More than 500 abandoned boats litter NYC waterways, frustrating seaside locals: Blight on the neighborhood

One of the best days of a man’s life may be the day he gets rid of his boat, but it’s among the worst for the city.More than 500 rusting and decaying boats are littered throughout the Big Apple’s winding waterways, some of which have been bobbing for close to a century – and locals are growing sick of the eyesores.The city has plucked just 85 abandoned ships from the shores over the last 14 months as part of a slow-moving, expensive project bogged down by archaic marine laws.“People want to get that cleaned up.It’s been like that forever,” Brock Weiner, head of the College Point Civic and Taxpayers Association, told The Post.The seaside Queens nabe has roughly eight derelict boats leaking rust, fuel and other pollutants in its waters, hazards residents have been complaining about for decades.“Going back 100 years, you could get lobsters out of there and you could get clams out of there.

It’s been polluted for a long time – 120 years ago, it wasn’t like that, Weiner said. The city has cleared 87 decrepit vessels from the Big Apple’s 520 linear miles of shoreline since launching the Office of Marine Debris Disposal and Vessel Surrendering last spring.The office, a subsection of the Parks Department, was created to clean up the more than 600 estimated derelict ships, which not only blemish the city’s waterways but also act as a hazard to operating boats and seriously pollute the water. But the office has been bogged down by archaic marine laws, dating back to the 17th century, that were established to protect the cargo on “wrecks” from being pillaged – an issue that is no longer relevant to the fiberglass pleasure cruisers currently befouling the Big Apple’s shorelines.Progress on cleaning up the skiffs and sloops is also hampered by a high price tag, costing roughly $7,000 to remove a single boat and transport it to a designated marina to be disassembled and crushed.Complicating the clean-up process even further is how far-reaching...