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GE, EPA, DEP, MAYOR & OTHERS NEGOTIATE WHILE PUBLIC WAITS
On Monday August 4, 1997 EPA Administrator John DeVillars formally nominated the GE/Pittsfield site and 55 miles of the Housatonic River for inclusion on the national priority list (NPL) of Superfund. At the same time he set a February 1, 1998 deadline for a negotiated settlement that might preclude having to invoke Superfund. Despite repeated HRI requests for community representation, including seats at the table for HRI, South County representatives, and impacted Pittsfield residents, the negotiations were limited to representatives of state and federal government agencies, GE, and Pittsfield Mayor Gerald Doyle and City Council President Tom Hickey. HRI has been fighting from its very existence to move the GE site and river from its current jurisdiction under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) to Superfund jurisdiction.
GE has been able to delay cleanup activity for years, utilizing the incredibly slow and cumbersome administrative and appeal process of RCRA. Superfund designation allows the Federal government to order cleanup activity, and if GE balks, the EPA can take action and then sue not only to recover its costs but triple damages. DEP and EPA regulators have counseled patience, and reminded us many times that, by both statutory responsibility and personal commitment, they need and want to do everything they can to protect public health and safety and the environment. Nevertheless, it is our job to be skeptical, and do everything in our power to get the best cleanup possible. It has been painful to watch others negotiate the fate of our community and our river.
An article by William Sanjour, "What's Wrong With The EPA" in the August 20, 1998 issue of Rachel's reminds us of the need to be vigilant. Sanjour, who has worked for EPA for 25 years, writes: "For decades, the Westinghouse Corporation disposed of its toxic waste at several dump sites in Bloomington, Indiana. In the early '80s, the dumps came under the aegis of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund program. While negotiations with Westinghouse over how to cleanup the waste dragged on for years, EPA, in order not to upset the negotiations, kept from the public the fact that toxic air levels near the sites were more than 15 times greater than the Superfund target risk level. At the same time that EPA was secretly recommending to its staff that they wear respiratory protection whenever on-site, it was assuring the people of Bloomington that they were in no immediate danger."
PRESSURE FOR INPUT RESULTS IN SPECIAL SESSION: HRI, CPCBR, ENVIRONMENTALISTS, SOUTH COUNTY TESTIFY
In an unprecedented display of unity, Lenox, Lee, Stockbridge, Great Barrington, and Sheffield presented separate testimony on July 22, 1998 to EPA, DEP, GE and other agencies conducting the on-going PCB negotiations. Even though each town made their presentations separately, the same issues seemed to be at the heart of what they had to say. The first issue was the need for further testing to accurately delineate PCB contamination in the sections of the river south of Pittsfield, and the area in which the EPA and DEP are currently focusing. Recent testing in Rising Pond in Housatonic found levels as high as 27 ppm in sediments, and in Lee new residential properties have been found to be contaminated.
The towns emphasized that this new testing should be done quickly, and that GE shouldn't be allowed to use this as an excuse to delay remediation decisions. As both the residential fill property cleanup and the Building 68 cleanup has shown, the agencies and GE can accomplish an awful lot when they have to. The Town of Sheffield expressed concern for their extensive river farm land and the effects PCBs might present to crops intended for human consumption. There was also concern about those places where PCBs might have concentrated: dam sites, bridge abutments, and other possible hotspots. Great Barrington was concerned about the PCB levels in Rising Pond. There was also concern expressed about the possibility of any new possible downstream transport of PCB, and questions about whether there will be a cleanup as far south as Great Barrington. Several environmental organizations participated.
Mark Jester, representing the Berkshire County League of Sportsmen, testified: " ... the Housatonic River, from its headwaters in Hinsdale to the point where it leaves Sheffield, is excellent fisheries and wildlife habitat. However, it is undermanaged and underutilized because its lands and species are contaminated with PCBs. "We want to see a restored Housatonic River. Our use of the river has been impaired and diminished for two decades. Remediation will bring further impacts. But the river can recover from remediation - it can not recover from inaction. "The promise of a cleaner, safer, healthier, more productive river causes us to support intensive PCB removal, and call for meaningful resources damage awards from General Electric."
Frank Lowenstein of The Nature Conservancy testified: "A number of rare species of the southern Berkshires are associated with the main stem of the Housatonic or its floodplain, including two rare turtle species, one of which is federally threatened, two rare mussel species, and a number of rare plant species. "The combination of superb agricultural soils and a viable farming community makes this one of the areas in the state with the best potential for maintaining agriculture over the long term. "All of these resources may be at risk from the continuing PCB contamination of the river. In other locations, PCBs have been shown to impact the reproductive success of such diverse species as mink, otter, and great blue herons.
