One of the most important local news stories over the last few months has been the EPA’s proposal to order dredging in the upper Hudson River from Hudson Falls to Federal Dam in Troy. Here’s a quick summary for those who are not up to speed on the story: General Electric, which has plants in Hudson Falls, Fort Edward, and Waterford along the Hudson, dumped polychlorinated biphenyls into the river for three decades from the 1950s until 1977, when the dumping operation was outlawed. PCBs are a type of insulator that is suspected to cause cancer.

At first, the PCBs made the river very toxic. The river was extraordinarily disgusting and generally unavailable for recreational use. Since that time the river has generally become much clearer and is once again a haven for summer enjoyment. The PCBs in the water have almost totally filtered out over the years, with the help of GE containment programs. Today the only place where PCBs remain in the Hudson in any kind of concentration are under layers of sediment on the riverbed.

Now, more than 20 years after GE stopped dumping PCBs in the Hudson, the EPA is ready to order dredging of the Hudson in order to remove PCBs from the bed of the Hudson, ostensibly in order to improve the state of the environment. Why is this?

Dredging the Hudson is going to cause more problems that it solves, if it even solves any problems. The operation will take anywhere from five to 20 years to complete. The dredging operation itself will stir up the PCBs on the riverbed and put them back into the water, where it’s already been removed from naturally. The contaminated soil will be trucked down to New Jersey and put in landfills there. And worst of all, it will disrupt the recreational use of the river for a prolonged period of time. There is no concrete proof that PCBs cause cancer in humans. In fact, those GE workers with extreme amounts of exposure to PCBs at the plants north of Troy have a rate of cancer far less than the regional average. (This would suggest that the chemical helps prevent cancer, which is obviously not the case.) Even if it does cause cancer, wouldn’t the best place for the chemical be exactly where it is now, buried under layers of muck, rather than back in the water?

So why do environmentalists pursue the project anyway? They are determined to punish GE for its "sins of the past." While bringing down that terrible, terrible multi-national, they turn a blind eye to what their supposed ideals are. Yes, it’s unfortunate that the PCBs were dumped in the river in the first place, but what these people fail to realize is that, at the time it was done, it was perfectly legal. When it became illegal, the dumping stopped. There is no punishment in order retroactive to the 1950s. I’m not defending what GE did 20 years ago, but they can’t be held legally liable. That’s why the project is pursued so vigorously. They want to make GE "sorry" in a fiscal way.

This is not acceptable. What’s done is done, and the best thing that can be done now for our environment is to let nature continue to clean the Hudson.

Tom Reale