EPA ORDERS CLEAN-UP OF 2 MILES OF THE RIVER
In June 4, 1998 letters to Berkshire County residents John DeVillars, Region 1 Administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency announced the results of recently completed evaluations of the human health and ecological impacts of PCB contamination of the Housatonic River and its floodplain.
Based on its own testing — spurred in large part by the Housatonic River Initiatives’s decade-long public insistence on a new independent testing program – the EPA found high and dangerous levels on a two-mile stretch of the river downstream from the General Electric’s 250-acre former transformer manufacturing plant.
DeVillar’s letter states: “Young children and teenagers playing in and near portions of the river face noncancer risks that are 200 times greater than what the EPA considers safe. Noncancer effects from PCBs may include liver and nervous system damage and developmental abnormalities, including lower IQs.” Teenagers growing up near portions of the river face a 1 in 1,000 cancer risk due to exposure to contaminated riverbank soils, he added.
“Fish collected in the river had PCB concentrations of up to 206 parts per million, among the highest levels ever found in the United States and 100 times higher than the limits set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Ninety-one of 93 sediment samples taken in the Upper Reach of the river showed the presence of PCBs.”
In spite of GE’s claim to the contrary, DeVillars goes on to emphasize that “it is the EPA’s concern for citizens’ health that is driving the agency’s actions to clean up the heavily contaminated 2-mile section of the Housatonic … ”
An EPA fact sheet contradicts GE’s claim that “people do not get PCBs in their blood from soil.” Instead, the EPA report concludes: “There are three primary means which people can be exposed to PCB contamination in and around the Housatonic River:
• Eating fish from the river.
• Children accidentally ingesting PCBs, for example by sticking hands covered with contaminated soils or sediments in their mouths.
• Skin contacting contaminated soils and sediments long enough to absorb contamination.
We have become used to, perhaps even resigned to, an epidemic of cancer. Peter Montague in the September 25, 1997 issue of Rachel’s Environment & Health Weekly #565 (www.monitor.net/rachel) reminds us that “in 1950, 25 percent of adults in the U.S. could expect to get cancer during their lifetimes; today about 40 percent of us (38.3 percent of women and 48.2 percent of men) can expect to get cancer.”
(The above account was assembled by the Housatonic River Initiative.)