In his latest column, Mickey Friedman lays out how the EPA and General Electric can clean up Housatonic River PCB contamination without relying on the proposed plan to create a toxic waste dump in Lee.
If you reside in the Land of the Davids, you get used to losing. The odds are always against you. Though to be expected, it’s exhausting nonetheless. Especially as you get older, and more of your body hurts and you’ve got less mental energy. Or maybe just enough for a daily Wordle.
The Goliaths are bigger and stronger, and in a world where money talks … well … they are the ones the others listen to and so they often get their way. There are a lot of them, so it’s wise to pick your battles.
Here in Berkshire County, the biggest of the Goliaths was General Electric (GE). Such was GE’s power that local politicians did their bidding. Pittsfield politicians were so grateful that their voters had jobs, they allowed the company free rein to skimp on providing their employees proper protective gear even though they worked with toxic chemicals. GE failed to inform them of the very real dangers of PCBs.
The powers-that-were in Pittsfield turned a blind eye as GE sent their tractor-trailers, day after day, to the Pittsfield landfill. No charge. Trucks filled with barrels of used toxic PCB-contaminated oil and the contaminated kitty-litter like Fullers Earth which they used to soak up the vast amount of oil that spilled from the transformers. Oil that often went down GE’s countless drains to form large underground lakes that made their way into the Housatonic. Oil, incidentally, that would eat away the rubber soles of the shoes of the workers. Few in Pittsfield did anything about the large numbers of GE workers, the families of Lakewood, who succumbed prematurely to cancers and other diseases. Few realize to this day, that their groundwater is contaminated and will never be drinkable.
There were always Davids in the community. Union leaders. Even GE managers like Ed Bates who spoke out as he watched more and more of those who worked for him at Power Transformer get sick and die. Former Mayor Remo Del Gallo, who grew impatient with the denials of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Quality and Engineering, finally taking them to the see the GE oil in the basement of Bardo’s Bakery on East Street, across from the plant. And Bernie Kleban of Monterey, who helped conduct a health study of GE workers and their families.
In the early ’90s a bunch of Davids came together to pool their energy and create the Housatonic River Initiative (HRI) — environmentalists and former GE workers like Dave Gibbs and Al Bertelli, joined soon after by local Lakewood homeowners whose front and back yards were contaminated with high levels of PCBs. Teachers like Betty Phinney, sportsman/journalist Ted Giddings, State Rep. Chris Hodgkins, George Wislocki of Berkshire Natural Resources Council, Gige Darey of Fish and Wildlife, Dr. Donald Roeder from Simon’s Rock, photographer Benno Friedman of Sheffield, and Tim Gray of Lee, who later became HRI’s executive director.
Based on HRI’s success and effective advocacy, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) recognized HRI “as a primary citizens advisory group for these sites.”
Twenty-something years in, I left the Board, but stayed an active member. After 30 years of meetings, and enough talk to fill a decent-sized lake, I couldn’t bear the usual GE and EPA dog-and-pony shows. I occasionally did a bit of work for HRI draft comments about GE’s plans for the River and helped assemble a legal brief, and of course the requisite appeals.
Given that these days we’re faced with a well-financed bunch of ultra conservative, mostly white faux Christian males determined to drag a changing rainbow America back to the good old days where people of color knew their place; gays, lesbians and transgendered folks remained close-mouthed and in their locked closets; and straight women told their arrogant husbands how much they really, really loved cooking their favorite steak and doing the laundry, I want to make it clear that we fought and won many critical battles. Because there’s a lot of fighting to come. And it’s important to know the fight is worth it.
I’m told there are some in the community who are now badmouthing HRI, unhappy that it won’t sing along with their “Happy Days Are Here Again” song. That HRI won’t pretend to like the secret agreement they negotiated for the River cleanup, especially the massive PCB dump they have planned for Lee. They’re trying to paint the organization as a group of unreasonable activists, zealots who won’t celebrate the compromise that a handful of them accepted on behalf of all of us who didn’t know what they were doing. That HRI is more comfortable arguing for the impossible, happier saying “no” than “yes.”
One man’s impossible is often very, very possible. As the Ukrainians show us every single day, it’s a matter of courage and willpower. Which is what American women will show the radical right wing.
