Conversation

The federal Superfund review process for the Hudson River is finally coming to an end in a few months. After facing 12 delays and ten years studying the issue, the Environmental Protection Agency is scheduled to make its recommendation by December of this year for a clean-up plan for the river. With the issues of PCBs, General Electric and dredging the Hudson heating up as the review process nears completion in an election year, I spoke to Andy Mele, Executive Director of Clearwater about the issues. —Brian K. Mahoney

C: What does it mean that the Hudson River has been designated a Superfund site?
Andy Mele: That’s a regulatory description. That means that under the terms of CERCLA—which I can never remember—Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act, I think is what it stands for. The Hudson River is designated as an area afflicted with some toxic pollutant or other that is in the middle of a regulatory process according to the statute of that law, to determine who the polluter is, what their liability is, and to see about getting it cleaned up.
C: How healthy is the river now, as compared to, say, twenty years ago?
AM: Oh, it’s very, very healthy. First of all, I mean, the PCB levels have dropped because GE stopped dumping finally. They were forced to stop, basically at the point of a gun. So the level—yeah, the PCBs have—basically gone downriver, downstream, and sort of diluted themselves in the environment. Which is not exactly a stunning victory, but if you just take a narrow snapshot of the river, the levels are lower, and so that’s positive. We have the Clean Water Act, which Clearwater was instrumental in getting passed, which has put up sewage treatment plants. You know, thirty years ago, there were virtually no sewage treatment plants. A lot of communities on the river just shot stuff directly into the river and so it was a pretty nasty place. There was all sorts of industrial stuff, there was trash, garbage, refrigerators, Volkswagens floating down the river. I know somebody who saw a dead giraffe one time. It was really, really gross, it smelled bad, the fish all tasted of oil, very high bacterial counts, whole areas of the river that were anoxic and therefore dead. The whole ten miles from Albany, down the so-called Albany Pool, stone dead, nothing there but bacteria and algae. And the same in New York Harbor. So, it was pretty bad. The river is indeed much better now—no thanks to General Electric. I mean, I’m at pains to say that, because in their advertising they appear to be trying to associate themselves in some way with the recovery of the river, whereas they have been fighting it every step of the way. It’s a very offensive irony that we just simply don’t have the money to strike back at. You know, they’re using fish and eagles—the natural beauty and health of the river—to somehow back their own avoidance of a cleanup liability.
C: PCBs are now the major contaminant in the river, is this correct?
AM: They are actually just one of many. They are a front burner issue mostly because of General Electric’s intransigence. If we lose this one on the Hudson River, there’s a strong possibility that every polluter in the country is gonna start going to school on GE’s strategies here. GE has been absolutely refusing to cooperate in this cleanup and has indeed been investing, instead of in a positive way, in a negative way, spending about 2 million bucks a week on advertising. So we see ourselves as the line in the sand that has to be drawn, for the sake of the rest of the country. There are lots of other industrial pollutants on the river. There’s mercury in the river, there’s heavy metals, there’s lots of things that we haven’t had a chance to get to, like recreational motorcraft for instance. Recreational boats—the boats with two-stroke engines, outboard motorboats, and jet skis, are taking on the aggregate, are outpolluting the biggest industrial polluters. And they’re polluting with a pretty toxic material—polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are basically a byproduct of uncombusted gasoline. So that’s something that really needs attention. It is a federal waterway—that makes it difficult—but we’ve got a couple of good bills through the State this year, which helped in other areas of the state. But the Hudson remains the Wild West as far as motorboating goes.
C: What would happen if nothing occurred involving dredging and the PCBs stayed in the sediment of the river bed? You said that the Hudson is now healthier than it’s ever been. So if I were to play devil’s advocate, I would say, well, GE has a point here. The river’s healthier than it’s ever been, they’ve stopped dumping their pollutants into the river, so why even bother with it?
AM: Well, just the pollutants that are in the river right now are continuing to replenish the pollutants in the lower Hudson, and it’ll be 50 years before the fish are safe to eat again. That’s two generations from now. That’s one good solid reason. Another good solid reason is that a number of communities—like, we were in Waterford the other night, and their water people were very concerned about this issue, and I pointed out to them that every time there’s a high water event or a flood you get scouring and you get a big slug of PCBs going downriver, right past their drinking water intakes. And I said that if the stuff is dredged out of the hot spots, just the hot spots, that they would no longer need to fear this kind of incursion. It is high water events and those slugs of PCBs that keep sort of an active PCB level in the biota of the lower Hudson. Through the phenomenon of bio-accumulation, it magnifies from actually very low levels in the water, just plain old water normally, to intolerably high levels in fish. And in people, for that matter. I had my own blood tested. I have 0.2 parts-per-million in my body—might be higher now, that was three years ago—and that means that if you adopt the regulatory standards of Michigan or Connecticut, I’m not safe to eat.
C: You’re talking there about PCB parts-per-million?
AM: Yeah.

