Going to Extremes - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 27

The top two feet or so of earth in Gibbs's yard was scraped away and replaced by
clean fill. But Gibbs doesn't believe it helped. The field behind his house yielded PCB
levels of three hundred thousand parts per million, he said, “which is basically pure
product.” Though it is impossible to prove a link to the PCBs, Gibbs's dog developed a
rare blood vessel cancer and died, and several neighbors—including his parents, sister,
and aunt—contracted leukemia and other cancers, and several of them died. Gibbs and
at least 150 other residents who live along the Housatonic in Berkshire County have
PCB levels higher than the EPA limit of 2 ppb in their blood.
“You lied to me, General Electric!” Gibbs shouted from his deck. “Now my job is to
find some very sharp sticks and poke you in the eye.”
In 1991, the federal EPA began legal proceedings to define the scope of the Housatonic's
pollution by GE. The company steadfastly maintained that its dumping of PCBs was leg-
al and safe, and refused to acknowledge it was responsible for cleaning the river. Never-
theless, the EPA found that exposure to PCBs led to “ increases in cancer mortality in
workers ,” while experts worried that major storms or floods could spread PCBs widely
and in uncontrolled ways. In 1996, the government sued GE, and the following year
placed the Housatonic and Pittsfield on the Superfund National Priorities List—a pre-
liminary step the government takes before designating a contaminated site ready for Su-
perfund cleanup, which acts as a stern warning to alleged polluters. In a settlement, GE
begrudgingly agreed to clean a half-mile stretch of the Housatonic below its Pittsfield
factory.
One major roadblock was Jack Welch . A Massachusetts native, Welch began his stor-
ied career at GE in the Pittsfield plant in 1960, as a $10,000-a-year engineer; he later
rose to become the plant's manager. In 1998, when Welch earned $83.6 million a year as
the company's chairman and CEO, he testified, “ PCBs do not pose health risks . Based
on the scientific evidence … we simply do not believe that there are any significant ad-
verse health effects.”
The EPA argued that the PCBs should be scraped out of the Housatonic and sealed
away in a landfill, but Welch vehemently disagreed. He hired scientists and lawyers and
spent years challenging the need to remove the contaminated mud from the river bot-
tom—an expensive, technically challenging process. he company's lawyers devised a
clever argument that it repeated as often as possible: dredging up PCBs would only stir
them into the water column and cause more health problems than if they were let alone;
if let buried in the river's sediment, the PCBs would bio-degrade over time.
HRI and others disputed this logic (the EPA notes that the type of PCBs found in the
Housatonic take “hundreds of years” to degrade), yet regulators were unable, or unwill-
ing, to force the company's hand.