winter 2001 newsletter
HRI DESIGNATED HOUSATONIC RIVERKEEPER™ AN INTERVIEW WITH BRYAN OLSON HRI Riverkeeper Tim Gray designated as ex-officio natural resource damage trustee.
Executive Director Tim Gray
with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and
Board President Dave Gibbs
On November 14, 2001 during his scheduled speech for the Dowmel Foundation at Monument Mountain H.S. in Great Barrington, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., environmental attorney and advocate for the Natural Resource Defense Council, Hudson River activist, and President of the Waterkeeper Alliance announced that HRI has been granted Riverkeeper™ status for the Housatonic River.
(see also: "Waterkeeper Alliance president Robert F. Kennedy Jr. helps HRI launch Riverkeeper canoe fleet and speaks on "Our Environmental Heritage" at HRI fundraiser." »on this page.)
HRI is now the 80th organization across North and Central America to represent and protect some of the major rivers and waterways of our hemisphere. HRI plans to augment their existing river advocacy with the Housatonic Riverkeeper program.
The Waterkeeper movement is among the fastest growing grass-roots environmental movements and quickly is becoming a unique force for environmental change. It is an environmental neighborhood watch program, a citizen's patrol to protect communities and the waters they depend on. The Keeper philosophy is based on the notion that the protection and enjoyment of a community's natural resources requires the daily vigilance of its citizens.
The Keeper concept started on New York's Hudson River where a coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen mobilized in 1966 to reclaim the Hudson from its polluters. The Keeper's job is to advocate compliance with environmental laws, respond to citizen complaints, identify problems which affect his or her body of water and devise appropriate remedies, serve as a living witness to the condition of the ecosystem, and to be an advocate for the public's right to protect and defend the environment. Keepers are part investigator, scientist, lawyer, lobbyist and PR agent.
Kennedy stated: “Our great challenge "as a people is to create communities that have the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment as the communities that our parents gave us. … Probably the principal thing that we have do … is to preserve our environmental infrastructure, the thing that makes our communities look right and have clean air and clean water … the essential infrastructure of our communities …”
“Really all environmental issues are, to me, not about protecting the birds and the fishes for their own sake but recognizing that we’re preserving those things because … they enrich us in so many different ways … Nature is the infrastructure of our communities and we are not going to have dignity and our children won’t either if we don’t preserve the environment.” Kennedy went on to account that the people on the Hudson who first started the Riverkeeper movement probably wouldn’t have characterized themselves as “environmentalists” but were blue-collar community activists, “commercial and recreational fishermen who challenged the polluters for control of the Hudson River … They were carpenters, factory workers, lathers, electricians … To them, the environment was their backyard.”
Kennedy continued: “We have Riverkeepers on every major water body on the West Coast from Cook Inlet in Alaska all the way down to the Baja Peninsula in Mexico … And on the East Coast we have a picket line on virtually every major river … from the Bay of Fundi in Canada all the way down to the St. Johns in Florida. And I’m very proud that last week we licensed our 80th Riverkeeper which is the Housatonic Riverkeeper … a program of the Housatonic River Initiative, so we’re very grateful to all of you for joining our team.”
AN INTERVIEW WITH BRYAN OLSON
On November 7, 2001, HRI Director Tim Gray interviewed Bryan Olson, the EPA Project Manager for the GE/Housatonic River site. Bryan has played a critical role in the cleanup thus far and will play a critical role in the years to come. We thought you’d enjoy learning about him and hearing from him. He has a B.S. from the University of New Hampshire and in 1990 came to work for the EPA.
In 1993, Bryan volunteered to work on the GE/Housatonic River site, which “at the time wasn’t the most sought after job … Part of the problem was that we were fighting with the two states over the RCRA Permit. We were fighting with GE. … When I started on the project, neither we nor DEP had a very good reputation for getting work done out there and that was probably due to the litigation with GE. Things just weren’t happening. … The public wasn’t happy with what we were doing out here. … But it was a good time for me to jump into the fray. And HRI was really starting to get involved at that point too.” “The biggest challenge and I think in some ways the part I enjoy most is trying to make the public understand what we’re doing and trust that the EPA is out here to try and do the right thing.”
“We’re trying to get the cleanup of the first half mile of the river done as quickly as we can but at the same time, we’re running into issues that if we don’t take the time to deal with, will come back to haunt us. Dealing with the oil we find, river construction issues – sometimes you just have to take your time, and do it right and that obviously causes great delays in the schedule. So it’s probably a year behind schedule. We’ll probably be starting the mile and a half stretch in late Spring or early Summer 2002.”
