But the music itself… it’s always been more the mood,” Rosenthal said on a cold Tuesday in January from the Projekt office, cluttered with old Projekt promo posters, boxes and boxes of CDs, and even a box of Projekt-embossed coffee mugs.

A father of one – Sasha, seven – Sam dresses all in black: a two-toned striped hoodie, a Projekt T-shirt, jeans, and Chelsea boots. In a way he’s fitting a role, but a decidedly different one. Projekt is known as the premier independent American label putting out Goth, but the term isn’t all-inclusive. He rifled around for others, post-punk and coldwave among them.

Really, there are numerous sides to Projekt’s sound and one term alone doesn’t give any of them a fair shake: there’s the drifting, zoned-out ambience, led by Steve Roach and As Lonely As Dave Bowman; the straightforward dark rock by Autumn’s Gray Solace, Melodyguild, Mira, and others; the subtle new wave in the electronic etch of Android Lust and others. Rosenthal also coined the terms darkwave and dark cabaret, performance genres non-existent 25 years ago. Today on Projekt, Voltaire and Rosenthal’s own band Black Tape For A Blue Girl lead the charge in that department.

And you’ve probably heard none of that.

That’s the strange dichotomy of Projekt – while nothing in its catalog stands out to most these days as even familiar, the label is still trucking right along. In the midst of a critical minefield, a genre known more for style than music, and a catalog of relative unknowns, the label is in as good a place as ever, at least as far as putting out music goes.

Even with a massive downturn in sales at the end of the last century, the label has more recently gone through exponential growth. In 1999, Projekt released its one-hundredth recording; in 2009 the label put out number 230. So after nearly thirty years of operation, there is no sign of letting up. Again: you’ve probably not heard much, if any, of it.

“I often think I’m the only one who has heard everything on the label,” he said.

After 27 years at the helm of Projekt, it’s still hard for even Sam to pin down the label’s ethos.

“It’s been more diverse than what other people think. The ambient fans sort of think of it as this ambient label. The Voltaire fans think it’s a Goth label with some weird ambient stuff,” he said.

Projekt began as an avenue to release Sam’s own music, which he described in the beginning as “mopey and non-mainstream,” insisting there wasn’t a name for the sounds that interested him back then. His band has put out 10 proper full-length releases of orchestrated, melancholy rock, driven by theatrical vocals and dark waves of synth. Couple this with insistent arpeggios on a couple acoustic instruments—mainly piano and guitar—and you’ve got the bulk of much of Projekt’s sound.

But then there is the swirling, electronic ambient, lulling the listener into hypnotic states. And the big wall-of sound shoegaze that appears from time to time as well. Projekt’s records can be listless, unidirectional at times, but when trying to relate this darker side of personal affect, epiphany isn’t the most important aspect; these artists seem content at the bottom of the manic wave.

“I’ve been doing this for my entire adult life. I can’t imagine doing anything else,” Rosenthal said.

What began as a hobby for Rosenthal in college quickly turned into his full-time job. He distributed Projekt Records out of his house in Los Angeles while pursuing his film degree. The label grew organically, and before long he had a couple employees. Projekt advertised free catalogs in the back of Spin and other magazines, amassing a database of some 40,000 interested listeners. Soon after, he had an office. And not long after that again, Projekt began its trek east, landing in Chicago in the 90’s.

“In Chicago it kind of went crazy. I had eleven employees and lots of expenses and I found myself all day being in charge of the employees then working all night to get my own work done.”

Now, with declines in sales in the wake of a collapsing music industry, Sam has two employees. One of them is Shea Hovey, who runs promotions and is a formidable presence. A taller woman with neon-pink bangs and tufts of blue gracing her face, tendrils of silver and azure tumble from her head like electric dreadlocks. She is pierced to the nines and strikingly beautiful in an unconventional way. Shea runs most the electronic correspondence directed at the label – its main way of now conducting business. They still send out CDs the old-fashioned way in labeled boxes the postman has to pick up.

Rosenthal predicted the collapse of the major labels in a 2000 interview, saying back then the big labels were too caught up in profit and not focused enough on artist relations. This led the RIAA to the wrong course of action against Napster and other file-sharing sites that hit the scene around that time – a huge part of Projekt’s loss has been illegal downloads.

“Now a band that used to sell 10,000 maybe sells 2,000. But it does keep the music flowing, keeps it coming out,” Sam says. “And legal digital sales have been growing to make up monetarily for the difference. Obviously less units are being sold, but artists are still being compensated that way.”

Even still a little timid about what he does and the success he’s culled over three decades, Sam admits he had a different idea about how downloading music would benefit record sales.

“I had more of a utopian belief in the positive benefits of it,” he said. “I thought digital was a great thing because people would hear the music and they would love it so much they would run out and buy it – not so.”

Ultimately, his prescience in the fate of the industry led him to Brooklyn to completely downsize his operation.

“Projekt is the easiest now in Brooklyn, even though it’s probably the most expensive place to live. I mean I live three blocks from here. I walk my son to school next to the Gowanus Canal. It’s all sort of like a small town because I really stay in a small area.”

