On weekday mornings, heavy delivery trucks trundle down one Red Hook street as often as once every minute. Another spot along the same street can see as many as 1,200 trucks in a single day. That’s according to a new investigation by Consumer Reports on the impact of Amazon warehouses and other e-commerce facilities on the Brooklyn neighborhood.
Working with community members, the investigators placed traffic cameras, air quality sensors and noise-level meters on rooftops and balconies to gauge the health and safety risks of delivery truck traffic. They collected data from last September up through April, then studied it for trends.
They found that truck routes to and from the neighborhood’s half-dozen current and future e-commerce warehouses bordered schools, parks and the Red Hook Houses, the city’s largest New York City Housing Authority complex — and that air pollution in those areas routinely crosses the Environmental Protection Agency’s threshold for unsafe conditions for vulnerable people.
“No one’s surprised the traffic numbers are high or that air quality is a certain way,” said Kaveh Waddell, deputy editor for Consumer Reports’s Digital Lab, who led the investigation. “But being able to say something about the frequency or the volume of some of these dynamics makes a difference.”
Air quality has improved citywide in the last decade, according to data collected by the health department. But NYC’s official network of air quality sensors excludes Red Hook, a mostly Black and Latino neighborhood with a poverty level more than double the citywide tally, according to Census data.
Red Hook has a long history of environmental injustices, linked to its industrial past and coastal location. It was hit hard by Hurricane Sandy, and most of its local sports complex was shuttered in 2021 due to lead contamination. Numerous e-commerce warehouses have popped up there in recent years, including two Amazon facilities currently in operation. A third,…
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