As for HRI, it’s always been about honestly evaluating the evidence. The truth is that we studied hard. We read and responded to every important report GE and its consultants prepared., determined to figure out the true extent and seriousness of the problem. Then figure out how to solve it. And when we didn’t know the answers, we found those who had studied more and understood better.
When HRI first got involved, GE and the environmental agencies, Massachusetts’ DEP and the EPA, all accepted the conclusions of the GE-bought Stewart Report. All accepted their judgment. Here’s how a 1982 EPA study explained it:
But GE’s study was shockingly inaccurate. Still, the EPA was so very pleased, convinced GE was committed to restoring the River as soon as possible. In some ways, this dynamic has shaped what’s happened in the Berkshires.
By asking those who really knew, we quickly discovered there were many more PCBs in the River than they acknowledged. And that PCBs were continually seeping into the River.
Ed Bates, a World War II hero, was the Manager of Tests at GE Power Transformer. His assistant, Charles Fessenden, was the Supervisor of Calculations. Nobody knew more about what was happening with PCBs and the large transformers they were working with. And no one was more loyal to GE. Until he saw the men under his command getting sick and dying.
Ed Bates: “GE scientists and engineers in 1936 came out with Pyranol, which had polychlorinated biphenyls in it … You put a gallon of Pyranol in water and it sinks right to the bottom … seven pounds of every gallon is PCBs. We used to use an average of 20,000 gallons of Pyranol a week … And we had a loss rate, spillage, over-filling of about 3% so this says that every week, we would lose between 4,000 and 5,000 pounds of PCBs that would go down the drain and into the river … about a million and a half pounds of PCBs have been plowed into that river. I imagine a good 30% is left.” [Emphasis added]
In 1980, former Pittsfield Mayor Remo Del Gallo — owner of Del Gallo’s bar and restaurant on Newell Street, across from GE’s Building 100 — saw folks drilling test wells in the road. He siad Gerry Doyle Sr., Commissioner of Public Works, told him: “‘Remo, I can only tell you what they told me. They’re looking for the location of the water table and the flow of water in the water table.’ We knew that wasn’t what they were looking for.”
“I can go back 50, 60 years, if need be, that when the General Electric Company had the oil tanks … those tanks leaked for years and years and years … and the oil flowed down the embankment, under the railroad tracks and then into East Street, and what was said [was that it] created a plume and when they say a plume, they’re talking about an underground lake of oil.
“But my real concern at the time was, when I say credibility gap, I say it for a given reason … George Rousseau was in charge of all liquid waste disposal for the General Electric Company since 1936, and he is the one that informed as to where the liquid waste was being dumped — four given sites on General Electric property … we’re talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of gallons of oil … including that oil tank that they had up on what is known as Peck’s Bridge, 550,000 gallons of oil … and it leaked for years and years and years, before 1964 and after 1964.”
The credibility gap that Mayor Del Gallo was talking about included not only GE but the very environmental agency we depended upon in the Commonwealth:
“Now I’ll go back to 1980 … they worked for what we called the DEQE, the Department of Environmental Quality Engineering, and they stated that it never penetrated, the plume, the oil never penetrated the southerly side of East Street. So I took it upon myself to take them up to a place known as Bardo’s Bakery … and I said to Angelo Iantosca [of the DEQE] at the time and representatives of the General Electric Company and EPA, if there’s no oil in that sump pump I’ll agree with you it never penetrated the southerly side of East Street. And now when we went up there and we checked that sump pump, it was loaded with oil, loaded with oil … [They said] it did not touch the Housatonic River and yet we did find out it did penetrate the Housatonic River. They said it did not contaminate Goodrich Pond and since then we found out that it also contaminated Goodrich Pond.”
GE workers and independent truckers took notice of HRI’s advocacy and came to tell us where GE had them take the barrels filled with PCB oil and Fullers Earth. A trucker told Tim Gray that he had dumped contaminated material where the Dorothy Amos Children’s Park now stood. Other truckers told us they had dumped contaminated oil-soaked wood flooring in Brattlebrook Park, and other waste around Goodrich Pond.