Above the Projekt office is its distribution warehouse, an expansive space lined with thousands and thousands of cataloged CDs. They are stacked ceiling high in some spaces, all packed neatly into cardboard boxes and labeled meticulously by hand. There’s an old Apple IIE crammed between a couple boxes (the office now uses iMacs) and an entire room is filled with freeze-dried coffee (the last tenant left it, Sam organized it). At the back of the warehouse, there’s a smaller room with a covered window letting in shafts of blue light. A solitary leather jacket, Motorhead-style with big lapels and a clunky zipper, sags on a wire hanger, looking eerie in the gloom. Sam picked it up in Mexico years ago, and hasn’t worn it in ages.

“It’s just not long enough – I can’t stay warm as I’d like.”

And somehow, that’s the perfect metaphor for the entire operation: while there could be another level of stylistic posturing going on, in the end, Sam just wants to get done what he needs to get done. Yes, Projekt tends to be a label pigeonholed for something beyond its tunes. But defining success to Rosenthal is as simple some days as choosing the right jacket, letting nine employees go, or knowing when to cut your losses on the retail market. He is Projekt Records, and Projekt Records is him, plain and simple.

For nearly six decades, Vivian Scarpati has lived within blocks of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. In the 1970s, she married a man who lived on her street. Her husband’s family had lived a block east of the Canal—for four generations.

Tragedy struck in 1981: Scarpati’s husband, James, passed away from lung and bone cancer at 33 years old, leaving her with two kids to raise. Perhaps only a coincidence, her husband’s grandfather also died young of cancer.

And perhaps also only a coincidence, the Gowanus had long been a heavily polluted industrial area. The Canal was created in the 1860s to bring raw
w material to rapidly developing residential Brooklyn. Within years, toxic waste was in the water and on its banks.

“There were other people in the neighborhood who died around the same age, so we always wondered,” Scarpati said. For over 25 years she has wondered; no one has conducted a comprehensive study of residents’ health in the area.

It is impossible to conclusively link Scarpati’s death, or illness in general, to contamination, scientists say. There can be myriad possible factors. Even so, for residents who live near the Gowanus Canal, concerns about toxic hazards are certainly legitimate. Dangerous chemicals—usually measured in parts per million or billion—have been measured in parts per hundred here.

“It’s dangerous, let’s face it,” said Linda Mariano, a neighborhood resident since 1974 and member of the group, Friends and Residents Of the Greater Gowanus. “The federal government said it’s highly toxic,” she said, as she stood on the Carroll Street Bridge gagging on the putrid air. “There are dozens of contaminants that I can barely understand or even read, they’re so exotic sounding. But they are real. And we should not be living with this.”

They may not have to. After years of debate, the federal Environmental Protection Agency fhas inally declared the Canal a “Superfund” site. It’s a designation reserved for the nation’s most contaminated toxic waste sites.

Yet a careful examination by the NYCity News Service of thousands of pages of documents has illustrated just how entrenched the pollution actually is. As early as the 1880s, local residents have protested the contamination, sewage overflows and foul odors. Public records have also revealed a number of companies are potentially liable for clean-up costs. Some joined with developers and property owners to form a coalition opposed to Superfund and to support the city’s plan. Details also emerged about the city’s strategy to avoid a listing. And interviews with various stakeholders and scientists have illuminated the complex nature of a cleanup, potential health risks accompanying development plans, and competing visions for the Canal’s future.

For nearly a year, residents, politicians, businesspeople and others battled over the EPA’s consideration of the 1.8-mile waterway for a Superfund listing. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg opposed the Superfund process and instead the city presented its own alternative clean-up proposal. His administration said a listing would lower property values and delay or even kill ambitious development plans for the area.

EPA Regional Administrator Judith Enck has disputed some of the city’s claims and said the Superfund process was superior to the city’s alternative. “We have determined that it is the most efficient and comprehensive cleanup,” Enck said, estimating it would take 10-12 years. She also added that it took decades for the Canal to become polluted so a cleanup that lasts as long should be reasonable. “This is not going to happen overnight,” Enck said.

Although the Superfund cleanup will take years, and possibly decades, some local residents can hardly contain their excitement when envisioning a clean canal.

“If we were able to clean it up and restore the ecosystem—wow, what a great resource it could be for the community,” said Ludger Balan, an area resident and program director of the Urban Divers Estuary Conservancy, an environmental group. “Engaging people in coming out to the water—it could be a place you could bring your kids.”

Balan has long studied the Canal and sees more than just pollution when he scans the banks. He sees America’s growth, including when the nation’s first president visited the area. “The kind of history the Canal has, there would be plaques all along it: ‘Here’s where George Washington sailed across.’ ‘Here are the historic bridges,’” said Balan.

But that’s only a vision. “For our community, it’s been no more than a blight,” he said.

The prospect of economic development along the Canal has long been appealing. The Canal sits in a valley between the desirable neighborhoods of Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. For Mayor Bloomberg, whose legacy includes rezoning former industrial areas into a mix of residential and other uses and who has cheered new construction, the location is too tempting not to pursue.

The city claimed there was no time to waste and that polluters would pay sooner for a cleanup if the Canal was not on the Superfund list. But development critics argued that a comprehensive cleanup was required and that this would happen only under Superfund.

Officially the “Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980,” the Superfund process forces polluters to pay for cleanups, through lawsuits if necessary. If polluters cannot be found, then the EPA is able to use some of its own funds. The EPA estimates the total cost of the Gowanus Canal cleanup will be about $300-500 million.

The EPA’s announcement clears the way for the next stage of the process to begin. The EPA says it hopes to complete a Remedial Investigation and an Ecological and Risk Assessment by the end of the year.

