Staten Island’s Freshkills was once the world’s largest dump. In 2001, New York City shut it down and began the process of turning it into a park. A soccer field opened in 2013 and a bikeway in 2015. North Park, the first section allowing public access into the interior of the former landfill, opened last weekend.

The Problem

When NYC Parks Commissioner Robert Moses selected Freshkills as a landfill site after World War II, it was a wetland. The plan was to build housing on top of it after three years. But New York was growing fast, and all the new trash needed to go somewhere.

The site accepted as many as 29,000 tons of garbage daily, which consumed more acreage and created a mighty stink. After many lawsuits, the city began its transformation.

The Stakes

There are more than 2,600 municipal solid waste landfills in the US. Federal law requires maintenance of them even after they close, so they don’t pollute.

If the methane released from dumps isn’t purified, it rises into the atmosphere, where it’s a particularly potent greenhouse gas.

Why It’s Tricky

Garbage compacts, creating shifting surface conditions. In North Park, the trash has been sculpted into four hills arranged around a tidal creek open for kayaking. There are roughly six layers of soil, sand, and plastic lining on top of the garbage to prevent toxic leaks, including a vent layer, which moves any escaping landfill gas-a combination of carbon dioxide and methane-into pipes.

“The biggest challenge posed by developing our park on a former landfill is managing the expectations between what we as a community want,” says Mark Murphy, the administrator for Freshkills Park, “and what the land is realistically able to be used for.”

Why There’s Hope

More than 500 former US dumps have been turned into energy projects that transform landfill gas into fuel. Far beneath the 2,200 acres of Freshkills’ grass and soil, a gas collection system vacuums out the landfill gas and sends it to a purification plant, where it undergoes methane removal.

The city sells 1.5 million cubic feet of this treated biogas to the local utility, which distributes it to Staten Island homes for cooking and heating. (The average American household uses 70,000 cubic feet of natural gas annually.)

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

A 33-year-old man was arrested in New York City on Monday after he jumped into a reflecting pool at the 9/11 Memorial, the New York Post reported. The incident happened around 1:30 p.m. when a Port Authority cop spotted the man leaping into one of the two-tiered reflecting pools at the memorial.

In a video of the incident that has gone viral, the man was seen lying in the 18-inch deep water in the pool’s central basin after walking slowly towards it. He then slowly moved closer to the center and slid head-first into the pool. The man injured his leg and back in the incident and was taken to the hospital for non-life-threatening injuries.

Here’s the video:

An Inadequate Jumped into the 9/11 Memorial Pool in #NewYork

A not entirely balanced 33-year-old #Manhattan resident decided to cool off and swim in the pool, which was built on the site of the #WorldTradeCenter towers destroyed in 2001.

Follow Me For More Update pic.twitter.com/P8JdpTuPCC

— __kaput__ (@__kaput__) October 11, 2023

The water was turned off immediately after the incident, and chains were erected around the pool to deter anyone else from jumping in.

“We saw the firefighters and emergency personnel come down the escalator as we were into the memorial. They said everything’s fine, but they were coming in and going to a, like, back room, and we figured that down there was where they could access,” tourist Lisa Bellow told CBS News. 

The man identified as Jeffrey Hernandez was arrested and charged with criminal mischief and trespassing after the terrifying jump, a New York Police Department (NYPD) spokesperson confirmed on Tuesday.

A spokesperson for the Port Authority described him as an “apparently emotionally disturbed person,” as per NBC News. He will also be getting a mental evaluation and criminal charges might include trespassing. The motivation behind the man’s actions is still unknown at this time.

Notably, the pool is one of two at the memorial, both in the footprints of the Twin Towers that fell during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. According to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum website, each pool descends 30 feet into a basin and drops 20 more feet into a “central void.” 

The Memorial was completed and opened on September 11, 2011, ten years after the attacks that destroyed the original towers. 

New York City is collapsing beneath the weight of its own city and among the first areas to be affected by such a tragedy are LaGuardia Airport, Arthur Ashe Stadium and Coney Island, according to a recent NASA report. The five boroughs of New York City are sinking more quickly than the city as a whole, which is sinking at a rate of 1.6 millimetres annually, according to research conducted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Rutgers University.

According to research published in Science Advances, from 2016 to 2023, the US Open Venue- Arthur Ashe Stadium and runways at LaGuardia airport saw the most sinking, lowering at rates of 3.7 and 4.6 millimetres per year, respectively. These two locations may have sunk the fastest since they were both constructed over previous landfills.

Further, the threat presented by the city’s sinking is being worsened by increasing sea levels. Hurricanes and extratropical storms have caused coastal flooding in the city, among other problems. One of the examples is Superstorm Sandy of 2012 which devastated the city.

“Protecting coastal populations and assets from coastal flooding is an ongoing challenge for New York City. The combined effect of natural sea level variations and destructive storms is being increasingly exacerbated by ongoing sea level rise,” the researchers wrote in the report.

NASA research also added that Interstate 78, which passes through the Holland Tunnel that connects Manhattan to New Jersey, is also sinking at nearly double the rate of the rest of the city. The southern half of Governors Island, Midland and South Beach in Staten Island and Arverne by the Sea, a coastal neighbourhood in southern Queens are also sinking faster.

The report was released after the United States Geological Survey discovered earlier this year that the New York metropolis’s more than 1 million buildings weigh close to 1.7 trillion pounds and that the city was gradually collapsing under its own weight. The report stated that the city was sinking at the rate of 1-2 millilitres per year. The researchers arrived at the result by comparing the geology beneath the city to satellite data showing its footprint.

“New York faces significant challenges from flood hazard; the threat of sea level rise is 3 to 4 times higher than the global average along the Atlantic coast of North America… A deeply concentrated population of 8.4 million people faces varying degrees of hazard from inundation in New York City,” lead researcher and geologist Tom Parsons of the United States Geological Survey wrote in the report in May.

The team of researchers calculated the cumulative mass of the more than 1 million buildings in New York City, which worked out to be 764,000,000,000 kilograms or 1.68 trillion pounds. They divided the city into a grid of 100-by-100-metre squares and converted building mass to downward pressure by factoring in gravity’s pull. Increased urbanisation, including the draining and pumping of groundwater, could only add to New York’s subsidence problem, the researchers warned earlier.