When Marcos and Jesus Perez feel like cooling off in the summer, it's a quick trip for them to the nearest water. They walk down the steep bricked hill from their West Ferry Street neighborhood and cross the massive lift bridge to Broderick Park, where they dive off a breakwater and into the still waters of the Black Rock Channel. "It's a little cold today," said Jesus, at 14, a year older than his brother, after a plunge into the canal on a coolish August day.
Besides being a little cold, swimming in the canal is a little risky. Across from where they swim is Combined Sewer Overflow No. 12 coming out of the canal wall.
The Albany Street drain overflows an estimated 56 times a year during rains or snowfall, according to studies done for the Buffalo Sewer Authority, spewing 143 million gallons of untreated sewage and storm water into the canal. There are nine combined sewers that overflow in times of heavy rain into the Black Rock Channel. These overflow sewers send nearly a billion gallons of sewage and storm water into the channel each year when the sewer system overflows.
Tests continually show the channel has high levels of fecal coliform, a bacterium from the intestines of humans and other warm-blooded animals that often indicates more serious pathogens. But New York does not require standards on the channel for fecal coliform, because the Black Rock Channel, the Buffalo River, Erie Basin Marina and parts of Cazenovia Creek are all designated Class C waterways by New York State. In the state's view, a Class C waterway equals no "primary contact uses," meaning there is no swimming in any of those waterways, including the Black Rock Channel.
But no one has ever told that to the Perez brothers, and there are no signs warning them of the potential dangers. "We never get sick," Jesus Perez said of their trips to the Black Rock swimming hole.
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