Understanding how the Canal is polluted is key to finding a comprehensive solution. It is, however, complicated. At least three distinct areas have been polluted.

LAYERS OF POLLUTION

First is the water itself. The quality of the water has been tainted over time, due to accidental and intentional toxic spills. Complicating matters, due to its relatively low level, the Canal receives sewage overflow and street run-off that cascades from surrounding neighborhoods when it rains heavily. This is often the source of pathogens in the water and the material seen floating on its surface.

Second, pollution is present in the Canal banks and the land farther from the water, known as the “upland” areas. Over generations, the pollution—from direct spills or waste disposal—has spilled onto the land nearer Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, both of which are family neighborhoods. Also, because of the soil composition, some of the contaminants have seeped from the water into the land—sort of a two-way toxic street.

Third, at least six feet of sediment make up the bed beneath the water. Contaminants include coal tar sludge, heavy metals, PCBs, pesticides, and volatile organic compounds, all of which can be carcinogenic. Scientists also talk about a chemical “plume” that exists below the sediment. It contains some of the most hazardous toxins that possibly leach into the water. Roughly the top three feet of sediment are comprised of settled material. The bottom three feet consists of accumulated sediment that traces its contamination back over a century and a half.

One of the most spectacular incidents was a massive 1976 fire at the Patchogue Oil Terminal. It destroyed underground fuel tanks and resulted in about 2 million gallons of oil spilling into the Canal—at the time, the largest oil spill in the nation’s history.

But this sort of pollution wasn’t always there. Prior to the days of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, the Gowanus was a tidal inlet comprised of small creeks winding through fertile salt marshes. Before the 1860s, the Gowanus Creek was teeming with oysters, shrimp, soft-shell crab, lobsters, clams, a host of fish species, as well as deer and beavers that roamed the grasslands, and a remarkable array of bird species. But by the second half of the 19th century, an exploding population and the rise of manufacturing began rapidly destroying the animal and plant habitats.

In the late 1840s, the United States’ western border had just recently reached the Pacific Ocean and steamboats roared through bays, inlets, and rivers transporting materials for the country’s rapid expansion. To accommodate growing industrialization, in 1848 the New York State Legislature authorized the construction of a canal, two and a half miles long, secured by bulkheads that would allow ships to navigate in and out. By the 1860s the Canal was completed, and it quickly became the hub of Brooklyn’s maritime and commercial activity. Stone that was used to build up brownstone and limestone homes was brought in through the Gowanus.

Coal yards, sawmill and lumberyards, coal manufacturing gas plants, oil refineries, printing, paint and ink factories, cement makers, a tartar manufacturer, soap makers, chemical plants, machine shops and tanneries sprouted up along the embankments.

Within a few short decades neighborhood residents began to complain about pollution and odors. The contamination was compounded by a sewer system that deposited raw waste from surrounding neighborhoods directly into the canal and residents’ dumping of garbage in the streets and water.

In 1880 and 1885 the Canal was dredged to deepen the water, which had become so shallow from sewage and waste that ships were getting grounded in the muck.  As government officials and business owners fought over who would pay for canal cleanups and improvements, some local residents concluded that the Canal should be closed altogether. A commission was formed in the late 1880s to study the issue and then report to the mayor.

The pollution was the death knell for Gowanus’ sea and plant life. Though the state passed a bill making it illegal to dump industrial waste and refuse into waterways containing oyster beds in 1886, businesses flagrantly ignored the law.

WHO MAY BE RESPONSIBLE

Hundreds of companies and government entities have polluted the Gowanus Canal since it began hosting ships with industrial cargo in the 1860s. Some continue to pollute today.

The most notorious actors were three manufactured gas plants (MGPs), which spewed coal tar and chemicals into the water and onto the banks of the Canal. These plants produced fuel oil for gas street lamps and heaters during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Near the turn of the 20th century, the MGPs were acquired by Brooklyn Union Gas, which operated them into the 1960s. Eventually, through various mergers and acquisitions, National Grid, a multinational electricity and natural gas corporation, became the owner of the three sites. The company has been working with the state Department of Environmental Conservation through its “Brownfield” program to clean up the contaminated land so that it can be redeveloped for other uses.

Today, National Grid and others may be on the hook for cleaning up both their own sites and the Canal itself.

In 2007, National Grid’s predecessor company, KeySpan, prepared a report identifying the nature and location of contaminants, as well as many of the industrial companies that have existed along the Canal.

Karen Young, a spokeswoman for National Grid, said the company had supported the city’s alternative cleanup plan because it closely would have involved the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has already been working on a Gowanus cleanup project. Also the Army Corps has unique experience working in urban waterways around the country.

Bloomberg officials consistently cited the city’s partnership with National Grid as proof they could get responsible parties to voluntarily step forward to contribute funds for a cleanup, which was a linchpin of their plan. They argued that many years of litigation would delay the cleanup process as companies defend themselves against EPA lawsuits; this scenario has played out at other Superfund sites.

Caswell F. Holloway, the commissioner of the city Department of Environmental Protection and the mayor’s point man on the Gowanus issue, explained last year how the city would have gotten companies to voluntarily pay: “We’re saying ‘Look, you’re going to have to get involved in this one way or another-—either you’re going to be sued and get forced to pay or we can work out a plan, get it done more quickly, and you don’t have to go through the cost of litigation and so forth,’” he said.