C: Clearwater has advocated dredging, literally scooping up contaminated sediments from the river bed, while GE maintains that the river is healthy by itself and dredging would actually make conditions worse in the river. Can you comment on this?
AM: GE is being incredibly disingenuous. They know better; we know better; but they are simply feeding people this information to keep their bottom line squared away. If you want to know who’s right and who’s wrong in issues like this, just follow the money trail. It’s as simple as that. If you have public interest groups and government agencies versus profit-making corporations, I don’t think you can have too much trouble following the chain of causation. Anyhow, the fact is that there are numerous environmental dredging technologies which involve suction removal. Some involve an actual cutter head which rotates around inside of a shroud in order to break up the sediment. I have video footage of a couple of different types of these environmental dredges, which show very clearly, underwater footage, that that sediment is getting sucked up and out of the river and there is, like, zero re-suspension of sediment. GE is just completely wrong and they are attempting to misinform people deliberately on this particular issue. Remedial dredging has been done all around the country, six, seven sites, it’s been done in New York State. In fact GE is using this stuff itself at a very small state-ordered dredging site right out of Outfall #2 from the Hudson Falls plant, where they were ordered to pick up a hot spot.
C: Under the Superfund law, polluters must pay for the cleanup of contaminated sites. The polluter in this case, GE, would have to decontaminate the Hudson River if they are found liable. Is that correct?
AM: Well, that is, again, something that GE would like us to think. They would like us to think that we’re asking them to achieve some sort of impossible task. Nobody expects them to decontaminate the entire river. The river will, indeed, heal itself if and only if the places that are continually re-contaminating the river are cleaned up. There are some 30 or 40 relatively small “hot spots”, as we call them, which have the highest concentrations of PCBs, all in the upper Hudson. All we’re suggesting is that those be taken out. That way PCB levels would drop virtually to non-detectable levels down here within a couple of years. And I think we’d be able to see a return to even commercial fishing, probably within five years or less. That seems to be the experience that people have had around the country where this has been done. Fishing—fish consumption advisories have been lifted after just a few years following remedial dredging. The evidence just does not support General Electric.
C: When was the river designated a Superfund site?
AM: Originally—hmm, probably in 1977. I don’t remember when the EPA, the federal government, actually picked this up. The State picked up the issue in ’75, ’76, or ’77. They settled with GE for 4 million dollars, just a pathetic token settlement. GE is just so masterful at achieving these settlements. Everywhere you want to go, where you might be able to litigate, they’ve already been and they’ve settled. They’ve settled with homeowners, and they bought their silence with their settlements, in black and white. You can’t go to commercial fishermen because, I don’t know, half a dozen commercial fishermen on Long Island sued and they settled. GE is now protected by double jeopardy so all the Hudson River fisher-families who lost their livelihood received checks in the amount of maybe five thousand dollars, which they had to then pay taxes on. And that was it for them—you know, here’s a little bit of money, go away, go on welfare, whatever you want to do.
C: The EPA is scheduled to submit its findings—propose the cleanup of the river—in December. Why has it taken so long, since 1977, to achieve this?
AM: Well, first of all, the EPA looked at this issue in the early 80s, during the Ann Gorsetch/James Watt era, and they decided that they were going to take no action. That was in 1984. Then in 1989, the New York State DEC asked the EPA to look at it again because PCB levels were just not going away. In fact, a couple of years later there was a big upward spike in PCBs, which shocked everybody. There was obviously some fresh input. At first GE said aha! we told you so, it wasn’t us after all, it was somebody else and then they realized, oops, it was them, because they’d contaminated their own site so fantastically that their own site was leaking into the Hudson River. There was stuff coming out of the bedrock, there was stuff just sort of washing out of old buildings down by the water, unbelievable quantities of stuff that had just been wasted at that site. So anyhow, that was that.
The thing is that there’s a complex chain of events that have led to GE’s intransigence on this issue, and I can describe it very briefly. Back in the 70s, when this issue first came up, the Board of Directors of General Electric was positive that they were going down. They recognized that this was a big issue. They recognized that PCBs were toxic and were probably harming people. They had their own medical data to support that, which they have since suppressed and kept under lock and key down in Fairfield County. So they figured they were going down for billions and billions of dollars. They have 75 Superfund sites around the country where they’re a polluter. They figured this was it, it could quite possibly jeopardize the whole company.
But an eager young chemical engineer/PhD/lawyer named Jack Welch just happened to be the area manager for the Pittsfield and Glens Falls region and he drew the line. He just said, no, we’re not gonna bend on this. They threatened to leave New York State—at that time they were still a very big presence in New York State. Their corporate charter is here. They still had tens of thousands of jobs in the state. It was a pretty serious threat. The politicians figured that they meant it and so they backed down and did this $4 million settlement. When the Board of Directors of GE saw what Welch had done, it was just like a miracle. It was deliverance for them. They put him on a fast track to where he is now, which is, you know, he’s the Chief Executive Officer of the company and he’s been very effective in terms of guarding their profits and their stock prices and everything like that. However, this issue and this area remains his baby, and as long as he is in, it is obvious that their policy is coming right from the top on this one—and they’re not gonna give it away.
There was a fellow named Steve Ramsey, who’s now a vice president at General Electric, who had worked at the US Justice Department and had helped write Superfund, helped write CERCLA, so he knew the law inside and out. He left the federal government, went into private practice with a law firm, and was hired by General Electric, and wrote a memo (I have a copy of it right here on my wall) which told General Electric exactly how to subvert, delay, and obfuscate the process, to virtually grind it to a halt. And GE has been following Steve Ramsey’s playbook this entire time, to the extent of forcing the EPA to take ten or eleven years to do a fairly simple, straightforward site review of the contaminants, because they are presenting alternative science, which is basically science that they buy and pay for and pre-ordain. It’s not hard to do that, you’ve got hungry scientists all over the place. And they have buried EPA in paper and forced all sorts of delays and EPA has felt, and rightly so, that they have to produce a defensible—a bulletproof defensible—case before they go public with it.
C: What happens after the EPA review is published in December?
AM: After that there’s about a six-month public comment period—maybe three or four months actually—and after that they, the EPA, then produces an actual Record of Decision, which is a legally binding document, that tells General Electric that this is what they have to do and this is how they have to do it, to the extent that EPA is going to actually, you know, tell them how, technologically speaking, they’re gonna do it. They may not—they may just say, here, you have to remove it under these circumstances, find your own method. And that’s okay. But we are virtually certain that General Electric will challenge it in court if it comes out even the slightest bit unfavorable to them.
C: Can you appeal an EPA decision?
AM: Sure, sure you can. The problem is that you’re really rolling the dice because, under the terms of the law, yes, you can appeal, but following the Record of Decision, the EPA can elect to have the cleanup begin under its own management, using taxpayer dollars, for which the polluter will be liable for three times the cleanup cost. So it is a real roll of the dice. And most polluters choose not to challenge simply because of that fact. I don’t know what GE’s gonna do.
C: Will the November election play any part in this process? Is GE stalling, perhaps hoping to have a friendlier ear in the White House?
AM: Well, yeah, I think they are. The tactics are interesting. There are two different hypotheses. One is, of course, that a Democratic administration remains in the White House, therefore we have a—apparently the numbers are strongly in favor of the Democrats recapturing the House of Representatives this year. I don’t know for sure if that’s gonna happen but at least they’re gonna come a lot closer to it and therefore be in a position of greater power, ostensibly, so the White House will have a little more clout in Congress. So the thought is that, of course, they will stay the course and will request that GE do the cleanup. However, there’s also a possibility that Gore will want to not have something like this be virtually one of the first things his administration does. It’s certain to attract a lot of attention, so they may actually suggest that the EPA go lightly upon General Electric so they can seem to be a little bit more business-friendly. Those are the two competing hypotheses for a Democratic victory.
For a Republican victory, the thought is that, well, one hypothesis is that, you know, the cleanup will be called for and then [George] W. [Bush] will put in a more friendly administrator in the EPA, for him, and that they will then produce some sort of interminable review process so that they can get up to speed on the issue because it’s such a big settlement and blah blah blah. It’s due process—they really need to review it—so there it’ll be, it’ll be gone again for the next ten years. But the other hypothesis is, with George W. Bush getting into the White House, that the EPA administrator, Carol Browner, will want to slap that administration and will call for a very rigorous cleanup as she’s going out the door, thereby forcing the Bush administration into a very high-profile rollback of environmental cleanups. Which would be something that would be tough for them to swallow. None of us have a crystal ball and so the elections—they are making the whole issue highly labile and nobody can really say exactly what’s gonna happen. But it certainly is more complicated than it would be without the damn election.

