Going to Extremes - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 25

the signs and eat the local fish and ducks anyway—a practice, the EPA said, that makes
them a thousand times more susceptible to serious medical problems.
In 1997, GE ran ads that said, “ here have been a lot of studies of long-term worker
exposure to PCBs, and they show overwhelmingly that even workers who had close
contact with PCBs day after day showed no unusual health problems.”
hat year, it was discovered that the soil in a playground in a largely African Amer-
ican neighborhood of Pittsfield was laced with PCBs. The revelation made headlines
across the country. Then Lakewood, a neighborhood mostly populated by Italian Amer-
ican families, was discovered to contain extremely high levels of PCBs. One house lot
was found to have 44,000 ppm of PCBs: GE bought the house, tore it down, and fenced
off the lot. But the greatest indignity was Hill 78, once a five-acre ravine next to Allend-
ale Elementary School. Beginning in the 1930s, GE began shoveling PCB-laced earth
into the ravine until it grew into a tall mound. The pile remains today, looming about
forty feet over the school. Soil samples from inside Hill 78 register PCB levels of 120,000
ppm. The soil around the school has been excavated and “capped” with untainted soil,
but traces of PCBs have been found in air filters inside the school's buildings, according
to HRI. In the 1990s, the EPA said it would clean Hill 78, but in 2000 the agency sud-
denly reversed course. Not only would Hill 78 remain as it was, the EPA said, but PCBs
dredged from the Housatonic would be added on top of it.
As GE began to lay of workers and pull out of town, some Pittsfield residents rose
up to protest the toxic legacy it had left behind.
“THE WORST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO PITTSFIELD”
On a brisk November afternoon in 2009, Tim Gray pulled his blue minivan to a stop
along the Housatonic River in Pittsfield and pointed upstream at the hulking shell of the
old General Electric plant. “When the EPA and the Massachusetts Department of En-
vironmental Protection (DEP) people first got here, the situation was so out of control
that they became shell-shocked,” he said. “That plant was literally marinating in toxic
chemicals. The regulators had no idea what to do. They weren't evil people, it's just they
had never seen anything like it before. When a few of us tried to help, they didn't want
to hear from us.”
Gray irst encountered PCBs in 1976 , when, as an undergraduate studying natural
resource science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, he and some friends
tested the Housatonic's water and discovered PCBs in the river below the GE plant.
His research was ignored, but, indignant about the pollution, Gray, now a soft-spoken