If you’ve seen or heard about GE’s video on PCBs and the Housatonic River, be sure to read our rebuttal.
From 1932 to 1977, the General Electric Company (GE) in Pittsfield, Massachusetts used PCBs, a man-made toxic chemical, in the manufacture of its transformers. In the process, GE 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. “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.
- What are PCBs?
- How did GE pollute Berkshire County with their PCBs?
- Did GE know about the dangers of PCBs?
- Just how dangerous are PCBs?
- Did GE really build a toxic waste dump next to an elementary school? – Allendale Elementary School
- Do Pittsfield’s 11 pediatricians think the children attending Allendale Elementary School are being adequately protected?
- What happened when environmental groups suggested taking the air filters from the school and testing them for PCBs?
- Citizens Coordinating Council – A process to hold public meetings to keep the citizenry informed about the “cleanup” of PCBs
- Dorothy Amos Park and the West Branch of the Housatonic River
- Newell Street Parking Lot and Barrel Fields
- NPDES permit – expired 2/1997, new permit comment period expired 3/05, still no new permit!
- Pittsfield Economic Development Authority – The William Stanley Business Park site, where GE knocked down buildings and then turned the site over to the City of Pittsfield, is supposed to be redeveloped by PEDA, but there are many problems. BEAT now broadcasts these meetings.
- Rest of the River - 2007 – how to deal with the “Rest of the River” below Fred Garner Park in Pittsfield, is not being hotly debated
- Restoration plans for the Housatonic River
- Rose Superfund Site – A site in Lanesborough where toxic chemicals were dumped. The site was “remediated” in 1994, but is still pumping toxic water from the ground
- Silver Lake – The lake that for years GE dumped toxic waste into which flows into the Housatonic River above most of the “clean up” The lake has not been “remediated”, but they are experimenting with a cap – which BEAT believes has already proved to be a bad idea.
- Unkamet Brook: Another toxic waste dumping area for GE. This brook flows into the Housatonic River above the entire “cleanup” of the river.
