Daylighting Tibbetts Brook

At the southern end of Van Cortlandt Lake, Tibbetts Brook enters the Broadway sewer at a rate of 4 to 5 million gallons of water per day. And that’s on a dry day! This water is then treated, for no reason, at the Wards Island Stormwater Treatment Plant. Often when it rains, the combination of sewage, street runoff and the brook enters the combined sewer, bypassing the treatment plant and flowing directly into the Harlem River. This one Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO), WI-056, connected to the Broadway sewer makes up more than half of the CSO water entering the Harlem River. Daylighting will remove this clean water from the sewer and help to reduce CSO occurrences on the Harlem River and help with flooding issues along Broadway and other areas of the Tibbetts Brook Watershed.

The Friends of Van Cortlandt Park joined forces with the Bronx Council for Environmental Quality to create a Coalition for the Daylighting of Tibbetts Brook in 2017 and the Coalition continues to grow. If your group would like to sign on please email christina@vancortlandt.org. Individuals may add their support by signing our online Free Tibbetts Brook petition.

As the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance, we will continue to advocate for Daylighting of Tibbetts Brook which is a project in the 2034 Master Plan for Van Cortlandt Park. VCPA is working closely with the NYC Parks, NYC Department of Environmental Protection and the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation to make this project a reality and hope to have some project updates soon.

Check out this short video from BronxNet to learn more about daylighting of Tibbetts Brook.