It’s all about the clout.
The woman who posted a video of herself diving off a boat into the Hudson River – an EPA Superfund site due to toxic materials dumped there for decades – near the Statue of Liberty said she was thinking about creating some popular content and not about the potential filthiness of the river.
“I was really excited that I finally came to the Statue of Liberty,” Donna Paysepar said in a follow-up TikTok. “I had never been up that close and I’m like, ‘You know what? YOLO.’ And I wasn’t thinking about the water, and I was just like, ‘I want to take a cool TikTok jumping in the water, swimming in front of the statue that’s so famous’ because, you know, I want to be famous.”
@chef_dp 💜💜💜💜this feels like a dream ##nyc ##newyork ##persian ##statueofliberty ##boat ##ellisisland ##coneyisland ##manhattan
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GORDON RAMSAY IS MERCILESSLY ROASTING HOME COOKS ON TIKTOK, AND HIS OWN DAUGHTER ISN’T EVEN SAFE
It worked, sort of. The 20-year-old Long Island college student told NJ.com that 2,000 more people started following her after posting the video. The video also drew lots of jokes about the river’s cleanliness.
“There’s dead bodies there,” one commenter wrote.
“The true story behind how Covid started,” joked another.
The good news is that, while some sewage plants closer to Albany still discharge into the Hudson, the river is cleaner than it was decades ago.
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“Many noxious discharges have ceased, but leftovers from past pollution haunt the Hudson, and new problems are becoming evident,” according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
The river “almost always meets the NYC standard for swimming,” Rob Buchanan, coordinator for the Citizens’ Water Quality Testing Program, told the New York Post.
And John Waldman, a biology professor at Queens College, told the Post it’s “not problematic” to be in the Hudson.
“The river has been cleaned up and is in decent shape,” he told the newspaper.
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Even swallowing a little bit of the water shouldn’t be a problem, according to the state DEC. That’s good for Paysepar, because she said she accidentally did get a little in her mouth.
“The water was really gross through … it tasted really bad,” she said in a video. “I got some of it in my mouth.”
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