Keeping tabs on the river clean-up

“The river from Troy to the south of Albany is one great septic tank that has been rendered nearly useless for water supply, for swimming, or to support the rich life that once abounded there,” Governor Nelson Rockefeller said in 1965.

He wasn’t wrong: Between 1947 and 1977, General Electric (GE) released approximately 1.3 million pounds of polycholorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the Hudson River. On top of those toxic PCBs, raw sewage was dumped into the river – 150 million gallons of raw sewage entered the river daily until 1986.

Today, the Hudson River is much cleaner than it was due to sewage treatment requirements, the passage of the Hudson River Estuary Act in 1987, a “No Discharge Zone” designated from Troy to Manhattan in 2003, and the enactment of the Clean Water Act.

But it took years – from 1984 when the river was declared a Superfund site, “a designation given to the most dangerously polluted lands and waters in the nation,” to 2002, when the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) first created a PCB clean-up plan with GE, to 2009 when clean-up began to remove 150 tons of PCB-contaminated sediment from a 40-mile stretch of river.

The dredging, according to Scenic Hudson left “significant quantities [of PCBs] in the river. Health officials warn that Hudson River fish are still unsafe to eat, advising that children and women of child bearing age eat none.”

This winter, the EPA plans to release its status of the PCB clean-up, and “whether the selected cleanup remedy is working as intended” for public comment.

On November 14, 2023 at 5:30pm, the Friends of Clean Hudson – a group of organizations that include Clearwater, Riverkeeper and Scenic Hudson – will host a free virtual meeting to discuss their assessment of the EPA’s Upper Hudson River PCB clean-up. Register: https://www.riverkeeper.org/news-events/events/rvk-events/hudson-river-pcbs-superfund-site-virtual-meeting/

Source: https://www.hrmm.org/history-blog/the-hudson-river-then-and-now-a-brief-history-of-water-quality

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