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Between 1947 and 1977, General Electric polluted the Hudson River by dispensing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), causing a range of harmful effects to wildlife and people who eat fish from the river or drink the water. In response to this contamination, activists protested in various ways; for instance, musician Pete Seeger founded the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater and the Clearwater Festival to draw attention to the problem. The activism led to the site being designated as one of the Superfund sites. Other kinds of pollution, including mercury contamination and sewage dumping, have also caused problems.
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Types of pollution
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) has listed various portions of the Hudson as having impaired water quality due to PCBs, cadmium, and other toxic compounds. Hudson River tributaries with impaired water quality (not necessarily the same pollutants as the Hudson main stem) are Mohawk River, Dwaas Kill, Schuyler Creek, Saw Mill River, Esopus Creek, Hoosic River, Quaker Creek, and Batten Kill. Many lakes in the Hudson drainage basin are also listed. Other ongoing pollution issues affecting the river include: accidental sewage discharges, urban runoff, heavy metals, furans, dioxin, pesticides, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).
Numerous factories that at once lined the Hudson River poured garbage and industrial waste directly into the river. These factories produced transformers, capacitors, and electric motors, which used PCBs as dielectric and coolant fluid. This pollution was not comprehensively assessed until the 1970s. By that time, the largest remaining factories in the area were owned by General Electric, which became primarily responsible for cleaning the Hudson River. Between approximately 1947 and 1977, GE released between 500,000 and 1,500,000 pounds (230,000 and 680,000 kg) of PCBs into the river. The PCBs came from the company's two capacitor manufacturing plants at Hudson Falls and Fort Edward in New York. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned the manufacture of PCBs in 1979. The bulk of the PCBs in the river were made by Monsanto Co. under the brand names Aroclor 1242 and Aroclor 1016. The highest concentration of PCBs in found in the Thompson Island Pool.
A study reported in the August 2008 issue of the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry suggests that mercury in common Hudson River fish, including striped bass, yellow perch, largemouth bass, smallmouth bass and carp, has declined strongly over the past three decades. The conclusions were extracted from a large database of mercury analyses of fish fillets accumulated by NYSDEC and collected over much of the length of the Hudson from New York City waters to the Adirondack watershed. The research indicates that the trends are in line with the recovery that the Hudson River has experienced over the past few decades, now that activist groups, government officials and industry are beginning to cooperate to help clean up the river system.
In 1991, zebra mussels, an invasive species, first appeared in the Hudson River, causingthe near-disappearance of native pearly mussels.
In 2010, the NYSDEC determined that the Indian Point Energy Center, a nuclear power plant in Buchanan, was violating the Clean Water Act because of its large withdrawals of water from the Hudson, which kills millions of fish and other aquatic organisms each year. The state requested that Entergy, the plant operator, replace its fish screens with cooling towers to mitigate the environmental impacts.
Effects
The PCBs caused extensive contamination of fish in the river and apparently triggered a rapid evolutionary change in the Atlantic tomcod, which after about 50 years of exposure evolved a two amino acid change in its AHR2 receptor gene, causing the receptor to bind more weakly with PCBs than normal. The mutation does not prevent the tomcods from accumulating PCBs in their bodies and passing them on to striped bass and whatever else eats them. This system of passing contamination on to larger organisms is also known as biomagnification. The toxic chemicals also accumulated in sediments that settled to the river bottom.
In 1976 NYSDEC banned all fishing in the Upper Hudson because of health concerns with PCBs. It also issued advisories restricting the consumption of fish caught within a 20-mile (30 km) long segment of the Hudson River from Hudson Falls to Troy.
PCBs are thought to be responsible for health issues that include neurological disorders, lower IQ and poor short-term memory (active memory), hormonal disruption, suppressed immune system, cancer, skin irritations, Parkinson’s disease, ADHD, heart disease, and diabetes. PCB contamination in humans may come from drinking the contaminated water, absorption through the skin, eating contaminated aquatic life, and/or inhaling volatilized PCBs. PCB contamination is especially dangerous for pregnant and nursing women. The contamination can reach the fetus and potentially cause birth defects. Contamination through breast milk can also have harmful effects on the child indirectly.
