[LasTins]

May 1, 2007

G.E. Moves Ahead on Removal of PCBs From 2 Rivers, but Frustration Remains


Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
A sign posted on a tree at Woods Pond in Pittsfield warns of the contamination of
fish, waterfowl, frogs and turtles by PCBs, banned synthetic compounds that are
considered neurotoxins and probable carcinogens.


By ANTHONY DePALMA

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — More than 30 years have passed since Congress banned a broad range of synthetic compounds called PCBs. Yet 2.65 million cubic yards of mud on the bottom of the Hudson River remain contaminated with the chemicals, which are considered neurotoxins and probable human carcinogens.

Since 2002, General Electric has been under federal order to clean approximately 40 miles of the Hudson where its factories discharged PCBs. Preliminary site clearing for the huge project began last week, but actual dredging will not start until 2009 at the earliest.

Here, on another PCB-contaminated river about 60 miles to the southeast in Massachusetts, G.E. has made more progress, albeit haltingly.

Working with the federal government, the company completed the cleanup of a two-mile stretch of the Housatonic River late last year, scooping out the heaviest concentrations of the industrial chemicals. While much remains to be done along the remaining 100 miles or more of the Housatonic, its most heavily contaminated section is now cleaner than it has been in a long time.

The two projects differ in scale and expense as much as the two rivers differ in depth and breadth, and each presents unique engineering challenges.

The Hudson project covers 40 miles of the broad river from which the 2.65 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment will have to be dredged, at an estimated cost of $700 million.

By contrast, the first phase of the cleanup of the Housatonic, a far gentler river, had a price tag of $250 million and involved 110,000 cubic yards of mud.

Still, the Housatonic cleanup dragged on for more than six years, twice the expected time. And there is no timetable or cost estimate yet for decontaminating the river’s lower reaches.

Based on their experience on the Housatonic, scientists, G.E. officials, government authorities and people who live in the local communities affected by PCBs all agree that work on the Hudson, whenever it starts, is likely to take far longer than expected and will run into more technological obstacles than anyone anticipates.

Almost certainly, the level of public suspicion and mistrust surrounding these projects will not soon subside. Peter L. deFur, an environmental consultant who advises local groups concerned about the Housatonic cleanup, said that although the company had belatedly been doing a “pretty good” job on the river, the people who live along the Hudson should be warned that “G.E. has been absolutely the opposite of a responsible party.”

Stephen D. Ramsey, G.E.’s vice president for corporate environmental programs, who is overseeing both cleanups, said the company had proved its good faith by spending more than a billion dollars studying and cleaning up PCBs, mostly in these two rivers.

But he said there is little that G.E. can do to change perceptions “except to be very clear with the public about what is the status of the project, what people can expect to see and what are the issues we are encountering as we go along.”

In the last century, G.E. discovered many profitable ways of using PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, a slippery yellowish goo as thick as motor oil that can resist heat without catching fire. G.E. used vast quantities at its Hudson Falls and Fort Edward factories on the Hudson to build electrical capacitors. At its sprawling plant here on the Housatonic, G.E. used them in transformers.

After the chemicals were banned in 1976, the company agreed to clean up its properties. But it argued that the vast quantities of PCBs that had been discharged into the rivers would break down on their own or be harmlessly buried under a protective layer of silt. At first the federal Environmental Protection Agency agreed.

As scientific understanding advanced, however, the agency decided to take a second look. Even nestled in the river mud, the chemicals were being ingested by worms and other invertebrates, which were in turn eaten by small fish, and those were eaten by larger ones, which eventually were consumed by people.

The only ways to solve the problem, the E.P.A. decided in the late 1980s, were to remove or cap the PCBs.

G.E. spent millions of dollars on advertising trying to convince local residents that dredging was worse than doing nothing, but the company eventually accepted a plan to clean more than 40 miles of the Hudson, from Fort Edward to the Troy dam, in two phases.

The first phase, a kind of trial run to last one year, was originally set to begin in 2006 but is now set for 2009. The final phase is scheduled to last five years.

