Going to Extremes - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 24

But it was not until I wrote this topic that I realized how contaminated the river is. Nor
did I understand why GE's legendary chairman, Jack Welch, fought the cleanup of the
Housatonic, and the nearby Hudson River, in New York, so hard for so long.
In 1903, GE, which had been founded by homas Edison a few years earlier, bought
the Stanley Electric Company and began to manufacture three important product lines
in Pittsfield: electrical capacitors and transformers, military ordnance, and plastics. For
the next seven decades, Pittsfield was a one-company town, and the GE plant expan-
ded to over 5 million square feet of buildings on a 254-acre site. “The GE” employed
eighteen thousand people during the Second World War—75 percent of the local work-
force—and as many as sixty-five hundred in the 1980s. But in the 1990s, the company
began to shut down its Pittsfield operations and sent work to its plants in the South or
overseas.
GE irst used PCBs in Pittsield in 1932, as an insulating fluid in its electrical equip-
ment. But the plant produced so much PCB-contaminated oil that workers ran out of
places to bury it on company grounds. Numerous pipes dumped PCB-laden water and
oil into the ground, storm drains, and nearby Silver Lake, as well as directly into the
Housatonic River. PCBs and other chemicals were poured into metal drums and bur-
ied off-site. PCB-laced oil was sprayed onto dirt roads as a dust suppressant. Wooden
blocks soaked with PCBs were dumped into a nature preserve, Brattle Brook Park. Still,
the PCBs kept piling up.
he Harvard School of Public Health sounded an alarm about the possible adverse
effects of PCBs in 1937, but the companies that produced and used the chemicals ig-
nored the warnings, and government regulators never addressed the question seriously.
In the 1940s, a few Pittsfield residents complained about the PCBs, but most locals re-
mained unaware of the problem or were unwilling to criticize the region's biggest em-
ployer. GE assured citizens that Pittsfield would not be harmed, a message it repeated
for decades.
In the 1950s, GE offered the residents of Pittsfield free “ clean ill , ” which was really
fuller's earth, a Kitty Litter-like substance used to absorb spilled PCBs. All that the re-
cipients of the fuller's earth had to do was to sign a waiver agreeing that they had re-
ceived clean fill and would not hold GE liable for any health problems resulting from it.
They happily did so—unaware that it was toxic, according to HRI—and used the fill in
construction projects or to enhance their lawns and gardens.
In the 1970s Massachusetts health authorities discovered that milk from cows grazed
along the banks of the Housatonic near Pittsfield was contaminated by PCBs. GE
bought portions of two farms built on the river's floodplain. Four decades later, signs
are still posted along the river, warning of PCB pollution and advising people not to
consume the Housatonic's fish, waterfowl, frogs, and turtles. Yet some people ignore