G.E.'s Comments on Disposal of PCB's Draw
Objections
By Andrew C. Revkin
Copyright 1998 New York Times
January 28, 1999
To many people in the Hudson Valley, the scenario is familiar:
A stain of
PCB's, toxic industrial chemicals, lies buried along the river.
Environmental
officials and residents are eager to dig it up, and General
Electric presses to
let the contaminants stay where they are.
The difference this time is that General Electric had
nothing to do with this
particular pocket of pollution, which is in a fenced lot in
Hastings-on-Hudson,
a prosperous Westchester village 15 miles from Manhattan. General
Electric's
factories, which generated most of the PCB's in the river, are 150
miles
upstream.
That is why Hastings residents and some elected officials
complained yesterday
that the company was improperly interfering in local affairs when
it filed
comments contending that the pollution did not pose a significant
environmental
threat and opposing a state plan to excavate the tainted soil.
Jean Zimmerman, chairman of Hastings
Waterfront Watch, a local environmental group, called for a boycott
of the
company, saying its intrusion was irresponsible.
"G.E. should keep out of the Hastings waterfront
cleanup process and mind its
own PCB's," she said.
Company officials defended the seven-page letter sent to
the state's Department
of Environmental
Conservation in November, which criticized many aspects of the
proposed $40
million cleanup plan. David Warshaw, a spokesman for General
Electric, said
state law allows anyone to comment on such an issue.
"To suggest that one portion of the public should in
some way be shut
out seems to be at odds with 25 years of environmental law,"
he said.
General Electric has been engaged in costly PCB cleanups at
its plants in
Hudson Falls and Fort Edwards and faces as much as $1 billion in
cleanup costs
if Federal officials order it to dredge
"hot spots" downriver of the factories. That decision is
due next year.
Over the last decade, the company has repeatedly challenged
Federal and state
decisions to dig up polluted soil or river mud, saying that in most
cases the
chemicals pose no substantial health
risk and eventually break
down if left buried.
Federal environmental officials say PCB's, or
polychlorinated biphenyls, are a
probable
cause of cancer and other ills in humans and can harm wildlife. The
chemicals were banned in
1977.
In Hastings, high levels of PCB's accumulated in the soil
and leached into the
river
during wire-making operations at a factory owned by Anaconda Wire
and Cable
Company from 1919 to 1978. Other hazardous chemicals and heavy
metals permeate
parts of the 26-acre tract. Once state officials settle on a
cleanup plan, it
will be
undertaken and paid for by the Atlantic Richfield Company, the
current owner of
the property. Atlantic Richfield has not opposed the cleanup plan.
The current proposal calls for the excavation of six
heavily contaminated
spots, with the material taken to hazardous waste landfills. Other
areas would
be capped with clean soil or
other materials.
General Electric said the PCB's could be permanently sealed
and stabilized
where they are, eliminating the need for costly digging, trucking
and disposal.
This echoes its position on the dredging of PCB's in the upper
Hudson.
Mr. Warshaw said the company felt it was obligated to share
its expertise and
opinions, which had been gained
over more than a decade of studying and cleaning PCB contamination.
Richard L. Brodsky, the chairman of the Assembly Committee
on Environmental
Conservation and a Democrat representing Hastings, said General
Electric had no
right to file comments in the cleanup case.
"The notion that they're casually offering
an opinion just to be helpful doesn't have any dignity," said
Mr. Brodsky, who held a news conference yesterday to draw attention
to
the issue.
"Hastings is a pawn in the larger G.E. chess game."
Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for the State Department of
Environmental
Conservation, said yesterday that there were no obvious legal
barriers to
General Electric's expressing its views on cleanups that were not
its
responsibility.
The company filed similar comments last year when the state
agency proposed a
PCB cleanup at a site owned by Georgia Pacific Corporation
on the shore of Lake Champlain in Plattsburgh, Mr. Sheffer said.
"We asked for removal," Mr. Sheffer said.
"G.E. thought the best solution was containment, and we opted
for removal."
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