Hudson River Cleanup
skip to secondary navigationGE has recently taken a more proactive role in tending to our “legacy” environmental issues and the communities impacted by them. We have been working closely with federal and state agencies to address these issues effectively and have a record of successfully meeting our commitments.
GE is a 130-year-old company with facilities all around the world. Many of those facilities began operating at a time when scientific understanding and regulatory requirements were far different from today. As we learned more about how some chemicals behave, it became apparent that there are “legacy” issues involving environmental contamination that we must address.
Our most significant sites are related to our historical use of PCBs. From 1990 to 2007 GE has spent over $1 billion in addressing PCB-related issues, with the majority of those expenses (82%) coming from just three sites: the Hudson River in New York, the Housatonic River in Massachusetts and Connecticut and a former transformer facility in Rome, Georgia.
GE’s largest environmental clean-up project is one of the biggest environmental dredging projects ever undertaken in the United States. We are building a 110-acre processing, treatment and transportation facility in Fort Edward, New York, near where the company operated two plants that before the 1970s used PCBs in the manufacture of capacitors.
After a long public debate, the EPA selected dredging as its preferred remedy to remove river sediments containing PCBs. We are performing and paying for the work and will provide the EPA with reimbursement for the Agency’s past costs to study the Upper Hudson River and its future costs for project oversight. Construction of the facilities began in April 2007 and is scheduled for completion by early 2009.
Responding to community concerns, the EPA imposed on the Hudson project the strictest performance standards ever applied to an environmental dredging project in the United States, covering everything from noise, odor and light, to the impact of the project on river navigation, the amount of PCBs left in river sediments after dredging and the length of time dredging will require. We have designed the project to meet these standards.
We are working closely with the EPA to ensure there is no public contact with PCBs found in the soils along low-lying shorelines of the river. In addition, the dried sediments removed from the river will be transported by rail to final disposal at a facility in Texas that holds federal and state permits for the disposal, processing, treatment and storage of a broad range of wastes, including PCBs.
The EPA and GE have worked closely together to reduce other impacts on local communities, choosing an undeveloped field removed from the more heavily populated areas of Fort Edward, New York, as the site of the treatment, processing and transportation facility. To prevent potential traffic congestion in local neighborhoods, we built a new access road from the nearest state truck route rather than use a much shorter road through the center of the village.
Once sediments are removed from the river, they will be transported by barge to the processing facility, which is located on the nearby Champlain Canal. To ensure that normal boat traffic in the canal is not disrupted by dredging activities, we are widening the canal by 65 feet to allow other boats to pass.
GE also moved forward on another major Hudson River clean-up project in 2007. Building on 20 years of clean-up projects that have dramatically reduced the amount of PCBs entering the river at the site, we began to construct innovative tunnels under the Hudson River to capture the small amount (less than two ounces a day) of PCBs that may be entering the river near our plant in Hudson Falls, New York, a few miles north of Fort Edward.
The tunnels, 1,500 feet in length, will be built in the bedrock 80 feet below the bottom of the Hudson River. They will be outfitted with equipment to collect PCBs and water from the bedrock. The PCBs and water will be pumped to a newly expanded water treatment plant where the PCBs will be removed and the water will be discharged to the Hudson. While tunneling technology is not new, this is the first known application of that technology to an environmental solution.