But all too often EPA and DEP wouldn’t believe us. Until we insisted that DEP establish the anonymous 1-888-VIOLATE phone number for truckers to report dumpsites, and they got so many calls they finally tested some of the sites and found dangerously high levels of contamination.
It was never about rhetoric, but insisting on the reality GE and the agencies weren’t ready to admit to. It was that way about acknowledging the health effects of PCBs — the growing and disturbing realization that there was no real safe level of exposure to PCBs. And the inconvenient need to appreciate the danger posed to those who worked with them, or played bocce outdoors at the Italian-American Club or softball and baseball at the Newell Street Park on contaminated land, or those in Lakewood breathing in the exhaust smoke from GE’s PCB incinerator, GE’s 1974 Puff The Magic Dragon, its Thermal Oxidizer.
For years, we advocated for GE to shut Puff down, pressuring the Company to admit that not only were they burning their own PCB-contaminated oil, but importing oil from other plants across the country.
We learned from a GE worker that because they were running the incinerator constantly, they had burned out the sensors on the stack and were no longer able to gauge what was coming out of the stack. Finally, our ever-increasing public pressure convinced GE to shut Puff down.
It’s was almost as if there were two different realities at work. One was the world GE wanted everyone to believe in — that PCBs were safe. Here’s GE’s report entitled “Aquatic Ecological Assessment of the Housatonic River, Massachusetts – 1993,” claiming the fish and inveterate populations on the river were fine, showing “no pattern of population parameters that appear to be related to sediment PCB levels.”
Which drove the folks who loved the river and fished it crazy. They kept telling us about the fish they found in the Housatonic with cancerous sores. So George Hamilton Jr., an active member of Trout Unlimited and one of the founders of the Environmental Sciences Program at Berkshire Community College, went out, caught, and photographed one. He’d take the photo to every meeting he could:
We always insisted on more sampling. More testing. Independent testing. When the EPA finally conducted a thorough investigation of life in the river, this is what they acknowledged:
“Fast Facts: Ecological Risk Assessment [AMY – LINK https://www.epa.gov/ge-housatonic/understanding-pcb-risks-ge-pittsfieldhousatonic-river-site – WildlifeHumanHealthEffects]
Remember that 22,000 pounds of PCBs? Well, in 1996, the increased sampling around the former Building 68 adjacent to the Housatonic revealed incredibly high levels of PCBs. Just so you have some basis for comparison, MA DEP limits soil concentrations in residential areas to two parts per million, 2 ppm, and in recreational settings to 10 ppm. Here in a 170-foot stretch of the river bank, they discovered PCB concentrations ranging from 8.6 ppm to 5,500 ppm at the surface (0 to 6 inches) and up to 102,000 ppm in subsurface soils.
When they tested the sediments in the Housatonic, they discovered an average of 1,534 ppm in a 550-foot stretch of the river. So, in 1997 and 1998 GE excavated 5,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and 2,230 cubic yards of contaminated river sediment. In fact, they went down eight feet in some sections and still found PCB levels as high as 2,240. They couldn’t go deeper because they had reached the limit of the sheet pile keeping the contamination in place. So, in this one small section of the River, they had discovered almost half the PCBs they had claimed existed in the entire river system.
But let me be clear. Everything we did was about trying to make things better for the people of Berkshire County. The GE workers who had gotten a raw deal for their honest day’s work. The homeowners who discovered they had been gardening in contaminated soil, their kids playing in contaminated parks. And because we cared about the critters, as Tim Gray called them time and again. We made it clear what we wanted: A fishable, swimmable river.
Our commitment to science was demonstrated time and again. We brought some of the leading experts on the public health dangers of PCBs to the Berkshires: Dianne Dumanoski, author of the bestselling “Our Stolen Future;” Lois Gibbs, who had led the historic effort to relocate 800 of her neighbors from the contaminated community of Love Canal; EPA PCB researchers Dr. Jim Cogliano and Dr. Deborah Rice. And Dr. David Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and Environment of the State University of New York at Albany, who came on a regular basis to update the Berkshire community on his research with the effects of PCB exposure on the Akwesasne Mohawk community. He also shared his growing knowledge of how PCBs can volatilize, correlating the incidence of a variety of diseases with how close patients lived to contaminated rivers and toxic dumps.
