GE finishes dredging upper Hudson River

ALBANY >> General Electric said Monday it has completed its dredging of contaminated sediment from the upper Hudson River six years after a massive $2 billion federal Superfund cleanup began.

“We brought world-class GE engineering and technology to the task, and we met every obligation on the Hudson and will continue to do so,” General Electric Co. CEO Jeff Immelt said Monday.

The company, whose operations involve home appliances, health care, transportation, aviation and other industries, discharged polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, into the river decades ago when they were used as coolants in electrical equipment manufactured at its nearby factories.

PCBs, manmade chemicals, also were used by companies in paints, plastics and many other products, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said they were demonstrated to cause cancer and other ailments, and their manufacture was banned in 1979.

About 2.75 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment has been removed from a 40-mile stretch of river north of Albany. The company said its crews removed from the river 300,000 pounds of PCBs, more than twice what was anticipated.

The cleanup project, overseen by the EPA, is not over. Flood plain work, habitat reconstruction and long-term monitoring of the river, which is more than 300 miles long, will continue.

Also, government trustees will make an assessment of the harm done to the river’s resources, through litigation or through a settlement with Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE over its liability.

An environmental group criticized GE’s announcement that it was finished dredging, saying the “partial cleanup” would leave behind hundreds of thousands of pounds of PCB-contaminated sediment.

“This cleanup is inadequate and must go on for twomore seasons to ensure that the river’s health and the health and economic opportunity of the people of New York have been restored,” said Ned Sullivan, president of Scenic Hudson.

The Hudson River Natural Resource Trustees, a three-member group of government officials, had asked the EPA to delay the dismantling of a plant used to process the polluted sediment. The trustees said the possibility of future dredging shouldn’t be foreclosed.

Last week, the EPA said it has no problem with GE dismantling the cleanup plant. It said it doesn’t foresee a need for additional dredging but if a need becomes apparent a new processing plant could be put in place.