Recently while rewatching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), I wondered where the story would take place now. The turtles become Mutant Ninjas after being abandoned somewhere around Midtown in 1975 (which is interestingly the year that keeping small turtles as pets became illegal —maybe this is why the turtles were abandoned). A rat (and ninja master) named Splinter gathers them up from the puddle of radioactive chemicals (“ooze”) they are crawling in. Exposure to the ooze causes all to become human-like: they walk upright, talk, and are human sized.
I love trying to match the movie’s New York City scenes from 30 years ago to New York City today. In 2023, Midtown does not feel like a place where radioactive waste would go unnoticed—or a place where people flout the law to get their kids illegally tiny turtles. I also actually live in New York City now. I’m not that worried about illegal turtles, but I would like to know if there are really radioactive materials and hazardous chemicals lying around.
311 Complaint Data
To answer this question, I have to learn if there is a place in New York with a concentration of baby turtles that could stumble upon irradiated chemical waste. 311 logs three complaints that could help:
- Illegal Animal Kept as Pet – Turtle Under 4 Inches Long,
- Radioactive Material, and
- Hazardous Materials – Unsafe Chemical, Abandoned.
All data was downloaded in February 2023 from NYCOpenData.
Where are New York City’s illegal turtle hotspots?
In 1975, it became illegal to sell or own small turtles because they spread salmonella.[1] Small turtles are specifically banned because they are more likely to belong to children, and children are unhygienic. The Baby Mutant Ninja Turtles do seem illegally small. They are much smaller than Splinter, at that time a normal size rat, and all four fit inside a coffee can.
While this seems like a fairly obscure law, nearly 300 people have called 311 about it since 2010 (mostly to report pet stores rather than their neighbor’s kids). Brooklyn produced over twice as many illegal turtle complaints as Queens and nearly three times as many as Manhattan:
I am showing this with a pie chart because the turtles’ first word was pizza, and because the downsides of a pie chart don’t matter to make the point. Brooklyn has a very clear lead. The color scheme matches the turtles and their masks. I gave Michelangelo’s orange to the next biggest slice because he’s the most fun and Raphael’s red to the smallest slice because he’s annoying. Based on the pie chart, Brooklyn is the most likely location for the new TMNT.
However, a bar chart showing the zip codes with the most cases reveals worrisome hotspots (which I am defining as a zip code with ten or more complaints) all over the city. The worst neighborhoods were Williamsburg, Tribeca, and Elmhurst:
I color coded the bars according to borough to show how geographically spread out the hotspots are. I also added neighborhood names as labels to show the diversity of the hotspots for people who are familiar with New York. So far, the only borough that can be ruled out is Staten Island.
How serious are hazardous waste and radioactive material complaints?
Hazardous chemical reports are much more common than reports about radioactive materials. Between 2010 and 2022, there were almost 8,500 reports about hazardous chemicals and about 140 reports of radioactive materials. I looked at the “abandoned” subset of chemical reports, which was 2,500 cases. This seems a better fit for the movie, where the ooze is leaking out of a broken container in a pile of garbage that has collected in a sewer. A handful of radioactive material reports are related to unlicensed health care workers. I kept these cases. The Secret of the Ooze, TMNT’s sequel, blames a company called Techno Global Research Industries for creating the ooze but never says what the company does. I can’t rule out rogue health care workers without more information. (Aliens are responsible for the ooze in the comic books. It’s hard to believe that in 12 years no New Yorker has called 311 about aliens, or cryptids, or ghosts, but I don’t see it in the dataset. Maybe it’s buried in the “Animal in a Park” cases? Regardless, I haven’t read the comics so I’m working from evidence presented in the first two movies.)
I categorized duplicate reports, no further action needed, and no violations as “probably fine.” I categorized violations, referrals, further investigation needed, closed but unresolved, and unable to access as “suspicious.” I also put cases where the City mysteriously told people to call or file a FOIL request for information in this category. Outcome information was unclassifiable for about 160 cases.
The bar chart below shows the results of that system: only 24 percent (570 cases) of abandoned chemical and 16 percent (23 cases) of radioactive material complaints were suspicious. Only two resulted in violations, both related to radioactive materials: an unlicensed health care worker in Flushing, and improperly stored materials in the Upper East Side.
I wanted to look at the rates of founded versus unfounded cases next to each other because I wondered if the abandoned chemical reports were more likely to be real than the radioactive material reports. I thought that would be the case, but they really aren’t that different. I really hoped to make the suspicious bars a glowing neon green, but could not figure out how to access a full palette when building this type of chart.
I had a lot of trouble embedding my Tableau charts in WordPress. (There is a better view of this chart here.) I cannot figure out how to make the scroll bars go away. It looks like all the settings are the same as for the previous bar chart, but I can’t get the size right.
Where do baby turtles, improperly handled radioactive materials, and abandoned chemical waste converge?
Now that I know where the baby turtles and the suspicious hazardous waste are, I can find out if there are any places with all three. The map below shows the nine baby turtle hotspots. Inside each, abandoned chemical cases are shown by yellow dots and radioactive materials by orange ones. (A larger version of the map is available here).
This also gave me sizing problems. There is a lot of unnecessary white space under the map and it extends much farther outside the city than I want it to. I would prefer a normal legend, but I removed it hoping it would help the map embed better.
The map reveals two areas of concern: Elmhurst and the border of Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The Elmhurst area of concern includes an unlicensed worker handling radioactive material case, which the City could not investigate because the establishment went out of business. Very suspicious! The abandoned chemical reports were all referred out and are under investigation by the Department of Sanitation and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
The Williamsburg/Bed-Stuy area of concern is part of a turtle triangle with Crown Heights. Those three neighborhoods produced 20 percent of the illegal turtle complaints. It has one case of improperly stored radioactive materials (which was referred out for investigation by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, but there is no information about where). It also has several abandoned chemical cases under investigation.
What Else Have I Learned?
311 data is frustrating at first because so many cases are logged and investigated with no findings. It seems bizarre that people are calling 311 about turtles or radioactive waste. But that’s exactly what 311 is for: I don’t have to figure out who to call if a turtle at a pet store gives me salmonella or I see a glowing green puddle. It makes sense that a lot of calls are unfounded, because it’s a resource for unclear situations. And the data then provides a great resource for more investigation. You have to be really specific to succeed at a FOIL request. If someone wanted to do a deeper dive on shady pet stores or household chemical contamination, the 311 data gives a specific list of incidents that the City gathered information on and which you could turn into a great FOIL request.
