General Electric generated a lot of PCB waste in Pittsfield, both in the normal course of manufacturing and in receiving old and damaged PCB-containing transformers. The Housatonic River Initiative's website quotes Ed Bates, former Manager of Tests at the Power Transformer division at GE in Pittsfield on the subject of Pyranol, GE's name for its version of PCBs. "People don't realize that Pyranol is twice as heavy as water. If you put a gallon of Pyranol in water it sinks right to the bottom. Within that twelve and a half pounds of Pyranol weighs, seven pounds of every gallon is PCBs. We used to use an average of 20,000 gallons of Pyranol a week and this is if you do simple mathematics, this is one hundred and forty thousand pounds of ... PCBs a week that we were handling. And we had a loss rate: spillage, overfilling, of about 3% so this says that every week we would lose between four and five thousand pounds of PCBs that would go down into the drain and into the river. ...About a million and a half pounds of PCBs have been plowed into that river. I imagine a good 30% is left."

When you have a dangerous chemical such as PCB, how do you dispose of it? If you're General Electric, you bury it on site and around the city. GE also dumped PCBs and other chemicals into Unkamet Brook and Silver Lake in Pittsfield, and when they still had more to get rid of, they offered it to their neighbors, their own workers, the city, and even to their community schools. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, from the 1940s through the 1970s, GE gave away thousands of tons of fill from its facility to Pittsfield-area homeowners and contractors. GE's PCBs have turned up in the backyards of former workers, in city parks and playgrounds, and even in city schoolyards. In 1997, GE was ordered to remove 3,800 cubic yards of contaminated soil from a city playground, Dorothy Amos Park. The Park has been remediated, but the river bank and river next to the park still have high levels of PCBs.

GE was also ordered to remove fill from the schoolyard of the Allendale Elementary School. (This is the same school that now finds itself next to two toxic waste dumps, one of which is a high-level toxic waste dump, because when GE was ordered to remove contaminated sludge from the Housatonic River they piled it next to the school.) Who knew there could be a problem with the free fill being offered by GE? GE knew.

Allendale Elementary School after removal of GE-contaminated fill (photo from EPA website)