The city hoped that it could leverage its relationship with the Army Corps to provide an added financial incentive for companies to step forward on their own. City officials wanted use federal matching funds from Congress through the Water Resources Development Act. They said this would provide 65 percent of the total cost, leaving only 35 percent to be paid by the city and liable companies, reducing the portion those companies will have to pay. However, the federal funds are not guaranteed.

State officials were not convinced. In an August letter to Holloway, Stuart F. Gruskin, the executive deputy commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which had originally requested the EPA consider the Gowanus for its Superfund list, seemed doubtful about the viability of the city’s plan. “There are many assumptions in the proposal, including among other things, a requirement for a very high degree of cooperation among responsible parties,” he wrote.

Holloway also pointed to National Grid as a party that could have signed a binding agreement with the EPA to clean the Canal, an agreement legally required by the alternative approach under which the city submitted its plan. Yet the company appeared to be open to working with the feds whether the Canal was listed or not.

“Given the positive interaction that we have had with the EPA and the openness towards all ideas that they have shown, we are confident that these same benefits can be achieved with either the traditional or alternative regulatory process,” Young said.

In its announcement designating the Canal a Superfund site, the EPA named a number of companies it is holding responsible for contamination (potentially responsible parties or PRPs), with more to be identified in the coming months. Walter Mugdan, the Superfund director for the region, said that an agreement has already been reached with National Grid. Other PRPs include the City of New York, the U.S. Navy, Con Ed, Chemtura Corporation, Rapid American Corporation, Brinks, Beazer East, and Cibro Petroleum Products.

ConEd, the major gas and electric utility, had reportedly spilled oil and gasoline from 14 underground storage tanks located just two blocks east of the canal. In 2002 it removed those tanks, which were the subject of at least six reported spills. Besides the reported incidents, regulators have found illegal levels of volatile organic compounds and lead in the soil and groundwater near the old tanks.

This location used to be closer to the water. Prior to the 1950s, the 1st Street Basin extended from the Canal eastward toward 3rd Avenue. It was filled in sometime between 1953 and 1965. It is unknown what contaminants might be in the landfill.

Bob McGee, a spokesman for ConEd, said that the company’s environmental department wasn’t aware of the 1st Street Basin. “We don’t feel we have a role based on where we were located and what we did,” he said before the EPA made the Superfund designation.

The EPA requested documents and information about two of ConEd’s facilities – the refueling and truck yard near 3rd Avenue and its Gowanus substation located at the intersection of 27th Street and 3rd Avenue. ConEd lawyers replied with a detailed, firmly worded response.

“Con Edison expressly denies any liability for contamination at the Gowanus Canal Site, or for any investigation, response or remediation costs for the Gowanus Canal Site,” they wrote.

So at least one potentially responsible party has begun to fulfill the Bloomberg administration’s prophecy of litigation. “Obviously, there are a lot of lawyers involved. Who knows where it’s going to go,” said McGee.

A slew of toxic chemicals have been detected in the soil surrounding Chemtura Corporation’s former plant near the mouth of the Canal. Chemtura acquired the property in 2005 when the previous owner, Witco Corporation, was merged into the larger organization. Today, Chemtura is a global corporation with $3.8 billion in annual sales. The Gowanus plant closed in 1999, but before that groundwater samples had shown elevated concentrations of benzene, acetone, lead and cadmium and other chemicals. A phone message left with Chemtura seeking comment was not returned.

In recent months, the EPA sent more than 20 letters notifying other companies that they may be on the hook to pay for the cleanup.

One of the recipients of those letters was Amerada Hess Corporation, a global oil and natural gas company, which has operated a petroleum terminal at the mouth of the Gowanus since 1977.

Since the mid-1980s, when the federal government began maintaining detailed databases of hazardous spills, the Hess terminal has had at least 15 reported spills, leaks or instances of contaminated soil, with over 1,200 gallons of diesel and fuel oil spilled or leaked either directly into the canal or onto the land. It also occupies the site of the former Patchogue Oil Terminal, where the 1976 fire spilled millions of gallons of oil.

In early 2008 Hess settled a lawsuit brought by the state DEC alleging violations at the facility’s tanks and bulkheads, by paying $1.1 million.

Lorrie Hecker, a spokeswoman for Hess, said in an e-mail that the company is cooperating with the EPA but declined to comment further.

Bayside Fuel Oil Depot Corp., a family-owned fuel company with one active terminal on the Canal, also received an EPA letter. Up until 2005 it had operated a similar facility near the head of the Canal, selling various types of fuel oil, kerosene and diesel. There is still a potent smell of petroleum and one can see a slick sheen on the surface of the water near Sackett Street where it was located. Government records indicate that Bayside has spilled at least 300 gallons of fuel oil at its two facilities since 1990.

Reached on the phone, an unidentified Bayside representative said that they are barred from speaking about the Canal by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Today, the area along the Canal remains partially industrial, but much less so than in the past. Busy cranes can still be seen scooping scrap metal from yards onto barges. The last large-scale industry that exists here is the cement business.

Ferrara Brothers Building Materials, one of the largest concrete providers in the city, has operated at the major bend in the Canal on the west side at Hoyt Street between 4th and 5th Street since the early 1970s.

The company was one of three that the environmental organization Riverkeeper threatened to sue in September after it allegedly observed Ferrara polluting the Canal. Riverkeeper says it observed and documented the company discharging liquid cement and stone into the water.

