Just The Thought Of Dust Makes Me Want To Vacuum

Things you wish they could have waited a day or two to report include:

As many as 300,000 people could become ill because of World Trade Center dust, says a published report.

Discover magazine quotes Dr. Thomas Cahill, professor of physics and atmospheric science at the University of California at Davis, as saying contaminated air from the Twin Towers collapse extended “more than a mile from Ground Zero, far outside the safety zones established by the EPA.”

Congestion Pricing . . . Potentially Deadly?

You’re a New Yorker — so you stand next to people . . . get real — it’s sink or swim here:

A crowded subway platform and hundreds of aggressive commuters “pushing and shoving” their way on and off trains was a deadly combination for a 63-year-old woman who fell to the tracks, hit her head and died from her injuries.

Earlier this month, the woman’s daughter filed a lawsuit against the city and the MTA, blaming them for not doing enough to protect her mother.

On May 22, 2006, Maria Navarro, who walked with the help of a cane, exited a train at the Roosevelt Avenue-74th Street subway station in Jackson Heights, Queens, and was overcome by the crush of people.

She fell to the tracks and died a month later.

The Subway’s Not-So-Fresh Feeling

The MTA tries to shake the funk off of what has previously stunk:

It smelled like death warmed over to some straphangers. To others, it was rancid excrement.

That stank crept from an elevator at Herald Square. The summer heat acted as an odor adhesive, keeping the foulness lingering well after people were out of the stink zone.

The dirty elevator solicited complaints throughout the week, and it has won worst-smelling elevator from a disabled riders group two years in a row. Luckily for straphangers, a Transit employee with high-powered disinfectant mopped out most of the smell Thursday, but the war on odorous subway stations is not over.

. . .

Cleanliness is a serious subject for New York City Transit, and as part of a new customer service initiative, about 350 more cleaners will be on the roster by fall to keep stations fresher, trains cleaner and platforms and tracks clearer and safer. They’ll also be able to respond to specific stenches faster.

Still, why the big stink at Herald Square and at stations throughout the system? Stations get funky for several reasons, said Bill Henderson who hears rider complaints as head of the MTA’s Permanent Citizens Advisory Council.

“Sometimes the cause is a broken sewer line,” he said. “It could also be something on the surface.”

And unfortunately, it takes a little more than a few spritzes of air freshener, sometimes a lot more. A sewer stank is sometimes caused by construction accidents, and the stink may slowly dissipate even after a cracked line is patched.

Spewing Out Waste Water When The Rain Comes, The Plant Gives Out And Lets It All Run . . .

. . . it’s not hard, not hard to reach, then you get E. coli at Rockaway Beach:

Besides flooding subways, the wild downpour this week provided a disconcerting glimpse into one of New York’s dirtiest environmental secrets: heavy rain regularly overwhelms the city’s vast sewage system and pushes polluted water into places it is not supposed to go.

New York has a storm water drainage system that was linked many years ago to the same pipes that carry wastes from homes and businesses. That, combined with the ever-expanding layer of asphalt and concrete that keeps rain from soaking into the ground, means that whenever it storms, some of the storm water and sewage in the 6,000 miles of sewer pipe in the city start to back up.

When that happens, millions of gallons of rainwater mixed with raw sewage are routed away from the city’s 14 sewage plants and toward a web of underground pipes that empty directly into the East River, the Hudson River and New York Harbor.

The backups could also prevent water from being drained from subway tunnels.

These events — called combined sewer overflows — have been recognized as a major environmental problem for decades. The city has been dealing with the issue in response to orders from the state and the federal government, but still has a long way to go.

. . .

On a dry day, the Department of Environmental Protection, which runs the system, normally treats about 1.4 billion gallons of sewage at 14 plants spread throughout the city. But because storm water runoff flows through the same pipes, each plant has been equipped with enough capacity to handle double its ordinary load on rainy days.

But as little as a tenth of an inch of rain coming very quickly can overload that system. A series of devices called regulators that are buried deep in the ground automatically respond to pressure from the extra water by diverting the flow away from the treatment plants to nearly 460 registered sewage outflows that empty directly into the city’s rivers and waterways.

New York has a long history of using its waterways as dumps. Until the late 1980s, the city routinely poured untreated sewage into the harbor; in 1992, it became the last city in the country to halt the practice of dumping sewage sludge at sea.

Like, ew.

Each Of Us Just Basically Does Our Own Thing Around Here

The roommates assumed that the new girl just loved watching television:

The boyfriend had a “very possessive” streak that “stressed out” McCallum, who recently moved into the apartment after her sophomore year at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., the sources said.

She was last seen Thursday morning by four friends who had slept over in the eighth-floor apartment at 4 Washington Square Village after a party to celebrate her father’s wedding, one of the friends told The Post.

The friend said McCallum was supposed to join them at the beach Thursday, but backed out to help her father prepare for his honeymoon.

Investigators believe the unidentified boyfriend confronted her later that day about not being invited to the party.

One of the roommates saw him washing his hands in the kitchen that night, which is about the time police believed she was murdered. He then left abruptly.

The two roommates told police they hadn’t seen McCallum for days, but apparently never tried to enter her locked room, even though the TV was playing.

On Sunday, the apartment began to smell and the roommates called the super, who notified police. Cops entered from a fire escape, and found her decomposing body wrapped in a sheet on the floor between her bed and a wall. Police said there was no sign of drugs or forced entry.