A sewage leak at a Bronx bus depot is worse than previously reported and possibly leaking into surrounding groundwater, the Daily News has learned.
Repair work on a smaller leak, first reported by The News earlier this month, has uncovered an incursion of groundwater into the sewage system at the Gun Hill Bus Depot — likely allowing human waste to flow into the marshy ground beneath the facility for months, according to a review by The News of internal MTA records and correspondence.
The MTA-owned sewage line linking the bus depot to the city-run sewer main has been in need of repair since early 2024, when the two pumps tasked with moving waste through the system failed.
Four days after an overflow caused the city’s Department of Environmental Protection to issue a violation on March 14, the MTA shut down water to the facility and began pumping sewage out of the system in order to replace the broken pumps and inspect the lines. The water was turned back on April 14.
During the 27 days the water was off, crews pumping out the sewage line removed approximately 300,000 gallons of liquid — four times more than the roughly 75,000 gallons the system was designed to be capable of holding, sources with knowledge of the repairs told The News.
An MTA spokesman confirmed that work crews had discovered “another source of water intrusion” in the sewage lines while pumping out “significant amounts of water” to replace the pumps. An investigation of the source of the excess water is underway, the spokesman said.
It is still not clear if the groundwater leaking into the sewage system means with certainty that sewage has been leaking out. But internal correspondence reviewed by The News indicates that an MTA engineer raised concerns in early March — even before the water was turned off at the facility — that sewage was leaking into the soil around the depot.
The Gun Hill Bus Depot, which sits astride Interstate 95 just south of Co-Op City, was built in 1989 atop an old dump — over the objection of community members worried about toxic waste. Prior to its use as a dump, the parcel of land now belonging to the MTA was a marsh along the now-subterranean Givan Creek, which empties into nearby Eastchester Bay.
Save the Sound, a regional non-profit that monitors water quality in the Long Island Sound watershed, has given the inner portion of Eastchester Bay — which includes the part nearest the depot — an “F” rating.
Elena Colon, a scientist with the organization who has studied that section of water, said she’s seen frequent algae blooms and other problems that could be linked to sewage and fertilizer runoff in the inner bay. But given that the inner bay is bounded by run-off promoting roadways and home to a handful of DEP sewage outlets, the problem is hard to pin on any one source.
The state Department of Environmental Conservation and the city DEP both cited the MTA earlier this month when an apparent overflow in the depot’s sewage ejection pit ran off into nearby storm drains, spilling what DEC inspectors estimated to be 50 gallons of waste into the bay.
On April 2 — the day following The News’ reporting on the 50-gallon spill — documents reviewed by The News show that Ramesh Ballie, the MTA’s vice president of bus facility maintenance, signed off on the rental of a temporary pump to restore functionality to the sewage line before the water could be turned back on.
But the sewage woes predate the violations, as does the work to repair them.
Documents reviewed by The News show that plans have been in the works to replace the broken pumps at the depot for nearly a year. A work order from May 2024 states that “both sewage ejection pumps in the outdoor sewage ejection pit at Gun Hill Depot are out of service and need to be replaced.” The work order requests the hiring of an outside firm “to pump down the sewage ejection pit … in order to install new pumps.”
A month later, in June 2024, a Google Street View car captured an image of a tanker truck from Republic Services at the location of the ejection pit at the corner of Bruner and Allerton Aves., as well as a van marked “Genuine Plumbing and Heating.” Staten Island-based Genuine is an MTA plumbing contractor and MTA records show Republic is the firm that was hired to transport sewage off-site to a treatment plant in Newark.
Despite the longstanding sewage troubles and the apparent ongoing incursion of groundwater into the system, sources at the facility said the water remained on Friday and the temporary pump remained in operation.
A spokesman for the city DEP told The News an inspector visited the facility last week and found the temporary pump to be in working order with “no sewer line blockages or manhole overflows” detected. The regulatory agency plans to revisit the depot in six weeks, when they expect permanent sewage pumps to have been installed.
Bronx Councilman Kevin Riley, a Democrat representing the district that includes the Gun Hill Depot, told The News he wasn’t surprised to learn the problem has persisted longer than initially thought.
“That area itself has been a problem for decades. There’s a lot of dumping over there. It gets really disgusting over there when it’s raining, a lot of flooding, and I don’t think the MTA has done a good job taking care of the area,” Riley said. “They own it and they have poorly, poorly taken care of that area.”
Riley said he’d first received a complaint earlier this year from a constituent who said sewage leaks had been happening at the depot for more than a year.
As previously reported, Riley said he’d had been briefed by the MTA in March, around the time regulators first caught wind of the sewage issues — but the councilman said he hasn’t yet been given an update.
With Chris Sommerfeldt
