Going to Extremes - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 28

GE used the same argument to deny that it was responsible for cleaning another load
of PCBs—at least 1.3 million pounds' worth—that the company had dumped into the
Hudson River, in New York, between 1947 and 1977. The Hudson is an estuarine river,
with a rich fishery famous for its runs of striped bass and shad. But in 1976, all fishing
was banned in the Hudson's upper reaches, due to concerns over toxins in the sediment
and fish. In 2002, the EPA issued a Record of Decision, which defined 197 miles of the
Hudson a Superfund site (the largest in the nation), and required GE to undertake a
massive restoration effort.
Although the Superfund law holds polluters retroactively responsible for any
cleanup, GE maintained that the PCBs in the Hudson were better left undisturbed, and
delayed the case for years. Between 1990 and 2005, activist shareholders discovered
that GE had spent $122 million on political donations, lobbyists, scientific experts, and
lawyers—such as Harvard Law School's constitutional expert Laurence Tribe —to avoid
dredging the Hudson.
In 2001 Jack Welch retired and was replaced as GE chairman by Jeffrey Immelt, who
agreed to work with the EPA to dredge the Hudson clear of PCBs. In May 2009, a dredge
lowered a blue clamshell bucket into the river near the town of Moreau, New York, and
brought up the first scoop of toxic mud, which it deposited in a hopper barge. Once
dewatered at a $100 million GE treatment plant, the contaminated Hudson mud was
wrapped in plastic and shipped by rail to a dump in West Texas. By the time it is in-
ished in 2015, GE's remediation of the Hudson will be the most complex and expensive
environmental cleanup in history. The first phase will remove 22 tons of the pollutant
from the river; the second phase will remove 102 tons. Federal officials say the program
will cost $750 million, though industry experts estimate the total cost will be “much lar-
ger than that.”
Money helps to explain GE's recalcitrance: the company is wholly or partially re-
sponsible for 175 Superfund sites across the country, according to Harper's.If it is forced
to clean up the Hudson and the Housatonic, then GE could well be obliged to pay for
expensive cleanups elsewhere.
Cleanup of the Housatonic has gone more slowly , with much less fanfare than the larger
Hudson case. By 2008, GE had spent $250 million to clean a two-mile section of the
river below its Pittsfield plant. The EPA maintains that the two miles of dredged river
will not become recontaminated by PCBs, but that seems like wishful thinking. PCBs
remain in the river's banks, in its wide floodplains, and in storm drains that empty into
the river. Silver Lake, which feeds the Housatonic, and Woods Pond, through which the
river flows, remain polluted by PCBs. And the 147 miles of river south of the cleaned
zone remain contaminated, mostly at dam sites, where PCBs collect. In preparation for