Hudson River dredging finally under way

http://www.dailygazette.com/news/2009/may/16/0516_startdredging/ 5/16/09

Regional
Chapter 21

On Friday, May 15, the EPA started dredging the contaminated Hudson River. The river is contaminated with PCBs from General Electric Co. capacitor plants in Hudson Falls and Fort Edwards. These plants discharged as much as 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the river for 30 years, ending in 1977. The first phase of thee project will remove 250,000 cubic yards of contaminated sediment containing around 20,300 kilograms of PCBs from a six mile part of the river and will dig approximately 2 feet deep . All of the PCBs will be transported to a hazardous waste site in Andrews, Texas. The EPA ordered GE to pay for the cleanup in 2002 but was delayed because of legal issues and complexity of the project. Some people of the anti-dredging group CEASE dislike the dredging and called it a "funeral".

I think that this dredging will really help the Hudson River ecosystem by getting rid of a bulk of the PCBs in the river. The PCBs are very dangerous and should have been taken out years ago. The one thing that worries me is that this could damage the bottom of the river but I think the positives outweigh the negatives. It is also good that GE is paying for this because they caused this major problem and they should have to deal with it. When the PCBs are dumped into the toxic waste site in Texas, they could cause problems there but hopefully they are far away from any people. The dredging of the Hudson River is good and I don't understand why some people are against the dredging.

PCB- a mixture of up to 209 chlorinated chemicals. Although PCBs are no longer produced in the US where they were once known under the trade name Aroclor, PCBs are still found in the environment. A number of adverse health effects have associated with exposure to PCBs.