Imagine this. Your four-year-old has been playing in the living room. Toys are everywhere. The room is one big hazard zone. Now it’s time to clean up. After picking up a few toys, your child calls it quits. Do you insist your child finish the job or do you just let it go?
Suppose the living room is actually the Hudson River, a 315 mile waterway flowing from the Adirondacks to New York City. Suppose the child is actually GE, and the toys are 1.3 million pounds of cancer-causing PCBs GE spilled into the Hudson during its operations from 1947 to 1977. Between 2002 and 2015 GE dredged the river bottom to remove some, but not all, of the contaminated sediment. Then, the company walked away.
Was the job done? Not by a long shot. Much more work is needed. Even the Environmental Protection Agency recognizes that.
There’s still plenty of contamination. According to its June 2017 report, it will be over 50 years before people can eat fish from the river even once a week without risking cancer. This is shameful. A quarter of the river and its tributaries aren’t even safe for swimming!
Assemblywoman Carrie Woerner (D-Round Lake), observed, “GE came here. They dumped all of these PCBs in the river, and now they’re gone. It’s up to the EPA to hold them accountable and get the job done.”
But that won’t necessarily happen. In early June, the EPA’s five-year review let GE pretty much off the hook. Couple that with the administration’s 31% cut in funding for the EPA and the future of the Hudson looks grim. Thank you, President Trump.
Once again, New Yorkers are left largely on our own—home to a magnificent river not safe enough for recreation or fishing. Once again we learn: One is. on fact, the loneliest number.