BATWorks Panel Examines Sunset Park’s Wastewater Challenge

On September 1, BATWorks, the climate innovation hub under development at Brooklyn Army Terminal, hosted a panel on wastewater and aging infrastructure in New York City. The panel brought together engineers, regulators, startups, and investors to ask: when it rains, where does all the water go and can the system handle it?

The answer, according to the panel, is no. Oftentimes, it no longer takes a record storm to overwhelm the system.In Sunset Park, sometimes it takes just a quarter inch of rain.

New York’s sewer system was not designed for the kind of rain the city gets now. When the system can’t handle the amount of rain, the city has to release stormwater, along with untreated sewage, directly into local waterways like the East River — something called a “combined sewer overflow.” At Owls Head, the wastewater treatment facility that serves Sunset Park along the Shore Parkway, even routine storms can trigger one.

“A quarter of an inch, here in Owls Head, they can handle it,” said Evelyn Powers, executive director of the Interstate Environmental Commission. “Over that, it can’t.”

That much rain, according to the National Weather Service, is “moderate rain,” but not a downpour. The problem is that, with climate change, the city sees more intense rainstorms than ever. On paper, 2025 was a dry year for New York City, as Central Park recorded rainfall well below the 30-year average. But ask most New Yorkers and they will say the city is wetter than ever. Summers are regularly marked by waterfalls in subway stations and streets turned into rivers. That’s because the intensity of storms has increased and more water is falling in a short amount of time. That intensity is straining an already undersized system, according to the panel.

“There’s no quarter-inch storm anymore,” Powers said. “Three inches is nothing, and things are flowing down the street.”

BATWorks is backed by the city’s Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) and led by the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI), a nonprofit that helps launch and scale clean-tech startups. BATWorks promises to house hundreds of clean-tech jobs and workforce training programs. The September 1 panel is part of a series BATWorks is using to evaluate six potential focus areas including: building decarbonization, construction innovation, maritime decarbonization, batteries & energy storage, and zero emissions trucking. Whether water and wastewater will be a focus for them “is still very much an open question,” said Alex Mitchell, LACI's senior vice president of BATWorks. Breakout groups at the panel highlighted the opportunities for the BATWorks waterfront to pilot wastewater technologies but raised concerns too: “most work in the space revolves around infrastructure deployment, the relatively small numbers of innovators working in this space, and a less clear pathway to local job creation” compared to some of the other sectors under consideration, Mitchell said.

The panel was moderated by Shino Tanikawa, executive director of the NYC Soil & Water Conservation District, and brought together Powers, Selman Mujovic, CEO of the pollutant-destroying startup Purafide, Edmund Lee, vice president and key account lead with Arcadis, and Tom Ferguson, managing partner at Burnt Island Ventures.

In addition to discussing the city’s water infrastructure, the panel discussed the importance of recognizing water as a resource.

“We don’t call wastewater treatment plants wastewater treatment plants here in New York City. We call them water resource recovery facilities! So we’re starting to change the mindset that there is no such thing as wastewater. Water is a resource, whether it’s got stuff in it or not,” Tanikawa said.

Lee went on to discuss some of the opportunities that exist with wastewater and described a “paradigm shift” in how experts view it. The panel also discussed the large role parks and landscaping, particularly along waterfronts, can play in reducing overflows by soaking up rainwater before it reaches the sewer system.

Tanikawa finished by emphasizing the importance of community involvement in large projects like waterfront parks. In particular, she pointed to a pattern she has seen play out across the city: residents help shape a waterfront redevelopment, the project succeeds, and property values rise until the very community that supported its development can no longer afford to stay.

“Communities may have been at the table designing the space, but it wasn’t enough,” she said. “It led to green gentrification. Those very people who provided input into what the park should look like got displaced.”

That observation is poignant given that the host of the panel was BATWorks. UPROSE, the Sunset Park-based environmental justice group, has publicly opposed the BATWorks development at Brooklyn Army Terminal, saying it risks doing exactly what Tanikawa described: bringing investment to the neighborhood without protecting the people already here.