General Electric’s managers estimate that more than a million and a half pounds of their PCBs were leaked or dumped into the Housatonic River. In addition, PCB-laden fill was donated to Berkshire County towns and cities as clean fill, and more was buried throughout the county, so that now, every time someone puts a shovel into the ground, they wonder if they are going to find PCBs and underground barrels. When GE was made to clean up a small section of the river, they dredged the sediment as ordered by the EPA and then dumped the contaminated sediment in a pile next to an elementary school. This infamous Hill 78 is still next to the Allendaly Elementary School in Pittsfield. If this level of contamination were to occur today, and if the polluter were to behave so irresponsibly, this would be the biggest news story in the world. It would eclipse the Exxon Valdez story and the BP oil spill story. But somehow, this story receives little to no coverage in the media, and has not generated a large-scale outcry among the residents of Berkshire County, even though GE dumped PCBs into the Housatonic River, buried barrels of PCB-laden waste throughout that river’s floodplain, allowed PCBs to drain directly into the river, gave away PCB-laden fill as clean fill, and when they were made to dredge contaminated fill from a short section of the river they created a toxic waste dump by dumping it next to an elementary school.
In 1998, The Berkshire Eagle ran a story entitled “Pollution’s Paper Trail: GE’s trove of records eluded regulators.” It begins,
“GE has recently released to state and federal environmental agencies tens of thousands of pages of records about PCB disposal practices – including historic records of disposal sites that throughout the 1980s GE’s top local environmental officials asserted did not exist. In 1984, the Environmental Protection Agency decided not to place GE’s transformer plant and a long stretch of the Housatonic River in the fledgling Superfund program based primarily on the misperception that the chemical contamination from GE’s 60-year transformer operation was for the most part confined to the 250-acre East Street plant and the river.”
Keeping regulators from putting the Housatonic River into the Superfund program may have been a sufficient motivation for hiding the whereabouts of other contaminated sites. But here’s another possibility. During court cases in 2003, in which some residents of Pittsfield tried to collect damages for the harm done by GE in dumping PCBs on their property without revealing this fact, GE responded that statutes of limitation had expired.
One year later, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts filed a complaint against GE in court. It reads in part, “Specifically, the Commonwealth alleges a failure to notify the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (“DEP”) of a release of hazardous material to the environment, and the making of inaccurate, incomplete, misleading and untimely submittals to DEP with respect to such release.”
In a 2003 court case brought by Pittsfield residents whose lands were contaminated by GE’s PCBs, a GE worker testified that he had seen a PCB filled tanker by the river. Its valves were open, and it was leaking PCBs into the ground and into the river. Thinking that this was an oversight on someone’s part, the worker closed the valve. The next morning he returned to the site to find the valve again open and the tanker empty.