"Clean-up should be a top priority in the negotiations, and should address not just areas near the GE plant but other hot spots as well, to ensure that the contamination does not spread over more and more land, impacting an ever-wider and more significant suite of natural resources." At the conclusion of the session, Tim Gray commented: "The message was loud and clear that South County has mobilized to reclaim the Housatonic as a treasured resource."
HRI UPDATES
Housatonic River Restoration. One of the aspects of a Superfund designation is the assessment of any possible "natural resource damages" the community may have suffered as a result of the PCB contamination of the Housatonic. This assessment is undertaken on behalf of the "trustees" of the river, including representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the State of Connecticut and several federal agencies.
If you've been reading newspaper reports of the on-going negotiations, you know that this has been one of the major sticking points for GE. Because they have the largest number of Superfund sites, they are, of course, wary of setting too large a precedent. With funding from the US EPA, and the Massachusetts Environmental Trust in partnership with the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, HRI has created Housatonic River Restoration, a broad-based coalition of interested and concerned stakeholders, to ensure public participation in the process.
Rachel Fletcher, who is heading the project, has held several meetings already with Sportsmen's clubs, in Great Barrington, Stockbridge, Sheffield, and Dalton, and will be holding many more, in every town up and down the length of the river to hear from anyone who has suggestions about how we can restore, use, and protect our river. If you're interested, there's a town meeting scheduled for Lenox on Wednesday, October 28th and 7 PM in Lenox Town Hall. Other upcoming HRR events include a Pittsfield meeting, a meeting of historical societies, and an interfaith meeting. For more information contact Rachel Fletcher at (413) 528-3391 or Tim Gray at (413) 499-6112.
SUNY, HRI, AND CITIZENS FOR PCB REMOVAL LAUNCH NEIGHBORHOOD AMBIENT AIR STUDY
Anne Casey, who some of you might have met at an HRI health forum, has undertaken preliminary work on what we hope will be an extensive investigation into the possible volatilization of PCBs into the air in the Lakewood section of Pittsfield. Anne has recently been taking samples of the ambient air in some of the homes of Pittsfield residents who may have received PCB-contaminated fill, or live nearby to those homes.
Anne is a researcher at the State University of New York's School of Public Health and has recently been working with the Akwesasne Indians. They have been dealing with PCB contamination on their upstate tribal lands. Anne and the citizens of Lakewood are concerned that PCBs may become airborne, and that this volatilization may indeed be an important pathway of exposure. While it's clearly much too soon to tell, testing in one home has already shown levels high enough to prompt a more complete study. And Anne has begun to apply for major funding for this work.
MASS. DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH: HOUSATONIC RIVER ASSESSMENT ADVISORY COMMITTEE
In conjunction with the listing of the GE/Pittsfield and Housatonic River site under Superfund, the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) is currently conducting a "health assessment" for the affected areas. The ATSDR Guidance Manual states: "A health assessment is the evaluation of data and information on the releases of hazardous substances into the environment on order to assess any current or future impact on public health, develop health advisories or other recommendations, and identify studies or actions needed to evaluate and mitigate or prevent human health effects." (pp. 2-1)
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health is engaged in doing some of this work. The health assessment gathers "environmental characterization data" - a fancy way of saying information about environmental contamination and the pathways this contamination may travel. "Community health concerns associated with a site constitute a key data component of the health assessment." So if you're aware of possible areas of contamination, or places where people may be in contact with sources of contamination, contact HRI and we'll make sure this information gets to the Mass. Department of Public Health.
WE'RE ALL LIVING DOWNSTREAM
Most people have gotten the impression that the PCB problem is Pittsfield's problem. But we at HRI have been hearing for many years that GE'S PCBs were shipped and dumped all over the place. We've heard rumors about a dumpsite as far away as the Westfield River. A recent report in the August 24, 1998 Berkshire Eagle states: "Environmental regulators are quietly investigating a slew of suspected new PCB sites, some of them recently disclosed by GE after a review of millions of pages of archived company records." Dozens of commercial sites are suspected of containing possibly contaminated industrial waste in Lenox, Lenox Dale, Hinsdale,Peru, Cheshire, and New Lebanon, New York.
