The Metropolitan Airport by Nicholas Dagen Bloom;

Author:Nicholas Dagen Bloom;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)
Published: 2015-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 23. The tank farm at JFK that fueled planes but also polluted sections of Jamaica Bay, 1973. Arthur Tress, Documerica Collection, National Archives.

Those lucrative tank farms also leaked. Even worse, JFK officials looked the other way as employees nonchalantly dumped petroleum by-products into the ground and waterways. A longtime manager confessed in the 1990s, “Years ago, when aviation fuel was very cheap, once we’d filtered out water, we just throw out the waste fuel—the sump. The product was so cheap, and the volume so large, that it just didn’t pay to save it.” The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo of 1973, designed to punish the West for its support of Israel, initiated a worldwide economic retrenchment. When jet fuel went from 13 cents to 40 cents a gallon, the staff “started recovering oil and selling it.”11 The cumulative pollution, however, became too obvious to hide. Polluted creeks near the airport, for instance, earned a reputation for their sterility: “The area adjacent to JFK airport in the southwest corner contained excessive amounts of petro-chemical discharge and noxious sediment” that rendered the area sterile and anaerobic and thus reduced “bottom organisms used as waterfowl food.”12 Naturalists found that crabs and oysters had largely disappeared.13 Extensive oil around houses in Howard Beach came to light when “it was noticed that the pilings supporting the homes were saturated with the jet fuel, requiring the hosing down of the pilings with high-pressure hoses.”14

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