Geospatial Analysis of Wastewater Release Events in New York State: Developing Environmental Justice Indices Based on RRV Metrics - TI

The state of New York has some of the most outdated wastewater infrastructure in the nation. Each year, this contributes to thousands of wastewater release events, most of which are caused by precipitation. High instances of wastewater discharges can affect not only environmental health but also human health. Wastewater can enter local water bodies through runoff and deplete water quality, in turn killing off aquatic species and preventing humans from enjoying the domestic and recreational benefits that usually come with such water resources. The Sewage Pollution Right to Know (SPRTK) Act was passed in 2013, effectively making New York the 13th state to require release events to be reported to the public. Though this data is now available, it is disorganized and difficult to interpret, likely due to the fact that individual municipalities report events and have different methods of entering information. Wastewater release data must be readily interpretable to serve any use to the public. The aims of this study are to (1) provide clear and revised release event data to the public, (2) evaluate the wastewater infrastructure of New York and pinpoint areas of improvement, and (3) identify any potential racial and/or economic disparities with respect to proximity to areas of high release occurrences. There are limited studies that adopt these initiatives, and it will be crucial to address these issues moving forward. Publicly available data on wastewater release events from 2017 to 2024 were cleaned, organized, and aggregated in several manners to both temporally and geospatially evaluate New York state with respect to its wastewater infrastructure. This was done on the basis of reliability, resilience and vulnerability. Findings showed the Western New York region, specifically Erie, to be particularly susceptible to release events, while the Mid-Hudson region is particularly vulnerable to high discharge volumes due to the high onset of flooding as a result of hilly terrain. Significant funding must be allocated to such areas to minimize the negative impacts that wastewater discharge has on them. Once adequate remediative action is applied to this infrastructural sector, New York will hopefully reap the benefits of elevated health standards.