Going to Extremes - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 26

greenhouse operator, helped form the Housatonic River Initiative, won allies, and kept
shouting from the rooftops until his foes had no choice but to listen.
Gray and his neighbors, many of whom were former GE employees, are working-
class people who live along the Housatonic. As they see it, GE made a mess of the river
and should clean it up. “We want our grandkids to have 'a fishable, swimmable' river,
like the Clean Water Act says,” Gray explained. “It's pretty simple—or, at least that's what
we thought when we started this thing.”
HRI has been a constant thorn in the side of both GE and Massachusetts regulators,
using its own experts to show that GE dumped far more PCBs into the river than it
claimed; that PCBs have leached under the river and can evaporate into the air; that
over eight hundred barrels filled with PCBs were dumped into the Pittsfield landfill; and
that ducks poisoned in Massachusetts can fly into Connecticut.
This enrages local boosters. Pittsfield is the county seat, a city of forty-five thousand
set in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains. The region is gentrifying from a rural ag-
ricultural and industrial zone into a popular destination for urban transplants and arts
institutions. But the legacy of GE's pollution is a shadow that looms over the aspiration-
al dreams of developers and politicians.
The aquifer beneath Pittsfield holds a vast store of water, but it is heavily contamin-
ated by industrial chemicals, including PCBs, and cleaning it would be prohibitively ex-
pensive. Instead, the city draws drinking water from nearby reservoirs, which are clean.
But the tainted groundwater could impede future growth, as could HRI's constant harp-
ing about the Housatonic.
One former mayor of Pittsfield called Tim Gray “the worst thing that ever happened
to Pittsfield,” among other names. But such attacks only stiffen HRI's resolve.
Standing in his kitchen, Dave Gibbs , a rangy former crane operator at the GE plant
who is now the president of HRI, said, “The company never said nothin' to me—or any
of the other workers—about the danger in those chemicals. Nothin'!”
Gibbs lives of Newell Street, with a view of the GE plant from his backyard. For
years, a grassy ield there was used by GE as a chemical dump. The BostonGlobeun-
earthed a 1948 memo showing that GE officials were worried about residents' growing
opposition to the burial of PCBs: “This is the last section anywhere near the plant where
we can dump most anything,” one company man confided to another. “I would hate to
have them take it away.” In 2000, EPA inspectors discovered dozens of old capacitors,
corroded barrels filled with PCBs, and what Gibbs calls “a Campbell's soup of dioxins,
ethylene, solvents, and other toxic chemicals” buried in the field. When GE contractors
excavated the field, Gibbs and his wife clandestinely videotaped the contractors crush-
ing barrels and spreading chemicals as they worked.