By Roger Witherspoon
Copyright 2004 The Journal News (Westerchester County, NY)
The Journal News
December 16, 2004 Thursday
Pair of $30M plants will separate liquid from Hudson mud
The Journal News
The Environmental Protection Agency has selected upstate sites to house a pair of
$30 million dewatering facilities that will process 4 million tons of PCB-contaminated
mud to be dredged from a 40-mile stretch of the Hudson River.
The plants, each covering about 35 acres, will be built at opposite ends of the
dredging-project area and are essential to completing the nation's largest
environmental dredging project. The plants will be on 51 acres in Fort Edward along
the Hudson River and Champlain Canal, and on 94-acres in Bethlehem.
Deemed essential by the EPA, the plants are opposed by local officials. "Our home,
our heritage, our quality of life is being invaded and potentially could be destroyed
by the largest environmental dredge project in recorded history," Fort Edward Town
Supervisor Merrilyn Pulver said.
She termed the project an "environmental injustice" and said it would have negative
affects on all aspects of town life.
The plants will separate millions of gallons of water from the dredged river muck.
The dried mud will be packaged and loaded onto barges or rail cars and hauled away
for disposal. The water will be treated and, after the PCBs are removed, returned to
the river.
The sites were selected from seven potential locations the EPA has been examining
the past two years. They are a key ingredient in a plan to remove the remnants of
1.3 million pounds of polychlorinated byphenyls, or PCBs, which are suspected
carcinogens.
The PCBs were legally dumped into the river by General Electric Co. plants in Fort
Edward and Hudson Falls between 1940 and 1977, when the compound was banned.
The PCBs have continued to wash down the river, turning its lower 200 miles into the
nation's largest Superfund site and eliminating the river's thriving commercial fishing
industry.
EPA spokesman Leo Rosales said Fort Edward was selected because "the majority of
the contamination, perhaps 60 percent, is within a mile-and-a-half of that site." The
Bethlehem site is several miles below where the actual dredging would occur,
Rosales said, "but what makes it a great site is that it has a deep water port and
barges there can load three or four times as much material than the traditional,
upriver barges."
GE spokesman Mark Behan called the sites "the most suitable" of those evaluated.
Last spring, the EPA tentatively narrowed its search to three sites, but a close
examination of a 325-acre tract in Schaghticoke unearthed remnants of a Woodlands
Indian village estimated to be at least 1,500 years old. John Vetter, the agency's
archaeologist and chairman of the anthropology department at Adelphi University,
said researchers found crude stone tools possibly used for scraping hides and
shaping wood, sharpened stones and evidence of several fireplaces. He said tests to
be completed in January should give a more precise estimate of the American Indian
settlement's age.
Reach Roger Witherspoon at rwithers@thejournalnews.com or 914-696-8566.
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