By David Scribner
Faced with mounting skepticism about its motives and funding, 1Berkshire, an alliance of high-powered business organizations, has apparently reconsidered its position on removal of PCBs from the Housatonic River – at least as represented on its avatar Website, “Smart River Cleanup Coalition.”
Last week, before The Record revealed that 1Berkshire had received a commitment of at least $300,000 from General Electric, the business alliance had mounted a publicity campaign advocating minimal cleanup of the PCBs, a probable carcinogen, that GE had poured into the river for 30 years from its Pittsfield manufacturing complex.
In particular, the business group had opposed dredging of the river and river bank — any dredging, even in highly contaminated ponds such as Woods Pond in Lenox Dale – arguing that such invasive remediation would be harmful to tourism and to the river’s ecology, contaminated though it may be.
Such a stance was expressed by one of its steering committee members, Laurie Norton Moffatt, executive director of the Norman Rockwell Museum and a founding member of Berkshire Creative Economy Council, one of 1Berkshire’s member organizations. The other member organizations of 1Berkshire are the Berkshire Chamber of Commerce and the Berkshire Visitors Bureau.
But now, according to a newly posted explanations of its views, the Smart Clean-up Coalition is advocating dredging of Woods Pond, which has “the greatest concentration of PCBs, has few abutters and would cause little negative impact on the river overall.”
Further, the coalition is now recommending the river clean-up include the “testing and use of emerging technologies that offer the hope of chemically destroying PCBs in the river, riverbanks and wetland areas.”
The coalition also opposes the creation of PCB landfills in South County, an option that GE had contended would be necessary if the toxins were to be physically removed from the river.
At issue is the extent and methodology of the extracting and disposing of the toxins that have embedded themselves in the river environs. The Environmental Protection Agency is now evaluating what remediation process it will order, in response to public comments and to GE’s preference for “natural monitored recovery” that is, in effect, letting the contaminants be gradually neutralized where they now reside without intervention.
The initial position taken by 1Berkshire echoed GE’s strategy of minimizing the health risks – GE refuses to acknowledge the danger of PCBs to human life or to wildlife — in favor of protecting landscape and avoiding disruption that would deter tourism. At stake is the hundreds of millions of dollars GE would have to invest if a more thorough PCB cleanup were to be ordered by the EPA.
In the meantime, however, environmental advocates are pressing ahead to convince the EPA to remove as much of the PCB contamination as possible, arguing that whatever disturbance to the river environment occurs during remediation would soon be replaced by a river safe for swimming and recreation. At the moment, by EPA order, swimming in the river is prohibited, as is the consumption of fish and wildlife that abide there.
On March 1 at the First Congregational Church in Great Barrington, the Housatonic River Initiative is hosting a forum on the public health risks of PCB contamination. The featured speaker is public health expert and toxicologist Dr.David Carpenter from the School of Public Health at the State University of Albany.
Carpenter is well-known for his studies showing that PCB contamination has dire effects on human health, both in adults and children, and has warned that PCBs not only reside in river sediment but, if landfilled, can volatilize, thereby poisoning the air.