America's Water Crisis: New York's Toxic Wasteland

Every time it rains in New York City, billions of gallons of raw sewage are piped directly into the Hudson River. Superstorms like Hurricane Sandy only magnify the issue by flooding New York's waterways with even more human feces. It's a direct effect of the way New York City's wastewater pipes were built, and it's the same basic infrastructure problem facing over 40 million people in 700 American cities.

In the first part of a three-part series on freshwater in America, Emerson Rosenthal takes a dip in the grand Hudson River to find out just how far we've swum up shit's creek.