Posted on July 12, 2024
ALBANY — As it has in prior years, the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday said it needs more information before it can determine if the Hudson River has been thoroughly cleansed of the PCB pollution that General Electric dumped in the waterway in decades past, which prompted an extensive dredging operation that ran from 2015 to 2019.
“PCB levels in water and fish are going down overall but we need more annual fish data,” EPA Northeast Regional Administrator Lisa Garcia said during a video conference to release a draft of the agency’s third five-year review to see if the dredging has been adequately “protective’’ of the river.
n particular, scientists say they need to gather more data on the fish in the lower Hudson, from below the Federal Dam in Troy to the mouth of the river in Manhattan.
For three decades ending in the late 1970s, General Electric discharged an estimated 1.3 million pounds of toxic polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, into the river from its capacitor factories in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls. The discharges were legal then, but concern over PCB toxicity prompted the cleanup funded by GE.
As a Superfund site, the EPA also conducts five-year reviews to determine if the dredging did what it was supposed to do over the long term: clean up the waterway to the point where, for example, it’s safe to consume fish caught in the river.
Gary Klawinski, the EPA’s Hudson River project director, noted that eating fish from the upper Hudson (from Troy to Fort Edward and Hudson Falls) is still not advisable. And Garcia said the agency would pay extra attention to “subsistence” anglers in the lower Hudson, who catch and eat the river’s fish for cultural or economic reasons.
Stakeholders in the EPA’s process offered differing views, as they have in the past, of the need for more study.
“The Hudson River dredging project removed the vast majority of PCBs from the Upper Hudson, led to broad declines in PCB levels, and is on track to deliver further improvements,” a GE spokesperson said in a prepared statement.
The company, which spent $1.7 billion on dredging, also noted that it is working with the EPA to see if other industries along the Hudson may have contributed to the contamination.
Environmentalists, though, said they believed that calling for more study was delaying what they believe is the need for further remediation.
“Sadly, this is kicking the can down the road,” said Aaron Mair, the Forever Adirondacks director at the Adirondack Council conservation group. Environmentalists like Mair said they initially called for dredging the entire Hudson, not just sections of the Troy-to-Fort Edward and Hudson Falls stretch.
Garcia said Wednesday’s draft release opens a public comment period which will be followed by a web-based public hearing on Aug. 21. Those who are following the issue, she said, should “get involved, get engaged.”
She also stressed that fully eliminating the PCB threat is a slow, decades-long process.
“The road to recovery in the Hudson River is long,” she said.