Cleanup
In 1966, Pete Seeger and Toshi Seeger founded Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, an environmental education organization and an actual boat (a sloop), that promotes awareness of the river and its history. Clearwater gained national recognition for its activism starting in the 1970s to force a clean-up of PCB contamination of the Hudson caused by GE and other companies. Other specific Hudson watershed issues with which Clearwater is concerned are development pressures in the southern half of the Hudson Valley, pesticide runoff, the Manhattan west side waterfront, Indian Point nuclear reactors, and New York/New Jersey Harbor dredge spoil disposal. Clearwater played a key role in EPA's decision to compel one of the Hudson River’s biggest polluters to begin removing PCB from the water and restoring one of the most polluted portions of the river.
In 1980, Consolidated Edison (Con Ed) agreed to drop its 17-year fight to build a pumped-storage hydroelectricity facility on Storm King Mountain, after a legal challenge by the non-profit environmental organization Scenic Hudson. The actions of local citizen organizations that led to the Con Ed decision spurred the creation of Riverkeeper, a non-profit environmental organization that grew into a global umbrella organization, the Waterkeeper Alliance.
In 1983, EPA declared a 200-mile (320 km) stretch of the river, from Hudson Falls to New York City, to be a Superfund site requiring cleanup. This hazardous waste site is considered to be one of the largest in the nation. There have been many programs of remediation work to reduce the PCB pollution. In 1984, approximately 200 miles (320 km) of the Hudson River was designated a Superfund site, and attempts to clean up the upper Hudson River began, including the removal in 1977–78 of 180,000 cubic yards (140,000 m3) of contaminated river sediments near Fort Edward. In 1991, further PCB pollution was found at Bakers Falls, near the former GE Hudson Falls factory, and a program of remediation was started. In August 1995, a 40-mile (64 km) reach of the upper Hudson was reopened to fishing, but only on a catch-and-release basis. Removal of contaminated soil from Rogers Island was completed in December 1999.
In 2001, after a ten-year study of PCB contamination in the Hudson River, EPA proposed a plan to clean up the river by dredging more than 100,000 pounds (45,000 kg) of PCBs. The worst PCB hotspots are targeted for remediation by removing and disposing of more than 2.6 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment. The dredging project is the most aggressive environmental effort ever proposed to clean up a river, and will cost GE about $460,000,000. In 2002, EPA announced a further 2,650,000 cubic yards (2,030,000 m3) of contaminated sediments in the upper Hudson River would be removed.
GE began sediment dredging operations to clean up the PCBs on May 15, 2009. This stage (Phase One) of the cleanup was completed in October 2009, and was responsible for the removal of approximately 300,000 cubic yards (230,000 m3) of contaminated sediment, which was more than the targeted amount. Over 620 barges filled with sediment were transported to the processing facility on the Champlain Canal, and over 80 rail cars transported the dredged sediment to a waste facility in Andrews, Texas. The true scope of Phase One was about 100,000 cubic yards (76,000 m3) more than planned, and Phase Two was to be be expanded as a consequence. Phase Two of the cleanup project, led by GE and monitored by EPA, began in June 2011, targeting approximately 2,400,000 cubic yards (1,800,000 m3) of PCB-contaminated sediment from a forty-mile section of the Upper Hudson River. Phase Two of the cleanup will take approximately 5 to 7 years to complete. In 2010, General Electric agreed to finance and conduct a second dredging campaign at the Upper Hudson River between Fort Edward and Troy. These works have been supervised by EPA.
Though the cleanup has been slow, environmental advocacy groups have reached out to the general public on the condition of the river's pollution. Scenic Hudson, Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, Hudson Riverkeeper, and the Natural Resources Defense Council have continued to push for more action from General Electric. After Seeger's death in 2014, EPA Regional Administrator Judith A. Enck stated that "the incredible work" of Seeger and the Clearwater organization helped make the Hudson River cleaner.
Opposition
GE fought a media and political battle to avoid cleaning up the river and countered that dredging the river would actually stir up PCBs. In 2002, EPA ordered GE to clean up a 40-mile (64 km) stretch of the Hudson River it had contaminated.