Community Corner

Would You Swim in East River Water?

This article was written by Matt Hampton.

Is the water that separates lofty Manhattan from filthy Brooklyn and Queens suitable for swimming? 

As pointed out by the New York Daily News today, a new proposal for a floating pool in Brooklyn Bridge Park could allow scores of New Yorkers to answer that very question for themselves. 

The pool's filtration system, proposed in an ongoing Kickstarter campaign, would float in East River water.

If it works, the project could progress to the next stage, creating an actual $15 million pool using tiles named by Kickstarter backers. 

The campaign, according to its creators, started with a question few have been brave enough to postulate: "instead of trying to clean the entire river, what if you started by just cleaning a small piece of it?"

The goal is to raise $250,000, and the water in +Pool, as the project is called, would be cleaned by a "layered filtration" system that can clean half a million gallons of river water per day, the project managers claim. 

Just how that filtration system works — or if it will work — is still a subject for debate.

So don't break out the beach towels just yet. With less than three days to go, the campaign is still around $50,000 short of its goal. 

Would you swim in this thing or what? Let us know in the comments. 


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