GE Drags Heels and Dredges Old Arguments in Hudson River Cleanup

From about 1947 to 1977, GE spent 30 years dumping 1.3 million pounds of toxic chemicals called PCBs in New York's iconic Hudson River.

At the pace the cleanup is going, I wouldn't be surprised if it goes on for even longer than the dumping.

In 2006, after trying to absolve itself of responsibility for decades, GE  finally agreed to begin (its hand was forced by U.S. EPA) and launched the cleanup in 2009. This was a relief to many New Yorkers, who for years have been banned from commercial or recreational fishing in many areas along a 200-mile stretch of contaminated riverbed. PCBs are a big health risk because they first accumulate in sediments, then move up the food chain into fish. EPA calls them probable human carcinogens, and they also aren't so wonderful for fish and wildlife either. Also, they aren't going away anytime soon—they are classified as "persistent organic pollutants" for a reason.

The agreed-upon cleanup involves dredging the river free of toxic sediment in stages. GE's long-held contention is that dredging the river is a bad idea because it will stir up the PCBs into the water. It says they are better just left alone, which is a pretty convenient scientific conclusion for the company responsible for footing the cleanup bill. Now that Phase 1 dredging is complete, that doesn't look to be the case: testing by the state environmental conservation department shows that few PCBs were stirred up into the river, and its commissioner wants to make sure GE now finishes the job.

GE isn't so sure, of course. Even though it committed to finish the cleanup, it now wants an extra year to look at the Phase 1 data and "decide" whether it will proceed with Phase 2. Recently, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, Chairman Jeffrey Immelt met privately with EPA administrator Lisa Jackson to convince her.

Residents want the cleanup (according to recent editorials in both the New York Times and the Poughkeepsie Journal) and GE will have to foot the bill regardless. As the Poughkeepsie Journal board writes, "The federal Environmental Protection Agency should have none of it. Instead, the EPA must be firm and hold the company to a much stricter and clearer timetable. General Electric did just about everything it could to delay this project, and the river has been greatly harmed as a result." (According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, GE's delaying began in 1976, as soon as the dumping ended).

If GE were allowed to delay or abandon this cleanup, this would be a depressing reversal of progress on the Hudson. Year by year, water quality has improved and New York and New Jersey residents have been able to better enjoy, rather than fear, their most valuable natural resource. Billions of dollars have been invested in sewage treatment plants, for example. As NRDC president Francis Beinecke notes, the one exception has been the PCBs in the Hudson.

This week, a number of environmental groups have joined to make sure EPA gets the message that GE must finish the cleanup on schedule. "Working together with ordinary citizens and multiple local and state agencies, we insisted that GE be held accountable for threatening the health of generations of Hudson Valley residents, damaging native river species and turning one of our state’s most valuable natural resources into the country’s largest toxic waste site," they write, in a letter.

Will you join these groups by signing this petition to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson asking her to refuse to let GE off the hook?

Photo credit: Randy OHC via Flickr

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