The Project

Whitehall, NY

23 33.25 N 73 24.14 W

Last night in Mechanicville, our friends Carmello and Diane came to visit. We had dinner and then played games until late at night. It was fun to see them once again.

Today we passed the infamous Hudson River Dredging Project which has been underway for only 2 weeks so far. There is a lot of equipment at the site, tugs, barges, dredgers, moorings, floating instrumentation packages, a dewatering plant. Everything is brand new.

For Libby and me, the story of this project seems to have gone on for most of our lives. It has been in the news for 20-25 years. Here's the short form of the story. General Electric had a permit from the state to dump PCB waste in to the river. They did so for decades. Later, someone decided that PCBs are dangerous. Using a new superfund law, the government ordered GE to pay to remove the PCBs from the river bed. It made no difference that the dumping was legal when they did it.

GE fought and fought and fought the government in court. That's what made it drag on for decades. Eventually they lost all their appeals. The cost of the dredging is about $500 billion, and GE has to pay all of it.

An argument against the dredging was that it would re-suspend the PCBs in the water. In the 20-30 years since they stopped dumping, the level of PCBs in the Hudson waters dropped to nearly zero. Digging up the mud on the bottom could raise the levels again. Guess what? After 1 week of dredging, the measured levels of PCBs near the dredging site are only 150 parts per trillion; only 10% of EPA limits for drinking water. It sounds like all the arguments on both sides were phoney. On one hand, the dredging is pointless in the first place because the PCBs were entombed in the bottom mud that would not move. On the other hand, fears that dredging would cause new pollution have proved false anyhow.

What do they do with the mud? They take it by train to Texas, the closest politically acceptable place to dump it.

So what's the moral to the story? It shows how horribly wrong things can go when one mixes public fear and politics and lawyers.