Housatonic Rest of River — After reviewing comments made October 10 by an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) representative responsible for determining the risk to human health for its projects, four environmental groups are calling for the organization to reassess those risks as they pertain to the Housatonic Rest of River cleanup.
On October 31, Interim Director of the Citizens for PCB Removal (CPR) Charles Cianfarini, together with Judy Herkimer from Housatonic Environmental Action League (HEAL), Tim Gray from Housatonic River Initiative (HRI), and Valerie Anderson from Housatonic Clean River Coalition, sent an email to three EPA officials involved in the waterway’s remediation urging the “need to perform additional Human Health and Ecological risk assessment … especially to determine the toxicity of sediment that will be placed in the Upland Disposal Facility (UDF) that will be located in Lee.” A copy of that email can be found here.
“We are also concerned that significantly more toxic materials will be transported by truck and or rail through our communities either to the UDF or out of our local area,” the email stated. According to Cianfarini, the four signatory groups include a total of about 300 to 500 members.
Last month, the EPA hosted a discussion focused on risk assessment, the human health risks from airborne toxins, or polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), potentially released during the 13-plus years of the project to remove the now-banned substances from the Housatonic River’s Rest of River, the region extending from its east and west confluence in Pittsfield through southern Berkshires and Connecticut. According to a 2020 agreement signed by General Electric Company after the business deposited PCBs into the waterway from its Pittsfield transformer plant, the least toxic dredged soil and sediment would be deposited into a to-be-constructed UDF, or waste repository, in Lee while the materials with a higher density of PCBs would be transported out of the area. At the session, Tagliaferro said cleanup of the Rest of River region is expected to start in late 2025 through 2026, with the construction of the landfill in Lee followed by river remediation in the Pittsfield area in 2027 and then Woods Pond in 2028.
Agency representatives, including EPA Senior Regional Human Health Risk Assessor Courtney Carroll, told the October 10 attendees that the inhalation of PCBs pertinent to the project doesn’t put the public at risk according to their criteria. That conclusion, per EPA Project Manager Dean Tagliaferro, is based on a 20-year-old assessment of thousands of data samples and an external peer review. Carroll, along with EPA Superfund Technical & Support Branch Chief Meghan Cassidy and NH/RI Superfund and Risk Assessment Chief Melissa Taylor, were sent the October 31 email.
Cianfarini told The Berkshire Edge that following the October 10 session, the environmental groups revisited the risk assessment aspect of the project, concluding that a newer risk assessment using more recent methods of evaluation should be performed before any remediation efforts begin. “We believe that old technology and older studies were really not looking at everything properly,” he said. “There’s newer technologies, newer testing.”
The email provided information dictated by Mark Hermanson, Ph.D., a former advisor to HRI funded by the EPA Technical Assistance Grant who reviewed the data over the past year. According to Hermanson, some of the water samples he evaluated included PCB-4 and PCB-19, substances with higher toxicity than the PCB categories originally considered to be in the contaminated settlement, citing PCB-4 as “a strong neurotoxin, interfering with dopamine synthesis in brains of mammals,” the email states.
“We want to know exactly what they plan on putting into that UDF,” Cianfarini said. “It’s one thing to say, ‘We’re going to put in PCBs that are 25 parts per million,’ or whatever. Now it looks like there could be other more toxic types of contamination that should be evaluated, not only what’s going in the [UDF] but how it gets transported, everything.”
Additionally, the email states that Hermanson found the data tables to not list the congeners, or toxins, in consecutive order and were missing information, citing the air concentration standards used by EPA as “complete nonsense.”
Recently, HRI hired a new TAG advisor, Keven Farrar, but Cianfarini said Farrar has not reviewed this data to date.
“What we’re looking for is just to open the door for them to do more complete, innovative testing on what they plan on taking out and where they plan for it to go and ensure that everything that GE has proposed and they are approving meets the standards to protect the health of the community,” Cianfarini said.
The Berkshire Edge reached out to the EPA for a response. EPA Spokesperson Jo Anne Kittrell replied that the agency will provide that response early next week.