Ferrara Brothers greatly benefitted from the building boom of the last few years. It produces half a million cubic feet of concrete annually—about half comes from the Gowanus plant—for major projects in the city, including the new Mets’ Citi Field baseball stadium and the Second Avenue Subway.

As of April, a representative from Riverkeeper said that the state was taking enforcement actions against Ferrara Brothers and 107 Sixth Street LLC and 32-2nd-J Corp., which jointly operate a parking lot on their property.

The third company Riverkeeper was pursuing, 6th Street Iron and Metal, has taken substantial steps to clean its shoreline, said Joshua Verleun, an attorney and investigator for Riverkeeper. It moved large piles of metal further away from the edge of the canal and built a concrete wall along the edge of the property. Verleun has been patrolling the Gowanus on the organization’s boat at least nine months of the year since 2005, looking for violators of environmental laws.

Ferrara Brothers has been in the unkind spotlight before. In the early ’90s, The New York Times reported it was accused of making payoffs to the Colombo crime family in exchange for favors. Calls to Ferrara Brothers were not returned.

CONFLICTING INTERESTS?

Others involved with the Canal have connections that have not been previously disclosed before now. Some were prominent figures in the run-up to the Superfund decision.

Holloway, who had been the point man for the Bloomberg administration on the Gowanus issue over the last year, is also the son of a prominent luxury residential developer, Caswell F. Holloway, III. The younger Holloway has attended community meetings and has been heavily involved in developing the specifics of the city’s alternative clean-up plan. He is now the newly-appointed commissioner of the city DEP, but had no prior environmental experience, having previously worked at a corporate law firm before joining the mayor’s office.

The elder Holloway’s business, C.F. Holloway, III and Company, which builds fancy houses and small-scale developments outside Philadelphia, Penn., has no vested interest in property along the Canal. But critics who say Mayor Bloomberg opposes the Superfund listing simply because he wants to save private development like the Toll Brothers luxury residential project, may be suspect. Repeated requests for an interview with Holloway for this story were denied.

Owen Foote, the treasurer of the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club, a local nonprofit, had criticized the potential Superfund designation while at the same time serving as an assistant vice president with the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which has board members appointed by the mayor.

“Any and all statements made [regarding the Gowanus] have been in my personal time and not while employed by the EDC,” Foote said in an email message. “What I do for a living has no relation to my hobby,” he added.

The Gowanus Dredgers are not directly supported by the city government, but take funding and grants from private donors, including the Citizens Committee for New York City, which is supported by city government funds. Also, if Toll Brothers is able to develop a condominium project on the canal’s banks, it would build a boathouse where the Gowanus Dredgers could store its canoes. Officially, the club did not have a stance about the Superfund controversy.

Since April 2009, the city worked to avoid a Superfund listing, both publicly and behind the scenes. While developing its own clean-up plan, the city employed a high-powered Washington, D.C. lobbying firm to provide consulting and technical services. Dawson & Associates specializes in water and environmental issues and regulatory compliance.

At a June meeting between EPA and city officials, three Dawson employees—Stephen D. Luftig, Dr. Jonathan P. Deason and Lester Edelman—attended on behalf of the city. Each has extensive connections in Washington to the agencies and players that will decide if the Gowanus Canal gets listed as a Superfund site, in addition to a high-level of expertise on environmental regulation. Although the mayor’s office says the three were not involved in lobbying activities, on the company’s Web site, it says the “firm has access to leaders and opinion makers in Washington.”

Marc LaVorgna, a mayoral spokesman, said that Dawson & Associates was retained because of its substantive expertise with the Superfund process and the Water Resources Development Act. “They did not have a role in lobbying Washington officials,” he said. “City officials, including the Mayor, have made our case in Washington.” While the Superfund decision was pending, Mayor Bloomberg called EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson on at least one occasion.

HOW DANGEROUS ARE THE CHEMICALS?

In 1997, Ben Longstreth, a member of Baykeeper, an environmental group, placed a mound of oysters covered in netting in the Gowanus Canal, as part of a project to test the health of various New York waterways.

The oysters died within a week. “They were white—seemed like they had just been bleached and then it looked like a rat had clawed a hole in the net,” said Longstreth. “It seemed to be purely a toxicity issue.”

The oysters’ plight is a far cry from the days when they bloomed in the Gowanus Creek. Dutch travelers visiting the area in 1679-1680 deemed them the best in the country. “They are large and full, some of them not less than a foot long, and they grow sometimes ten, twelve and sixteen together,” Jasper Dankers and Peter Lyster marveled in their journal.

Over 300 years later, the Canal’s water and surrounding soil have been contaminated with numerous chemicals and thousands of people have lived in the immediate area surrounding the Canal.

“If somebody were to do a health survey, they would find that people who grew up in these environments all their lives and raise children in these environments have issues,” said Balan of Urban Divers. “And most people in my neighborhood, elders that I’ve met, who have come and died in my time, they’ve died of cancer.”

The city Department of Health does study cancer clusters, but doesn’t break down data specifically for the Gowanus area. The exact risks to human health are debated within the scientific community. Experts do agree that eating fish or swimming in the Canal is considered highly dangerous, but the health risks of simply living near the Canal are less clear. There has never been a comprehensive health study of the area around it.

