A broken water main has left the Gun Hill Bus Depot in Baychester without running water or functional fire sprinklers since Saturday, as reported by the Daily News. This incident adds to a series of complications at the depot, which has been grappling with an ongoing sewage leak from a wastewater pipe believed to be seeping into the surrounding ground.
According to two sources familiar with the situation, water was observed bubbling up from what appeared to be a break beneath the depot’s parking lot late last week. Consequently, Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) crews shut off water to the facility on Saturday morning. In response, workers and staff at the depot are currently relying on portable toilets, while a continuous fire watch has been enacted until the fire sprinklers can be repressurized.
MTA spokesperson Laura Cala-Rauch confirmed the outage on Tuesday but refrained from providing specifics on the repair efforts. “We have crews on site daily who are working diligently to repair the issue as quickly as possible,” Cala-Rauch stated.
This marks the second occurrence this year in which employees at Gun Hill have had to adapt to chemical toilets due to water supply issues. Earlier this spring, the MTA shut off water for nearly four weeks to facilitate pump replacements in the sewage system, which had been nonoperational for almost a year. During that period, crews removed approximately four times the normal volume of water from the sewage system, suggesting a groundwater leak into the lines.
The MTA is still examining the potential groundwater intrusion within the sewage system, while the cause of the recent water main break remains unclear. The Gun Hill Bus Depot, located just south of Co-op City along Interstate 95, was established in 1989 despite community objections, on land that had previously served as a dump. Prior to its use as a landfill, the area was a marsh fed by the now-buried Givan Creek, flowing into nearby Eastchester Bay.