Housatonic Rest of River — Coming on the heels of their December 4 public meeting covering the Housatonic Rest of River remediation plan’s revised transportation and disposal proposal, General Electric Company (GE) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) representatives will hold a virtual public session regarding the project’s remedial design and action plan for Reach 6, including Woods and Valley Mill ponds, on January 15, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. The online format was enacted for next month’s meeting “out of an abundance of caution for weather and any residual illnesses continuing from the holidays,” a December 19 EPA news release states. The previous session, held at Taconic High School, wasn’t well attended as a snowstorm hit the area that evening.
Remediation efforts are warranted after GE deposited the now-banned polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the waterway for years. Labeled “forever” chemicals for their inability to break down, the toxins were used by the company in their Pittsfield plant’s manufacture of transformers.
A 2020 agreement between GE, the EPA, and five affected towns includes a plan to remediate the Rest of River portion of the Housatonic River, from the east and west confluence of the waterway in Pittsfield to Connecticut. This plan provides that the least PCB-dense dredged materials will be transported to a to-be-constructed upland disposal facility (UDF), or waste repository, in Lee while the more toxic substances are taken out of the area. According to this remedy, roughly 965,000 cubic yards will be taken to the UDF, with 100,000 cubic yards moved off site.
Here is a link to the virtual meeting. The meeting ID is 161 398 2552, and the passcode is 30052177.
Public input on the plan is due by February 3 and can be submitted at R1Housatonic@epa.gov.
Reach 6
The cleanup program is divided into reaches, or regions of remediation. Reach 6, including Woods and Valley Mill ponds, extends from about 10 miles downstream of the Housatonic’s east and west confluence through Woods Pond, in Lenox and Lee, to Woods Pond Dam. This reach is scheduled to be remediated during the first 10 years of the 13-plus-year project.
On October 31, GE submitted its remedial design and action work plan for Reach 6. That 94-page document can be found here.
The paper was presented along with a report showing its investigative findings in Reach 6. That pre-design investigation report can be found here.
GE’s final submission with those documents, its Baseline Restoration Assessment Report, can be found here.
However, GE stated that the Reach 6 design information included in the released documentation is preliminaryand represents only about 30 percent of the design, with the full design to be released after the completion of additional assessments, such as area habitat and archeological resources. Once its work is finished, GE is required to restore the area to pre-remediation conditions to the extent possible.
The Remedial Design and Action Plan
In its design and action plan for Reach 6, GE is proposing to remove sediment in Woods Pond up to six feet below the crest of the Woods Pond Dam. Generally, the plan provides that once the Woods Pond sediment is removed, a multi-layer engineered cap will be placed on top.
In the Reach 6 floodplain, the top one foot of soil will be excavated and backfilled. Ten vernal pools in Reach 6 will first be evaluated in a pilot study that is ongoing now and will be monitored before an appropriate remediation plan is put in place. The PCB levels in the “surface water, sediment, and biota” will be monitored before and during the construction in Reach 6, the plan states.
The document also specifies the extent of PCB density within the sediment and soils that will dictate whether it is disposed of at the UDF or off site and clarifies that the UDF will only house materials “generated as part of the Rest of River Remedial Action.” No materials from the remediation site will be disposed of elsewhere in Berkshire County.
“The goal of this cleanup is to make Woods Pond suitable for recreation and community use,” the release states.