NO RUG FOR OUR RIVER, OR SILVER LAKE
Time after time GE has proposed a clean-up strategy that relies on "armoring" or "capping" or "geosynthetic materials" or what we think of as covering up the PCBs with an expensive rug. I quote from one of many dozens of GE studies, the PICM: "In some cases, two layers of materials are used: a layer that provides isolation of the contaminants and a cover layer designed to prevent erosion of the armor. The armor layers are placed either from a barge, from a floating platforms, or from the banks of the river or lake." (pg 2-3) If GE has its way, the river bottom and banks will be pockmarked with a series of geosynthetic Band-Aids. And we will all be praying that the River never again experiences the natural turmoil of a flood. As for Silver Lake, if GE gets its cap, we may very well see a bizarre man-made ten foot pond stretched above some newfangled guaranteed-never-to-stretch, bend, or break space-age plastic cover. While beneath it lies an old-fashioned 20th century mausoleum of toxic waste. And all around it, some gorgeous gas lamps. Ye Olde, Quaint But Poisoned, Silver Lake.
BLDG 68 SHOWS GE'S ESTIMATES OF CONTAMINATION WAY OFF - REVEALS THAT REMOVAL (DRY DREDGING) WORKS
Two years ago, new sampling on the banks and in the Housatonic River near the former GE Building 68 revealed extremely high levels of PCBs. Levels as high as 54,000 ppm were discovered in the river sediment, and concentrations of 104,000 ppm were found on the bank. This was particularly interesting because for 15 years GE has been claiming that they knew where all the contamination was, and that, according to its 1983 Stewart Report: "The PCB levels in sediments ranged from less than 1 to 210 ppm (dry weight) and appeared to be confined to the upper 12 inches of the sediment."
The Stewart Report went to estimate that a total of 39,000 pounds of PCBs remained in the river system. For many years we have questioned the Stewart Report, and demanded new testing. Well, the stark reality of the Building 68 site reveals that GE has grossly misrepresented the extent of river contamination. As Theo Stein put it in his December 2, 1997 article in the Berkshire Eagle: "If GE's estimated average concentration of 1,550 parts per million for the sediments in the hot spot is even close, then at least 10 tons of pure PCBs were removed from the river bed off Building 68. That would represent more than half of the 39,000 pounds a GE consultant estimated was in the Housatonic River sediments above the Connecticut border in 1983."
Invoking a 106 Administrative Order under Superfund, the U.S. EPA directed GE to remove the contamination. GE failed to convince the agency to allow the site to be capped, and GE's contractor, Maxymillian Technologies, began work to isolate one section of the river at a time. The affected sediment was dried and dug up. The Massachusetts DEP and the EPA monitored the Building 68 clean-up efforts and reported that downstream monitoring revealed that there was no noticeable movement or resuspension of contamination. The Building 68 clean-up proves what we've been saying for years.
REMOVAL WORKS
GE has mounted an extraordinary public relations campaign to convince the public that dredging doesn't work. Don't believe them. There are several state-of-the-art technologies that exist today to dig up and successfully treat PCB contamination. In fact a local Pittsfield contractor has already demonstrated it can remediate PCB contamination. Maxymillian Technologies is one of several companies that can do the job, and do it well. As William Carley wrote in the July 27, 1998 issue of The Wall Street Journal: "The stakes of the battle extend beyond the Housatonic. GE and the EPA are locked in a similar dispute over PCB contamination of the much larger Hudson River, and a loss in Pittsfield might set an expensive precedent."
GROUPS, AND MORE GROUPS
We thought we'd take a moment to clarify what to some is a bit of confusion. The Housatonic River Initiative (HRI), a non-profit coalition of Berkshire County residents, was formed in 1991 to work as a group to reclaim the Housatonic river system from years of neglect and decades of toxic PCB contamination. We are conservationists, sportsmen and women, scientists, and homeowners whose land has been polluted.
The more we have learned, the more we have realized what a large task we have set for ourselves, and the wider our scope of activities has become. While we began advocating for a river, our tasks multiplied to include fighting for a comprehensive cleanup of the General Electric (GE) facility in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the closure of GE's PCB burn facility, the removal of PCBs from contaminated residential homes, businesses, schoolyards, and playgrounds, and demanding public health studies for former GE workers and members of the public whose homes were built on or near PCB-contaminated fill.
We are sometimes confused with the Housatonic Valley Association (HVA). While we many times find ways to work with HVA, our mission is very different, and inextricably bound by our sense that the Housatonic River will never be fishable and swimmable unless GE is compelled to undertake a comprehensive clean-up. HVA has often hesitated to criticize GE because it receives significant funding from the company. We will continue to look for opportunities to work together for the river, but we will never hesitate to pressure GE to fulfill its responsibilities to the community and the natural environment.