The Hudson River: Sixty Years of Abuse and Five of Gain

This post is going to be a bit long as it hits very close to home for our family. My mom worked at Scenic Hudson before working at The Nature Conservancy and I still have memories of watching her the TV as she gave talks about how we needed to clean up the Hudson and going to protests up and down the river. Luckily, the Hudson is now being taken care of in a way that it hasn't in a long time and it's laregly due to the people that I grew up with who I consider to be second mothers (go empowered women!), aunts and uncles. With that said, on with the post!

          After the Second World War, the United States began an era of rapid production. When this happened, there wasn’t much thought to what the environmental damages would be if production went uncontained. This proved to be deadly for the Hudson River. In General Electric’s (GE) production

of electrical capacitors they used they used polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) as type of cooling fluid. The problem is, without any laws regulating where the PCBs could be dumped, GE had dumped around 1.3 million pounds of PCBs (Stanne, 175). Couple this with slow reaction and delayed action, the Hudson River suffered for sixty years before any actual effort was made to clean up the river.

            Perhaps one of the triggering factors for PCBs becoming the huge issue that they became (and are) was the removal of the Fort Edward Dam in 1973 which caused a large amount of PCBs to be transported further down the river into the lower Hudson. Over the next two years, scientists began finding higher levels of PCBs in the fish throughout the River and the Toxic Substance Control Act of 1976 banning the manufacture of PCBs was passed by Congress. It was later in this year that an Administrative hearing found GE at fault for all the pollution.

            During the 1980s, the EPA put the Hudson on the Superfund National Priority but in 1984, the EPA called for no action. Many found this decision unsatisfactory as studies were still coming out showing that fish in the river were still unsafe and there was a possibility that by dredging sediment from the river, it could be cleaned. In 1989, DEC asked for the EPA to reconsider their decision.

Image courtesy of clearwater.org

            Enter the 1990s, and the situation is only getting worse. In 1993, GE admitted that PCBs had probably been seeping out of the ground since at least the early 80s. Later in the same year, it is discovered that several capacitors full of PCBs had been left in river. Though these are removed, it doesn’t stop the problem. The DEC was able to get GE to clean up under and around the plant but could not do anything to make GE clean up the river. The situation really hit home in 1996 however when scientists made the discovery that PCBs were evaporating from the river and the level of PCBs in non-fish eaters living in the Hudson River Valley. In the same year, the EPA announced its investigation of PCB health risks would not include inhalation pathways, endocrine disruptions, or the effects on women and children. Luckily for the River, headway was made by the late 90s. Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt held a press conference in which he told GE that he would no longer accept them trying to delay the cleanup and that the Superfund project should stop being influenced and changed by major companies to fit their goals.

            It wasn’t until 2001 that GE was lawfully required to take action for what they had. The EPA released a Record of Decision (ROD) which was a legal order to remediate. At this point, if GE had decided to challenge the ROD, the EPA would have had to begin cleanup by themselves with public money. GE would have then have been at risk of having to pay three times the costs of the cleanup costs if it lost its appeal. Seeing as for the past thirty years GE had been trying to get out of having to pay loads of money, it makes sense that they agreed to help with cleanup. Even then, it took about seven years for actual cleanup to begin. As shown on the diagram titled, “Hudson River PCBS Superfund: Sequence of Key Events”, there were a number of bureaucratic decisions that had to be made, where dredging would happen had to be decided, however, dredging for phase one began and was completed in 2009. Phase two is still in progress but is going well because, “GE exceeded its dredging goal because favorable weather allowed theChamplain Canal to remain open to dredging vessels for an extra few weeks” reports Dredging News Online.

            Though phase two is still underway, it is showing promising signs. But this comes too late for many species living in the river. Slow government action on behalf of the EPA coupled with unwillingness to help from GE delayed cleanup for over thirty years, causing unnecessary damage to the important ecosystem.

Want to know more? Check out these websites for more information:
http://www.clearwater.org/ea/pcb-contamination/
http://www.epa.gov/hudson/cleanup.html#quest1

Stanne, Stephen P., Roger G. Panetta , and Brian E. Forist .

                The Hudson: An Illustrated Guide to the Living

                River. 2nd ed. Rutgers University Press, 2007.

                173-182. Print.