C: You mentioned earlier the public becoming involved after the EPA releases its findings. In what way will the public become involved?
AM: We interpret the so-called feasibility study proposal, which is the name of, basically, the document that they release that will say what’s on their mind. And then both we, General Electric, Joe Citizen, other agencies, everybody gets to weigh in, probably in a series of public hearings, so you can do it verbally, or in writing. You analyze the decision, you look at all the body of science that’s out there. It’s a pretty heavy burden to place on the non-profits, but we recognize that we’ll have to do that and then either write a supportive document, which is important because you have to balance out. If they come up with a positive decision, you can’t just say yay, hooray, and wash your hands and walk away because GE is gonna be all over them like a cheap suit and if GE is the only voice they hear, that’s not good, because they are supposed to be responsive to the public. So we have to be there, we have to be loud, we’re gonna have to continue to develop a strong public support for a clean river and a safe river.

For more information on Clearwater and the contamination of the Hudson River with PCBs, visit www.clearwater.org and click on News and Bulletins. Clearwater has also produced a 27-minute video which “we will give to anybody who will more or less assure us that they’re gonna show it to several people—you know, show it to their family, and then maybe to a couple of families in the neighborhood, just so that we know the thing isn’t just sitting on a shelf gathering dust, because they’re expensive,” said Mele. Clearwater also has a PCB petition on their Web site, with six thousand signatures. The Clearwater contact number is 454-7673.