“The oil we just ran into (north of the Lyman Street parking lot) will probably require a sheetpile wall – and we’re getting better at dealing with these issues, and have sheetpile on order. We know we’re putting sheetpile down at Lyman Street, so we’ll have those sheets ready to go. And we’ve learned that we can have more than one river cell open at a time.”
“The biggest challenge for the next mile and a half is probably going to be dealing with the property owners. We just have so many property owners and there will be a large amount of impact to each property owner. We’re going to have to spend a lot of time making sure that people understand what we’re doing, and the impacts. We’ve learned a lot of technical information on the half mile that we can carry into the mile and a half, and we shouldn’t run into the same major technical problems.”
“I have a lot of good people working on the team and I know I can count on them to do their jobs. EPA has put a lot of resources into this site and my team is staffed with great people … “ “Given all the work that’s ahead of us, and all the public participation in terms of the ecologicaI risk assessment, the human health risk assessment and the river modeling work, I expect us to make a decision about the rest of the river in 2005.
It is critical that the public understands what we’re doing every step of the way. Once we resolve all of that, we have to get a cleanup level. Then if you have to do something, what do you do about it? If it’s removal that has to be done to meet the cleanup standard, or capping, or whatever it is, then what do you do with it once you get it out of the river? Are there treatment options? All of that work has to be done after you come up with the cleanup level, and it’s going to take awhile.”
“We should make sure the studies are right and that people understand them, because it’s going to be a big decision.” “I think part of what EPA’s job is to make sure there aren’t any risks, within some reasonable time frame – that we reduce the risks so that people will be able to eat the fish and people can be able to swim in the river. The hardest point to get to will be fish consumption because the PCBs bioaccumulate in the fish. Our job is to reduce the risk so that fish consumption is a reality within a reasonable period of time.”
HRI and HRR: an explanation
You may have seen a recent editorial in the Berkshire Eagle attacking HRI. They criticized “our sense of entitlement to all things concerning the river.” The Eagle attacking us is certainly not new news. And not surprisingly the Eagle got the story all wrong. The issue involves public participation in the work of the Natural Resource Damages Trustees – if you remember, part of the government’s settlement with GE involved a cash settlement to reimburse the public for the lost use of the river system due to GE’s contamination. The Massachusetts portion of that award is 7.5 million dollars.
At issue is how best to spend that money. Four years ago HRI was granted money by the EPA and we used it to begin a process known as the Housatonic River Restoration. Our first thought was to solicit input from as many people as possible up and down the County as to what the public’s priority was in terms of the river. We issued a report detailing the results of those meetings. Then there was a strategic dispute about the next steps.
Some people felt that HRI’s advocacy for a complete PCB-cleanup made us too hot, and that the Trustees would be reluctant to work with us, and possible fund us for restoration projects. Others argued that HRI was already a coalition of very varied interests and opinions and that we had a valuable track record of public trust. This difference of opinion grew and HRR formally separated from HRI.
Over the past year HRR has been pushing the Trustees to appoint a single public member (their Director, Rachel Fletcher) as the non-voting member of the Trustee Council – the body that will decide how to spend the 7.5 million dollars. HRI has been firm in our desire to maximize public input in the process.
We fought for many years for the towns along the river to be included in the secret negotiations with GE. We fought for the right of sportsmen and women to be represented. And for contaminated property owners to be represented. The Natural Resource Damage Trustees have a track record of designing a variety of mechanisms for public participation.
On Cape Cod, the five towns affected by the contamination of their groundwater, all have a seat at the table. In New Bedford, it’s a totally open process where anyone who is interested can come to a public meeting and speak or present a proposal. We have always believed in more rather than less public participation, and question the ability of any single individual to adequately speak for the great variety of interests and concerns that exist in our community.
HRR presented a series of letters supporting Rachel Fletcher’s nomination as the single public ex officio member of the Trustee Council but we have not seen any public meetings in any of the towns along the river to demonstrate that the public has enthusiastically endorsed this notion. HRI has no problem with Rachel Fletcher and HRR having a seat at the table, as long as the table is available to the rest of us. We will continue to advocate for your right to be heard by the Natural Resource Damages Trustee Council, and the most open public process as possible.