Newtown Creek, a 3.5-mile long tributary of the East River, is an estuary that forms part of the border between the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, in New York City. Channelization made it one of the most heavily used bodies of water in the Port of New York and New Jersey and thus one of the most polluted industrial sites in the US, containing years of discarded toxins, an estimated 30,000,000 US gallons of spilled oil, including the Greenpoint oil spill, raw sewage from New York City’s sewer system, and other accumulation from a total of 1,491 sites.
Newtown Creek was proposed as a potential Superfund site in September 2009, and received that designation on September 27, 2010.