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Dredging of Pollutants Begins in Hudson

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
After long battle, E.P.A. and G.E. begin a cleanup of PCB hot spots on the Hudson River. Hot spots of PCBS are mapped by GPS, and a dredge barge scoops up chunks of river mud putting it into a hopper barge, to be sent on to nearby processing facility and then, eventually, transported 2,000 mile on a train ride to a Texas hazardous waste dump.

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: May 15, 2009

MOREAU, N.Y. — Twenty-five years after the federal government declared a long stretch of the Hudson River to be a contaminated Superfund site, the cleanup of its chief remaining source of pollution began here Friday with a single scoop of mud extracted by a computer-guided dredge.

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Graphic HERE

Twelve dredges are to work round the clock, six days a week, into October, removing sediment laced with the chemicals known as PCBs. Mile-long freight trains running every several days will carry the dried mud to a hazardous-waste landfill in Texas.

An estimated 1.3 million pounds of PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, flowed into the upper Hudson from two General Electric factories for three decades before they were banned, in 1977, as a health threat to people and wildlife. In high doses, they have been shown to cause cancer in animals and are listed by federal agencies as a probable human carcinogen.

“Today, the healing of the Hudson begins,” George Pavlou, the Environmental Protection Agency’s acting regional administrator, said under bright skies in a riverbank ceremony here as federal, state and local officials, G.E. representatives and environmental campaigners looked on.

Those gathered scrambled from a white tent to get a good view as a blue clamshell bucket rose slowly from the riverbed holding the first five cubic yards of mud. A lone duck paddled downriver along the far bank.

The dredging operation is the first phase of an operation that, if it continues as projected through 2015, could largely eliminate the Hudson’s last significant toxic legacy from an era of unfettered industrial activity and dumping.

While the Superfund site itself is 197 miles long, stretching from Hudson Falls, N.Y., to the southern tip of Manhattan, the initial phase involves spots along a six-mile segment south of Fort Edward, the hamlet across the river from this industrial site.

G.E. is supervising and paying for the cleanup, which federal officials have estimated could cost more than $750 million. Industry experts say the ultimate cost could be many times than that, however. (G.E. declines to give an estimate.)

While most of the chemicals were dumped when such practices were legal, the Superfund law requires the responsible polluting party, when one can be pinpointed, to foot the cleanup bill.

Yet G.E has reserved the right, after a review of the operation in 2010, to reject the project’s much larger second phase. Federal environmental officials have said that if it did that, they would most likely order the cleanup to proceed and levy enormous penalties against the company.

The first phase is projected to remove 22 tons of PCBs from the riverbed; the second phase would remove 102 tons, the E.P.A. said.Even as it embarks on the cleanup, G.E. has a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Superfund law working its way through federal court. (The company is a responsible party in 52 active Superfund sites across the country, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.)

Yet spokesmen for G.E. are quick to defend the record of the company, which these days, with its Ecomagination line of products, is casting itself as a good environmental citizen.

Mark Behan, a longtime spokesman for the company on PCBs, said that the challenge to the Superfund law “has no bearing on the Hudson project.”

He said G.E. had acted in good faith for many years and that in 2002, its chairman, Jeffrey R. Immelt, made a public pledge to cooperate and implement the dredging plan, drafted and approved by the E.P.A. Three related accords have since been signed, he said, and the company has met every commitment so far.

In organizing the ceremony near the first dredging spot, the agency cast the moment as a milestone in the history of the river and of environmental governance in the United States.

Yet environmental officials and groups that spent years fighting General Electric’s efforts to challenge the need to remove the mud were more critical.

Edward O. Sullivan, who from 1987 to 1995 wrestled with General Electric lawyers and scientists as New York State’s deputy commissioner of environmental conservation and ran the state’s hazardous-waste cleanup program, said that by pursuing the court challenge to the Superfund law and reserving the right to reject the second phase of the cleanup, General Electric had constructed two potential “escape hatches.”

“Clearly, G.E. has the capability to do it right,” said Mr. Sullivan, who now runs the private group Scenic Hudson and witnessed the start of the dredging on Friday. “But the question remains, is the commitment there?

So far, the company has been masterful at instigating delay.”

The decision by the E.P. A. in 2002 to require dredging was a mix of politics and science, with a variety of expert panels split on the efficacy of dredging, but also on the perils of leaving so much contamination in sediments that might be disturbed by powerful floods or other factors.


In the 400 years since the first Europeans probed its waters, the Hudson has seen grand phases of development, with oyster, sturgeon and shad fisheries replaced by factories spewing everything from paint and dye to adhesives and toxic chemicals into the waters.

From the 1970s onward, the nascent American environmental movement grew partly out of efforts to restore the Hudson. The battle over PCBs dominated that phase.

After other cleanups, communities that avoided their riverbanks for two generations because of sewage or chemicals have reclaimed them. Still, from Fort Edward south to the dam at Troy, residents cannot keep any fish hooked in the river because of the chemicals that accumulate in them.

The hope now, environmental officials say, is that dredging 98 percent of the PCBs out of hot spots in the river like the Thompson Island Pool will greatly speed what has been a slow natural decline in levels of the chemicals in striped bass and other fish species.

After the PCB-tainted sediment is extracted, it will be replaced by clean fill, along with plants native to the river. Barges holding the contaminated mud will pass through locks into the Champlain Canal to a nearby $100 million treatment plant and transport hub built by General Electric for that purpose.

As work crews in an aluminum boat passed back and forth Friday along the waterfront in Fort Edward, some local residents at Jim’s Broadway Cafe reflected on how the river might benefit from the dredging operation.
Mary Cunningham, a former Chamber of Commerce president and self-described “river bug” whose house sits on one of the banks, said raw sewage was the main concern when she was young, and later, the chemical contamination.

She and Jim Rosch, the cafe’s owner, said that while the community has been divided over whether to dredge, for them it was never a question.

Mr. Rosch, 62, said he looked forward to taking a swim in the river without concern, and someday, to seeing people catch fish and keep them.

“For the plant life, the fish life, the human life, it just has to be done,” he said. “The scientists made one thing clear: It’s not going to clean itself.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/sc...1&ref=nyregion

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company