HRI also focused on how best to deal with the contamination, partnering with graduate students at Tuft University to create a web-based animation showing the location and intensity of PCB sediment contamination in the River.
There’s a great irony at work here, which quite frankly drives me up the wall. Some folks claim we’re negative, saying “no” to negotiated solutions. But from where I’m standing, we are the ones saying “yes.” While the EPA and DEP, and even some so-called environmentalists, and of course GE want to keeping doing things the way they did in the past, because for them it’s all about the money, HRI is saying “yes” to the present and embracing the future.
From Day One, HRI has been urging them to embrace the need for the most comprehensive cleanup possible, given the best technology available. Treating PCB contamination rather than dumping it in a landfill. Here’s what we said as early as July 15, 1994, in response to “GE’s Proposal for the Preliminary Investigation of Corrective Measures (PICM) for Housatonic River and Silver Lake Sediment.”
“We do not believe the PICM effectively incorporates pilot or research studies for ex-situ treatment/disposal technologies. And GE’s analysis of at least one of the treatment technologies indicates the lack of the kind of open mind and creative spirit that will be needed to make this clean-up a success.”
For years, we sponsored several panel discussions, inviting experts and vendors of specific treatment technologies. The more we learned, the harder we advocated for pilot projects. And the less satisfied we were with GE’s and EPA’s unsupported responses, or out-of-date assurances that they had found these technologies wanting. Repeatedly, we said yes and they said no.
When GE and DEP and EPA negotiated their 1999 settlement agreement for the cleanup of the first two miles of the Housatonic, we were appalled by the agencies willingness to let GE dump even more contamination into the unlined landfill at Hill 78 and to construct a new lined landfill next to it. Wasting the perfect opportunity to take a step into the future and mandate pilot tests for alternative technologies. But dumping toxic waste was easier for them all. And, sadly, doubling down on failure, making their “no” even louder, these dumps are across the road from the Allendale Elementary School and a residential neighborhood.
And so HRI went to court. To those who want to paint HRI as inflexible and unwilling to bend, HRI did, in fact, compromise. After extensive negotiations and winning agreement to better protect homeowners and Newell Street business owners from any future liability for the PCBs that had been dumped on their property, we withdrew our suit. And won a very important promise from EPA Region One Director Mindy Lubber: “The agreement includes among other things, the EPA’s commitment to identify and potentially test new and innovative treatment technologies.”
Sadly, and to the detriment of all of us in Berkshire County, the EPA never really fulfilled this commitment.
And this, to me, is one of the most heartbreaking aspects of our more than 30-year efforts. While we Davids have forced GE to undertake the cleanup of many miles of our gorgeous Housatonic, and restore playgrounds and hundreds of homes throughout Pittsfield, we have yet to prevail on DEP and EPA to fulfill one of the great promises of the legislation that binds them, CERCLA or Superfund. The law meant to guide the way polluters make whole what they have contaminated. Especially §9621. Cleanup standards: “The President shall select a remedial action that is protective of human health and the environment, that is cost effective, and that utilizes permanent solutions and alternative treatment technologies or resource recovery technologies to the maximum extent practicable.”
For years, proving that treatment could work for the Housatonic was nearly impossible, made even less possible by their resistance and refusal to honor the promise to test innovative technologies. Instead, the EPA bent over backwards to convince everyone that the Pittsfield dumps would be safe. And, to this day, they are more comfortable finding reasons to justify the outdated methods of the past — moving contamination from place to place, landfilling it and covering it up — than they are embracing the scientific advancements of today, and destroying it.
Ever persistent, we discovered that another branch of the U.S. government was willing to do what EPA Region One wasn’t: in partnership with the government of Vietnam, thoroughly investigating and pilot testing Thermal Desorption to remediate the dioxin contaminated soils at the Danang Airbase. You can check out the absolutely thorough process they went through and watch an animation of it.
Many times, HRI tried to make the case for Thermal Desorption. And then in HRI’s 2020 brief before the Environmental Appeals Board (EAB), EPA’s own Alice-in-Wonderland closed-loop court system. But challenging EPA decisions is so complicated, and bound by so many regulations, it requires a corporate-sized contingent of in-house legal counsel. The EPA has succeeded in stacking the deck against ordinary citizens.
