By David Scribner
September 27, 2011
LENOX – The state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), in a tactic that environmentalists claim is a concession to – if not an outright partnership with — the General Electric Company, has adopted a minimal approach to protecting wildlife and humans from the PCB contamination in the Housatonic River watershed, recommending instead a watered-down removal of the probable carcinogen and endocrine disruptor from the sediment in the river channel and along the riverbank.
A sign warning of the dangers of PCBs in the Housatonic River. (Photo: David Scribner)
Minimizing the remediation of the river system would save GE hundreds of millions of dollars. And it’s not surprising the DEP is taking a do-less-is-more approach to PCB removal: Bob Durand, former secretary of the state’s Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, is now GE’s principal lobbyist.
The DEP was to have presented its plan on Sept. 21 in a hastily called session at Lenox Town Hall – in an apparent campaign to muster support for the less comprehensive cleanup. The state agency was trying to get the jump on the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which is drafting its cleanup recommendations that are likely to call for a more complete restoration of the river environment and will be the subject of months of public input and review.
At issue is the method and scope of removing PCBs from the river south of Pittsfield, the so-called “Rest of the River.”
But complaints from members of the Citizens Coordinating Committee, a diverse group of business, political and environmental interests that monitor the river cleanup, forced the DEP to reschedule the session until Oct. 12.
“We were not even given the courtesy of a direct invitation via personal phone call, letter or direct e-mail,” fumed Barbara Cianfarini of Pittsfield, executive director of Citizens for PCB Removal, in a letter to DEP Commissioner Ken Kimmel. “We had barely one week’s notice of a meeting directly impacting us and the next phase of a very long and complex process. This hastily arranged and poorly communicated meeting has very much the appearance of being a politically motivated attempt at circumnavigating the Open Meetings Law.”
The criticism of the DEP highlights a significant battle between state regulators and their federal counterparts at the EPA.
The DEP, along with its affiliated Fish and Wildlife Department, is recommending the excavation of 286,000 cubic yards of PCB-laced sediment from Woods Pond in Lenoxdale and removing the contamination from 33 acres of floodplain, but avoiding cleanup of “highly sensitive rare species habitat when unnecessary to meet human health goals.” Instead, the DEP has suggested that posting signs warning of dangerous pollution in those areas would be sufficient.
Supporting the DEP’s minimalist approach is General Electric’s heavily advertised Web site, called “Housatonic Options,” in which the company disparages the removal of PCB contaminants and other toxins from the river adjacent to its former manufacturing facility in Pittsfield.
On the site, GE maintains that “there is no reliable evidence that exposure to PCBs, at levels found in the Housatonic, are associated with adverse health effects in humans.”
This viewpoint is also the basis for a concurrent publicity campaign by Smart River Cleanup, an alliance of local business groups under the umbrella of 1Berkshire. This group is also funded by General Electric, having received a covert payment of $300,000 last year to advocate for a less comprehensive cleanup.
But it’s not the DEP’s ballgame. The EPA has jurisdiction over the scope of the cleanup of the river south of Pittsfield, as part of a 2001 consent decree signed among government agencies and General Electric. The federal agency is in the final stages of preparing its recommended PCB-removal plan, one based upon its comprehensive scientific studies and its mandate to protect both human health and wildlife in the contaminated ecosystem. The EPA remedy for the removal of contaminants is likely to be more rigorous than that endorsed by state regulators.
The EPA, however, would prefer that state environmental officials were at least sufficiently in agreement with the health risks posed by PCBs that the DEP would support the EPA in the inevitable legal challenges to its plan. It would be strange indeed if the DEP ended up opposing the EPA remedy in court, especially given the fact that in every other cleanup in which the DEP and the EPA are involved they have close collaboration. It’s only in this case, with GE involved – and with Durand, the state’s former top environmental official, now employed as a lobbyist for GE – that the DEP and EPA have parted company.
“We were hoping to release our plan in September, but the DEP’s campaign has delayed it by 60 to 90 days, so it won’t be made public until the end of the year,” explained EPA spokesperson Jim Murphy. “We’re going to have a series of meetings with the state regulators and their technical staff. This is not the first meeting we’ve had, and we’re trying to build a relationship and some trust. Maybe we’ll make some progress.”
Murphy pointed out that an EPA Remedy Review Board, having examined a draft of the EPA plan for the Housatonic, had “generally endorsed our approach, although they have some questions that have made us adjust it a little bit.”
“The DEP is pushing to get the EPA to back down,” observed Tim Gray, environmental activist and founder of the Housatonic River Initiative. “The EPA, actually, needs the state to be on its side, in order to provide a unified front.”
According to Gray, “there is no other state in the nation in which a state environmental agencies is trying to tell the EPA not to clean up such a serious contamination problem that is damaging to humans and to wildlife.”
He insists that the state is relying upon data provided by General Electric, rather than independent scientific analysis, in order to justify its position. How else to explain, he maintains, the DEP’s abandonment of its stewardship of wildlife like the bald eagle, a species the EPA has identified as particularly at risk from PCB contamination since the eagles’ primary food source in the Housatonic River basin is PCB-laced fish.
And contrary to what GE promulgates, the cleanup of the river in Pittsfield is a success story, he argues.
“The two miles they clean up in Pittsfield are now teeming with wildlife, native species, and with fish in the river,” Gray noted. “All the signs point to a river that is returning to health and an environment that is flourishing, now that the pollution has been removed. I’m very bullish on the EPA being able to restore the river south of Pittsfield.”