U.S. Water News Online
HUDSON FALLS, N.Y. -- Gazing across the Hudson River, Winn Wachtel fears the beautiful view will soon be shattered by one of the largest dredging projects in American history -- a government-ordered plan to remove tons of poisonous PCBs from the riverbed.
``People come up from New York City for this. Now there's going to be so much pollution, muck and sediment. It's outrageous,'' the 60-year-old parole officer said.
The Environmental Protection Agency has ordered General Electric Co. to pay to remove 2.65 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment -- enough to fill about 40 football fields 30 feet deep -- from a 40-mile stretch of the river. One of two old GE plants dumped 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson before the federal government banned the pollutants in 1977.
Residents of northern river communities have been fighting dredging proposals ever since. Some complain their lives will be disrupted by a project that now seems inevitable.
State officials still have 15 business days to review the plan, which doesn't become official until it is formally signed.
The EPA classifies PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, as a probable carcinogen and says the oily substance poses risks to wildlife and to people who eat fish from the Hudson.
``If you have a cancer, you need to get it out,'' said postal worker Mark Backus.
But others question where the contaminated mud will be taken and how much pollution stirred from the river bottom will flow downstream.
The final dredging plan includes ``performance standards'' for air quality and noise. But environmentalists lobbied against performance standards for water, saying they could expose the plan to legal challenges and further delays. The EPA said standards would be developed with public input during the three-year design stage.
``How much of an increase in PCBs will be acceptable?'' asked Tim Havens, Sr., president of an anti-dredging citizen's group called CEASE. ``How much wetlands will be destroyed? Where would environmentalists draw the line on damage to the ecosystem?''
But environmentalists, including the Sierra Club, praised the EPA for resisting a fierce lobbying campaign from GE to weaken the plan.
``It's clear the majority of the people in the state of New York who have thought about it support the cleanup of the river,'' said Jeff Jones of the Environmental Advocates lobby group.
GE spokesman Mark Behan said company officials would not comment until they reviewed the plan.
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