James Corrigan, a biologist who has studied the Canal for over 30 years, stood on the Third Street Bridge looking down and yelling at some brave folks paddling a canoe. Earlier in the morning, he had been helping one of his graduate students collect samples to test water quality and thought it was important to warn those below. “If your hands were near the water you should go home and launder the clothing well and wash your hands well,” he said, leaning against the drawbridge railing. “What you’ll find in here is fecal contamination bacteria.”

Corrigan was talking about the pathogens found in floating raw sewage. It had rained the night before. Following heavy rains, the sewage overflow runs into the Canal and contact with the water can lead to staph and e.coli infections.

Additionally, Corrigan is concerned about effects of contaminants from a process known as biological amplification. Levels of toxic chemicals become more concentrated, and more toxic, as they make their way through the food chain. Not only is this a problem as it relates to eating fish from the Canal, but it is also an issue if people grow gardens nearby.

“Back in 1983 I had the soil in my garden tested, and, as a result grow only decorative plants in the ground. Many people told me I was paranoid,” wrote Christine Mackellar, a neighborhood resident for almost 30 years, in a letter to the EPA. “However, testing conducted in recent years by the people from The Earth Institute at Columbia University confirmed my worst nightmares concerning the levels of toxicity resident in this body of water and its uplands.

While Corrigan stresses the risk of eating vegetables grown on the land, Joshua Cheng, a geochemist at Brooklyn College, says the risk is greatest from working with the soil. If its contaminants can be ingested – by inhaling dust from a condo construction site or by rubbing an eye after planting gardenias – then the dirt surrounding the canal becomes highly dangerous to human health, he says.

Also, according to Cheng, hydrogen sulfide is one of the biggest risks to human health.  This is the pervasive rotten egg smell in areas of the Canal. Its primary source is human fecal matter in the water. Chronic exposure to low levels of hydrogen sulfide has been implicated in miscarriages and harm to reproductive health.  At high levels it can cause eye irritation, sore throat, cough and nausea.

Another concern is the combined effect of all of the chemicals.

“The health risks of individual compounds are well known,” said Cheng. “But the combination of many contaminants is a huge issue. I don’t think people really know what the risk is.”

While Cheng is more conservative about the health risks of living near the canal and more optimistic about the ability to clean the area, Corrigan is less so.

Given the long history of industrial contamination of the soil, he worries that pollutants are seeping into underground waterways—the land used to be a salt marsh. He argues that attempts to clean the canal will continually be thwarted if the contamination from surrounding soil is not addressed. “The surrounding soil hasn’t been adequately studied,” said Corrigan.

Beyond his concern for plants and vegetable gardens, Corrigan had a more disturbing thought.

“Let’s say everything went well,” he said of plans to develop Gowanus. “The buildings went up, the playgrounds went in, all the wonderful Venice in Brooklyn went in that they want to do. And then 10 or 15 years down the road, all of a sudden they’re getting children coming down with leukemia and all kinds of other medical problems, allergic reactions and everything else. And then they turn around and say the soil has been contaminated all along. Where are we? What went wrong?”

DREAMS OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Of course, there are residents who dream of redevelopment along the Canal and see it as the key to the area’s future. Almost all agree that such reinvestment is key to the region. So it’s ironic that the very thing that got the canal into the most trouble – development – is the same thing that might save it.

The Bloomberg administration argued that it made sense for developers to be responsible for cleaning up the land they wished to develop.

Before the EPA decision, the administration maintained that a Superfund designation would harm development prospects along the Gowanus Canal. For the past seven years, the administration has been attempting to rezone the land around the Canal from industrial to a mix of residential and other uses.

Critics accused the city of opposing the Superfund because of its cozy relationships with developers. “The city bent over backwards to try to make developers who want to develop on the Canal happy,” said Verleun of Riverkeeper.

However, the city recently received a letter from the EPA notifying it that it will be potentially responsible for paying a portion of a Superfund cleanup. The city ran multiple facilities along the banks of the Canal, including a Department of Sanitation Incinerator on Hamilton Avenue. This alone would give the city good reason to oppose a listing. Still, stalled development appears to be the driving motivation for Superfund opposition.

A listing could have “a significant negative impact” on Gowanus neighborhood rezoning, said a survey conducted by the Bloomberg administration. The 25-block rezoning was placed on hold pending the EPA’s decision. According to the city, stigma related to Superfund site designations will be an impediment to fast and efficient development.

Toll Brothers Inc., the luxury condo builder, had publicly considered backing out of its plans unless the city’s cleanup plan moves forward. David Von Spreckelsen, a Toll spokesman, said that people would have such little contact with the sediment it wouldn’t be worth the cost to remove it. “It’s a lofty goal to take that out, but what’s the purpose?” he said. Shortly after the EPA announced its decision, Toll Brothers followed through on its threat and pulled out.

During the two years preceding the EPA announcement, Toll and other builders around the nation had backed out of development projects because the financials didn’t pencil. It was one of the worst housing markets in modern U.S. history. Yet in this case Toll Brothers representatives said that a Superfund designation was reason enough to leave.

Other projects have also been stalled. Whole Foods, the gourmet supermarket, had been developing a site just one block from the Canal, but has since suspended construction and has no immediate plans to build the store.

