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Colonie-- Company wants to delay EPA dredging, give its own cleanup strategy a chance

By DINA CAPPIELLO
Thursday, December 21, 2000

The General Electric Co. called on the federal government Wednesday to hold off on a "destructive'' dredging plan for the Upper Hudson River until the company has had a chance to try out its own cleanup strategy.

GE said its plan, which would cost up to $20 million and delay by five years the start of the $460 million dredging project proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, would cut off the three ounces of PCBs per day that leak into the river from bedrock beneath the company's Hudson Falls capacitor plant.

But unlike dredging, the company project would not address the 40 hot spots north of the Troy Dam that contain millions of pounds of PCBs discharged by GE over three decades. The EPA believes PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, escape from these highly contaminated pockets of sediment to enter the food chain, where eventually they reach humans who eat fish. This is why PCB-tainted sediment needs to be removed, according to the EPA.

GE officials said Wednesday that the benefit of the government's dredging project on PCB levels in fish, sediment and water would be negligible compared to their own plan, and that without "source control,'' the river would never fully recover.

"What do the agency and the environment have to lose to undertake a source control program and wait to see the benefits? If this doesn't work, you could dredge until doomsday and have no improvement in the fish,'' said Stephen Ramsey, GE's vice president of corporate environmental programs, at a news briefing at the Marriott Hotel Wednesday at which GE criticized almost every facet of the EPA plan.

The company's proposal, which calls for digging a 1,500-foot-long tunnel deep within the bedrock separating the Hudson Falls plant from the river, was tentatively approved by the state Department of Environmental Conservation late last week. It would delay dredging until 2008, the year that the EPA is expected to have finished its removal of 2.65 million cubic yards of PCB-laden sediment.

The EPA plan would use a total of four dredges operating 19 hours a day for six months a year. It would result in three to nine barge trips up and down the river each day to cart contaminated sediment from the river bottom to temporary storage sites, or a 10-mile-long underwater pipe carrying mud and water. After removing millions of gallons of water, an average of 20 rail cars a day would transport the dried PCB sediment out of the Hudson Valley for disposal. Then 99 acres of aquatic habitat and 17 miles of shoreline would have to be restored.

GE, which had a dozen experts pore over the agency's 4,000-page feasibility study last week, used all of these facts Wednesday to support its argument, which is that dredging would hurt both the river's ecology and community and be a crapshoot when it came to the benefits. In 1984, the EPA failed to order bank-to-bank dredging because the agency said it would be environmentally devastating to the river.

"They are going to put a Spanish Armada of dredging boats in the Upper Hudson River,'' Ramsey said. "It's going to seem for a lot of people who live up there that they are living next to an offshore drilling rig in their back yards.''

Adam Ayers, one of a handful of experts on the panel assembled by the company Wednesday, added: "It's almost like clear-cutting a forest. It's going to denude the river bottom.''

The final plan for the EPA won't be hammered out until 2003, after a design phase. But the company denied that its criticisms were premature, despite changes that have already occurred since the initial plan was released Dec. 12.

At that time, the EPA also was calling for control of the seepage at the Hudson Falls plant, but the federal plan for that site became moot when an agreement was struck between GE and the state. The DEC oversees the PCB cleanup under way at the Hudson Falls and Fort Edward capacitor plants because both are state Superfund sites. EPA is in charge of the cleanup of the Hudson River federal Superfund site, which runs 200 miles from Fort Edward to the Battery in New York City.

The EPA says stopping PCB leaks from GE's plants, while beneficial, is not enough to restore the river completely.

"Both source control and a hot-spot cleanup are critical to restoring the river,'' said EPA spokeswoman Bonnie Bellow. "We believe our proposed plan for targeted dredging will restore the health of the river and protect the people who live there and eat the fish.''