The EPA went so far as to intervene with EAB to keep us from even raising the issue of Thermal Desorption, preventing us from arguing that USAID’s significant success in Vietnam might be a potential game-changer for Berkshire County. And exactly the kind of scientific breakthrough CERCLA was imagining.
Rather than welcome this exciting possibility, EAB and EPA dismissed our efforts, relying on a single mistake we had made: not specifically raising Thermal Desorption in our most recent official comments. It didn’t matter that we had been talking about treatment for three decades. And the EAB was glad to tell us we had messed up:
It turns out, since we failed the first time before EAB — and even though EPA and GE had come to a new cleanup agreement — we still couldn’t get the EAB in 2021 to allow us to raise the issue.
In fact, the EAB judges wouldn’t even read the letter from James Gilligan of TerraTherm in support of using Thermal Desorption in the Housatonic, or Dr. David Carpenter’s especially relevant 2015 article “Exposure to and health effects of volatile PCBs.” They won’t read it, but you can.
So much of what’s happened these past years has boggled my mind. But because I write about complicated, and often controversial, issues, I try very hard to do my homework. I spent a lot of time going back over years of documents, and discovered that despite what EPA and GE have told us, over the past decades they actually have done a thoroughly inadequate job of investigating and testing alternative technologies. Just another way of saying no.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s time to say yes to testing the one technology that could work. Yes, to the really good chance TerraTherm can do for the Berkshires what they did for Vietnam. Yes, treat the contamination, take CERLA seriously and reduce its toxicity, reduce its volume, and bingo, do away with the need for the gigantic landfill that will make life miserable for many in Lee, Massachusetts.
We know TerraTherm’s Thermal Desorption worked with the more toxic dioxin-contaminated soil of Danang. And if there’s any way to turn EPA’s no into a yes, we can conduct a thorough pilot test. We know there are challenges – successfully reducing the water content of the Housatonic’s PCB contaminated sediments. Finding the proper mixing agent to help with that would be necessary. We know the dioxin remediation required hotter temperatures than would be necessary for PCB remediation, so we’d have to discover the most effective treatment temperature. And it’s possible that applying some of the lessons learned in Danang could help with increasing the efficiency of the project and lowering costs.
On the plus side, there is more than enough room on the planned Lee site for the Upland Disposal Unit to create a de-watering facility to better prepare the sediments. And enough room, about the size of a football field, to build a similar aboveground insulated structure for the thermal process and treatment center. James Galligan, senior vice president of TerraTherm, has stated his willingness to participate in any planning process:
“I am confident that TerraTherm’s aboveground IPTD® approach can successfully treat PCB-contaminated sediment excavated or dredged from the Housatonic River, to achieve applicable regulatory standards. Although cost is obviously a limiting factor, there is no question that thermal remediation can be used to treat and destroy large volumes of PCB-contaminated sediments. For example, we recently remediated ~120,000 cy of sediments contaminated with dioxins for our client using our IPTD® approach. In order to reduce project costs, TerraTherm has partnered with our clients to segregate contaminated soil such that only the highest concentration soils and sediments were treated with thermal remediation, while less contaminated materials were disposed of using conventional methods.”
Having spent so much time going up against the Goliaths, I know this is something GE definitely doesn’t want. Something some of those environmentalists — who coincidentally don’t live in Lee — don’t seem to care about. And it’s clearly something the environmental agencies don’t want to be bothered with.
But it’s so very easy to say no. Too easy to rely on what you’ve done in the past. Scary to embrace the future.
To those who say we’re troublemakers, I invoke John Lewis:
Thirty years in, it seems so much is now up to the citizens of Lee. Unfortunately, the negotiators put the largest burden on them. But remember: GE poisoned the River and almost got away with it. Until a bunch of Davids forced Goliath to spend many hundreds of millions to clean up miles and miles of it.
Unfortunately, for the moment at least, the EPA and DEP and a handful of Berkshirites didn’t have the courage to make them destroy their mess. Because it was a lot easier to let Goliath move the mess to Lee.
But, as I’ve seen, one man’s impossible is often very, very possible. As the Ukrainians show us every single day, it’s a matter of courage and willpower. Here’s to the people of Lee, who live in a land of the Davids.
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