Depending on who you ask, the Upland Disposal Facility, a 13-acre landfill planned for construction in late spring in Lee, is either an environmental solution, an environmental risk, or both. The site will hold 1.3 million cubic yards of sediment containing low levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from the Housatonic River, sediment that will be cleaned up by General Electric over the course of at least the next decade.
Residents of Lee and nearby towns are concerned about both short and long term impacts of the facility, ranging from noise and air pollution during its construction to the potential for release of PCBs into the air and water if infrastructure fails. Others say that the risk to human health and wildlife can’t be worse than it is now.
“Right now, the dump is the river,” said Jane Winn, founding director of Berkshire Environmental Action Team (BEAT). “That’s where all this toxic material is getting into the air, passing through the water. Right now, people are being exposed.” While she wishes GE would dispose of all of the sediment out-of-state — the most concentrated sediment will be — she says that the PCB landfill is a better idea than leaving the chemicals in the open environment.
Housatonic Valley residents do not all support the landfill or agree on cleaning up the river at all. But there’s one thing they have in common: the burden of being watchdogs. People and wildlife in the Housatonic River Valley have been living among PCBs since the 1930s, when GE began disposing of them improperly during the manufacture of electrical transformers. These pollutants have persisted in the soil, water, and wildlife around the prior GE site in Pittsfield and at least 125 miles south of the city, long after the production of PCBs was banned by EPA in 1979 when their health impacts were uncovered. Wrestling over the construction of the disposal facility is the current chapter in a decades-long effort to ensure that a multi-billion dollar corporation and a major government agency do right by the residents of the valley.
Mike Lucia, a toxicologist by trade who lives in Lenox, a few miles from the disposal facility site, is one of many who has devoted time to researching this project. At this point, years into the process, he understands that clean-up and disposal is a done deal — it’s been ordered by EPA. But he takes issue with the premise that the clean-up is the best of bad choices, arguing that PCB exposure from the river is avoidable and that pollution related to the disposal site — including truck pollution and potentially releasing PCBs in the air — may not be.
“[EPA] said the risk is from eating the fish from the river. That is your exposure. And because the fish have PCBs, nobody here is eating fish from the Housatonic River,” he said. “And so, we’re exchanging one avoidable hazard for an unavoidable hazard, and that part of it doesn’t feel very fair. Because we can choose not to eat the fish, but we can’t choose not to breathe the air.”
While no studies have demonstrated a causal link between the presence of PCBs and health outcomes of residents in the Housatonic Valley specifically, the literature widely points to health effects in animals and humans. EPA and the International Agency for Research on Cancer have classified PCBs as carcinogens. Studies show immune effects, endocrine effects, neurological effects like decreased memory and learning deficits, and reproductive effects including decreased birth weight and a decrease in gestational age.
Published by MassINC