A mixed-use project, Gowanus Village, which was to include townhouses and loft condos, fell through a year before the Superfund controversy erupted. Africa-Israel, U.S.A., which has a controlling stake in ownership of the land, is still seeking to sell the property. When asked if the company was concerned about liability under Superfund, Andy Ashwal, a senior developer, said it was premature for him to comment.

Studies do show that there is a significant stigma associated with a Superfund listing. They also show that this stigma has created real economic impacts to surrounding property values.

Hilary Sigman, a professor who specializes in environmental economics at Rutgers University, points out that to economists, there is a difference between perceived risk from pollution and actual risk. According to Sigman, if people believe property is worth less, then it is worth less.  “To what extent you can say this is Superfund designation or actual contamination is hard to separate,” she said.

Lindsay Wilhelm, a senior project manager for the city’s Economic Development Corporation, conceded that the stigma may not be directly caused by a Superfund designation. “There is a lot of question over whether property values actually drop because of Superfund listing or if it’s just the knowledge of contamination that makes property values drop,” she said.

Enck, of the EPA, directly addressed the suggestion that development would be impeded by the Superfund listing. Pro-development and business groups had claimed that developers within 3,000 feet of the Canal would have difficulty securing private financing and obtaining loans due to the stigma caused by a listing. “Unfortunately, there is already a stigma there,” Enck said. “I reject this as a reason why development can’t move forward.”

The Gowanus Canal is in some ways the exception to the rule because it’s a densely populated area. Most Superfund sites are in solely industrial areas. Another anomaly is that with most cleanups, the choice is usually Superfund or nothing. In this case there was an alternative approach proposed by the city. No major studies have been conducted that look at the stigma or development costs related to an alternative cleanup option.

“We are not saying under the alternative plan there is not going to be any effect on real property taxes,” said Francesco Brindisi, a chief economist with the EDC, before the EPA’s decision. “There is going to be an effect, except that it’s shorter than what the effect would be under the Superfund listing.”

Therein lies the assumption made by city officials advocating for their proposal: that the city’s clean-up plan will take less time than the Superfund process.

The EDC made the same assumption when it conducted an analysis of the tax impact of a Superfund designation. While the EDC says that the actual analysis itself is confidential, officials were willing to talk about the report’s methodology.

Given the two scenarios—Superfund and the city’s alternative proposal—they relied on an assumption that the city’s plan would allow development in five years and that the Superfund cleanup would allow development in eight to 15 years.

If the Canal is not listed, they said, the planned projects along the Canal alone will generate over $500 million in tax revenue. Assuming that a Superfund designation moves forward, the EDC estimates that it will cost the city between $120 million and $189 million in lost tax revenue, depending on the length of the cleanup.

These projections came during the worst recession since the great depression. Despite the economic conditions, the Bloomberg administration reasoned that tax revenues from development would begin much sooner than if the Canal was listed.

“We’re not painting doomsday scenarios where all investment is delayed forever under Superfund designation,” Brindisi said. “Clearly there is going to be investments in the future when it’s cleaned up and the city is eventually going to get some taxes related to those investments. The city would rather have those tax revenues earlier rather than later.”

ANOTHER ERA’S ALTERNATIVE PLAN

The debates about how to handle the Canal’s pollution problems actually parallel the discussion and arguments being made 100 years ago. A mere 20 years after the Canal’s completion, industrialization had already taken its toll.

The Gowanus Canal Commission, formed in 1889, in a report to the mayor, deemed the Canal detrimental to health and called for it to be permanently filled in.

In its few decades of existence, the Canal was already seen as The Brooklyn Eagle put it in 1902, “a festering pool of filth.” Close living quarters throughout the city hadn’t helped—instead, they encouraged disease. Outbreaks of smallpox, cholera, scarlet fever, dysentery, typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis, yellow fever, diptheria, and malaria plagued the city, and disproportionately affected areas like Gowanus, where there were particularly squalid living conditions.

By 1893, it was described as a disease-breeding, foul-smelling, open sewer, and a “disgrace to Brooklyn,” by The New York Times, a notable accolade for a city whose streets were becoming lined with trash, sewage, horse manure, rats, and rotting horse corpses.

Despite the commission’s report, business interests won—the canal was not closed. The city approved an alternative plan to create a flushing tunnel that would continually refresh the waterway by pushing sewage, trash and industrial waste out to sea.

In 1911, the 6,200 foot underground tunnel, equipped with a 7-foot propeller was revealed to great fanfare. The New York Times wrote: “In gala attire, all South Brooklyn took a holiday yesterday to celebrate its long-looked-for emancipation from the evil smells given forth by the murky waters of Gowanus Canal.”

A parade of decorated craft drifted through the waterway surrounded by factories bedecked with flags and cheering crowds. Nine-year-old Jeanne Haviland, who held the honor of “Miss Gowanus,” threw white lilies out into the putrid water, symbolizing its future purity.

While sewage overflows and industrial pollution continued over the next four decades, the flushing tunnel replaced the water in the canal at an astounding rate of five times a day, washing away evidence of its contamination and significantly decreasing the pungent odors of the Canal.

In the 1950s, the creation of the Gowanus Expressway signaled the end of maritime commerce for Gowanus.  In 1955, the Army Corps abandoned its periodic dredging, and six years later the flushing station broke. For decades, the layers of contaminated sediment at the bottom of the Canal and the raw sewage would fester.