The Housatonic cleanup has a more compact history. The 254-acre G.E. plant in Pittsfield used PCBs from 1932 until they were banned. Storm water runoff from the plant carried the chemicals into the Housatonic, where they spread downstream, contaminating more than 100 miles of river in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

In 1999, G.E. agreed to a $250 million settlement to clean a highly contaminated half-mile portion of the river that ran through the company’s property in Pittsfield. Because the Housatonic in that area is only a few feet deep and a few yards wide, G.E. could, in essence, dry-clean the river.

At the end of 1999, it started work on a temporary dam across half the river, and when that half-mile section of the riverbed dried out, front-end loaders scraped off two feet of mud and dumped it onto trucks to be buried at G.E.’s Pittsfield property. The temporary dam was then moved to the other side of the river, where the process was repeated.

The E.P.A. cleaned the next 1.5 miles of river itself, billing G.E. for half the cost. The agency chose to divert the Housatonic through a large pipe and then bring in heavy equipment to scrape the river bottom.

G.E. had other PCB problems in Pittsfield. Over the years, the company had given away PCB-soaked dirt and other material that property owners used as fill in their backyards. In the late 1990s, G.E. performed tests at more than 300 homes and ended up excavating the soil around more than 175 of them, as well as at one Pittsfield public school.

A resident and former G.E. employee, David Gibbs, 56, found that several chemical drums had been buried in his backyard near the river. In a recent interview, Mr. Gibbs said that he caught G.E.’s contractors trying to cut corners as they cleaned up his property and that he developed a lasting mistrust of the company.

“My family’s lived in this neighborhood for over 60 years,” Mr. Gibbs said. “G.E. owes it to us to clean our river.”

Another resident, Tim Gray, 54, is executive director of the Housatonic River Initiative, which acts as a watchdog on G.E.’s activities. Mr. Gray pushed to have Pittsfield added to the national list of Superfund sites, but local officials objected, saying they believed it would stigmatize the city, causing economic harm.

In March, G.E. held public hearings in Massachusetts and Connecticut to discuss options for cleaning the 135 miles of river from Pittsfield south to the Long Island Sound. They range from dredging long stretches to doing nothing at all.

At a hearing in Kent, Conn., G.E. presented data indicating that PCB concentrations in fish and invertebrates had declined substantially before leveling off in recent years. When the company suggested that the river was cleaning itself, Mr. Gray objected, as did Mr. deFur, the environmental consultant.

“I think they’re trying to put something over on people,” Mr. deFur said. If the river was cleaning itself, he said, concentrations would continue to decline. He said the chemicals were degraded in water but not destroyed. Continued leakage from the plant and an incomplete cleanup mean the river remains polluted, he said.

At the Hudson Falls plant, a few ounces of PCBs continue to leak into the river each day, according to G.E. Local environmental advocates express fears that the chemicals have also contaminated the soil beneath homes in the area, but G.E. has not agreed to a residential cleanup, as it did in Pittsfield.

“Pittsfield is a precedent that G.E. did not want to set,” said Robert Goldstein, a lawyer for Riverkeeper, an environmental group on the Hudson. “They did not want to advertise to the folks in Fort Edward that there was an upland cleanup.”

Since it would be impossible to reroute the Hudson the way the engineers diverted the Housatonic, Mr. Ramsey, the G.E. official, said the company would use old-fashioned mechanical dredging. A “yellow iron Tonka Toy look-alike clamshell dredge” will scoop up contaminated river mud and dump it on barges, he said. The dried sediment will then be shipped by rail to a licensed landfill outside the Hudson Valley, he said.

Mr. Ramsey said the Housatonic project had taught him that even with advanced engineering, “things take longer than everyone thinks.”

The biggest challenge on the Hudson will be ensuring that the dredged material is not set adrift, Mr. Ramsey said. He said the affected communities needed to understand that if monitoring shows that too much material is escaping, the operation could be slowed down or suspended.

“If there are starts and stops,” Mr. Ramsey said, “it won’t be because anyone is trying to pull a fast one.”




Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company