SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. >> The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has delayed a certificate of completion for General Electric Company’s massive Hudson River PCB dredging project.
GE spent $1.7 billion on the largest Superfund project in U.S. history when it removed 2.75 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment from 2009-15. GE dumped polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a suspected carcinogen, into the Hudson at plants in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls for more than 30 years, beginning in the 1940s.
But environmental groups say unacceptably high levels of PCBs still remain, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo said last month the state would sue the EPA if it declared cleanup work complete.
“Based on extensive data, it is overwhelmingly clear that GE’s cleanup of PCB contamination is not complete,” Cuomo said Wednesday. “The EPA made the right decision by heeding our warnings and not issuing a certificate of completion this past month. As I have said before, if the EPA reverses course and chooses to ignore the facts, we will partner with New York’s attorney general to sue the federal government. The health and wellbeing of New Yorkers is at stake, and we will not rest until the cleanup is completed once and for all.”
But GE spokesman Mark Behan said dredging removed all of the PCBs targeted for removal by the EPA, about 80 percent of those in the river and twice as much as originally projected.
“PCB levels in water at every station on the river where environmental data are collected have declined sharply and are continuing to decline,” he said. “EPA has advised us that the agency will complete its five-year review report early this year and consider our application for a certificate of completion. We look forward to EPA promptly completing both documents.”
In December 2016, GE submitted an extensive report to EPA, detailing everything that took place during dredging and requesting a certificate of completion. EPA was supposed to respond with a report by Dec. 23, 2017, but first had to review numerous public comments received on the cleanup project.
“Finalizing that report has taken longer than we anticipated, because of the number and complexity of comments submitted,” EPA Hudson River Project Manager Gary Klawinski told GE in a Tuesday letter.
He said EPA would decide whether or not to issue a certificate of completion early this year.
Klawinski has said dredging work done to date, plus natural remediation, will eliminate threats to human health, although not as fast as hoped for – at least another 55 years. Critics, including the state Department of Environmental Conservation, say this is an unacceptably long time and want more PCBs removed, even if this requires more dredging.
“A remedy that takes 55 years to be protective is not protective,” DEC geologist Kevin Farrar said recently. “Our position is that EPA should have made them (GE) do more.”