In 2009, the Bloomberg administration announced plans to partially address the issue of combined sewer overflows, or CSOs, which have been an inherent infrastructure problem in the city for over 70 years. In October, Mayor Bloomberg announced that $150 million worth of work would soon begin.

Of that, $85 million will go toward enhancing the pumping station, $50 million will go toward expanding the flushing tunnel’s capacity, and $15 million would go toward dredging the 750 feet at the head of the Canal.

Early on in the clean-up debate, the city worried that this work would not be able to move forward if the Canal were to be designated a Superfund site. EPA officials quickly dispelled this notion.

The work will increase flushing rates by approximately 40 percent and will reduce the volume of sewage discharges by 34 percent. For that reason, some residents remain worried that if the sewage is only reduced by a third, then even while the Canal cleanup moves forward—regardless of the process—sewage discharges will continue to pollute the Canal. Add to that the fact that the EPA says a Superfund cleanup will focus on the contaminated sediments in the Canal—not the floating sewage and storm run-off.

Still, as the Superfund cleanup moves forward, all stakeholders will have to temper their expectations about how fast the process can move. Because of the need for a comprehensive cleanup and considering the multiple levels of government involved, the process will be inherently slow. Compromises will need to be made while keeping a long-term vision for the Gowanus and the community’s health at the forefront.

There are 530 calories, 18 grams of fat, and 2/3 of the daily value of cholesterol in a bacon, egg, and cheese from Dunkin Donuts.

Diana Blanco doesn’t care. Blanco, 19, a senior at Lehman High School in the Bronx, gets the breakfast sandwich four times a week.

“The reason I come here is because it’s really close,” said Blanco, as she gestured to her school’s main entrance steps right across the street. “I never eat school lunch.”

But having fast food restaurants so close to schools may pose health risks for students. A recent study by University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University found that California 9th graders who attend schools with a fast food restaurant one-tenth of a mile away are 5.2 percent more likely to be obese.

One in six South Bronx public high school students is obese, a number 30 percent higher than the rest of the borough and 42 percent higher than all of New York City, according to a June 2007 report by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Lehman High School, near the Westchester Square section of the southeast Bronx, stands near several fast food restaurants. Besides the Dunkin Donuts in front, 40 classrooms on the western wing overlook the track, football field and a White Castle.  A little bit further down the street, the crown of Burger King looms.

All students but freshmen are allowed to leave school grounds for lunch, said Delma Sosa, the community health organizer at Lehman.

“They have a short amount of time for lunch. So they run out and whatever is closest, they eat,” said Sosa, who works for Montefiore Medical Center and visits the school every Monday.

Chris Hernandez, 16, a freshman at Lehman High School, doesn’t like most of his school lunch options.

“I just buy cookies,” he said. So after school, he bounces from one fast food restaurant to another.

Students are more familiar with White Castle sliders (their miniature burgers) than Brussels sprouts and many other vegetables, said Sosa, who introduces new fruits and vegetables weekly to the 30 members of the school’s health club. Sosa says some students come for the free produce and others enjoy learning new healthy recipes.

“It’s not that they don’t want fruits and vegetables. They just don’t have the option,” Sosa said.

In 2008, the New York City Department of City Planning initiated the Supermarket Need Index (SNI) to determine the neighborhoods with the highest levels of diet-related diseases and the largest populations with limited opportunities to purchase fresh foods. Three million New Yorkers live in these areas, including parts of the South Bronx and the Williamsbridge, Wakefield and Pelham Parkway areas of the Central Bronx.

In many of these communities, healthy eating is too expensive.  At Lehman, 3,599 out of the 4,322 students qualify for free or reduced lunch, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

A 2008 report by the Public Health Association of New York City, says “calorie-for-calorie, unhealthy foods cost less than healthy ones. Since unhealthy food is cheaper, low-income families are often forced to choose items that can lead to health problems over time.”

The abundance of fast food restaurants, especially near schools, makes the problem worse, nutrition advocates say.

“They are predatory. They try to get them young. They purposely locate themselves next to schools,” said Amie Hamlin, Executive Director at the New York Coalition for Healthy School Food.

To help combat this type of marketing, Hamlin’s coalition helps children understand food labels.  A pilot program provides a plant-based lunch menu for students at Future Leaders Institute K-8, a charter school in Harlem. The program also includes nutritional education in the classroom and cooking demos for parents. Hamlin hopes other schools will adopt the program.

“We need to make an environment so all choices are healthy choices,” said Hamlin.

“Parents come up to me and say, “My child always reads the label now. If they see partially hydrogenated oil, they put it back on the shelf,” she said.

Schools can help students make better choices, said Nick Freudenberg, Director of the Public Health program at Hunter College.  They can implement “healthy eating zones,” which parallel the no-smoking zones from a generation ago, he said. These zones would be located around schools and community centers and not allow any vending machines with sugary drinks or any advertisements of unhealthy foods.

Many aging schools, Freudenberg noted, don’t fix broken water fountains. But fixing these fountains and adding more water coolers could help curb soda drinking.

At Lehman, Sosa is working to establish a New York City Green Cart right outside the school. The carts only sell fresh produce like whole carrots, bananas, apples and berries. Sosa hopes these healthy options will have more students forgoing White Castle’s onion rings (540 calories) and picking up an apple for less than a dollar (only 80 calories).

Changing the eating habits of this young, obese community will come about only by changing the culture, according to Hamlin.

“We have to find a way to make a healthy diet hip,” Hamlin said.