Showered In Mystery

Crazed ex? Pissed off creditor? No one knows:

Residents of a block in Boerum Hill have known for months that rogue urinators were defiling their street, but they never had the proof to convince local police of a scatological conspiracy on Dean Street — until now.

A two-liter container of human urine, complete with syringes bobbing in the waste, was found Sunday morning between Bond and Nevins streets — and the repulsive find was finally enough to prove to cops that residents were being tormented by micturating hellions and not merely dogs with overactive bladders.

“It’s absolutely gross,” said Joseph Samulski, who had the misfortune of finding the container on his front steps. “I don’t even know how you could accumulate that much urine.”

But on the brighter side, “It was the first time we were able to establish what we’ve been saying on our block — that someone has been pouring urine on cars.”

. . .

The pissing match broke out on the day of the block party last September, when several people emerged from their homes near the Nevins Street end of the block to encounter an overpowering stench of liquid waste on the street and in one man’s pickup truck.

Since then, that pickup truck has been showered at least two other times.

“Thankfully, whenever it happened, my truck needed a good washing anyway,” said good sport Kevin McGowan.

Because If They Can Spend $3 Billion On A Water Filtration Plant . . .

Let’s see — drag racing at a high rate of speed, being ejected from the back seat . . . so what were those concrete bollards doing there anyway? You tell me:

A drag race on a Charleston service road led to the crash that killed an Annadale teenager, prosecutors contend.

But the father of the victim, Michelle Arout, is seeking to spread the blame to the city and a number of its agencies.

John Arout maintains that two concrete-filled steel stanchions, or bollards, guarding a fire hydrant at the crash site negated the hydrant’s built-in “breakaway” design feature and figured in his daughter’s death.

The 2003 Honda in which Miss Arout was riding collided at a high rate of speed with a Ford Mustang, then slammed into one or both bollards and split in two.

The 17-year-old was ejected from the back seat and suffered fatal injuries in the July 23 crash on Veterans Road West near Bricktown Centre.

Arout, who is administrator of his daughter’s estate, seeks unspecified monetary damages in the civil action, recently filed in state Supreme Court, St. George.

Named as defendants are the city and its Environmental Protection, Transportation and Fire departments. . . .

That Works Out To $11.11 A Day

If you found yourself without power for, I don’t know, like nine days during the summer, know that you will be compensated at a rate significantly below that of jury duty:

Customers in western Queens can expect to receive about $100 each from Consolidated Edison as compensation for having to sweat through nine days without power in July 2006, according to officials who have been briefed on the settlement.

The approval of the settlement, which the utility proposed several weeks ago and which will total $17 million, was to be announced at a news conference on Thursday.

Customers will receive a credit on their monthly bill, which will also include a brief apology from the company.

Coordinate Message!

As Rev. Sharpton gets geared up for a verdict in the Sean Bell case it occurs to me that it might not be the best time to remind people about the WWII-themed Operation Torch program, what with its submachine guns and all:

NYPD cops armed with rifles, submachine guns, body armor and bomb-sniffing dogs will start patrolling the city’s subways on Thursday — a first for mass transit in the United States.

Teams of six officers and a dog will patrol subway platforms and trains in 12-hour shifts.

The TORCH teams are being paid for by $151 million from the feds announced in February.

Similarly equipped NYPD units, known as Hercules teams, have patrolled Wall Street and other aboveground icons as part of the NYPD response to the World Trade Center attacks.

“The TORCH teams are Hercules teams with a MetroCard,” a police source said.

“Though Nothing Has Been Proved”

But really, when you throw around figures like $545 million for trees and $410 million for biometric punch clocks, $3 billion doesn’t seem like such a bad deal:

In a city of big projects, it ranks among the biggest. New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection is building one of the largest water filtration plants in the world in a 10-story-deep hole it blasted out of bedrock in the Bronx. When completed in 2012, the plant, capable of purifying 300 million gallons of water a day, will be buried there.

But the plant, which will filter water from the Croton watershed in Westchester County, is no Bronx treasure chest. Even as construction moves forward, questions about soaring costs and delays continue to plague the project.

The cost is now estimated at nearly $3 billion, a huge jump from the $660 million city officials estimated when they announced an audacious plan in 1998 to build the plant below the surface of Van Cortlandt Park. They vowed that the park would be made as good as new, even if that meant replacing whatever was lost during construction. They now plan to rebuild a driving range on top of the buried plant.

Some officials and others fear the final tab could climb even higher, and in the process push up water rates. On April 1, the city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., announced that he was starting an independent audit to determine whether city officials understated the original price, to get the plant built in the Bronx rather than Westchester. Besides scrutinizing the complicated accounting, Mr. Thompson will have to sort through accusations by some residents and officials of deliberate distortions of costs, and intimations that the project has been tainted by mob influence, though nothing has been proved.

. . .

The city was forced to build the plant because water from the Croton watershed did not meet federal standards for safety and purity. Although the Croton system can supply nearly 30 percent of the city’s 1.1 billion gallons a day of drinking water, generally it supplies just 10 percent, mostly in the Bronx and northern Manhattan. The rest of the city’s water comes from the Catskill Mountains and the Delaware River, and is so clean that the city last year won a 10-year exemption from federal regulations requiring that all surface drinking water be filtered.

Opponents of the Bronx plant have also expressed concern about the federal indictment in February of a key manager for the Schiavone Construction Company, which was the principal contractor responsible for digging the pit and putting in the water tunnels. The company’s offices were raided by federal agents, who seized files, and the manager, Anthony Delvescovo, was charged with having committed extortion beginning in February 2005 — around the time that work was beginning on the Croton project.

Location Scout: Van Cortlandt Park.