Housatonic Rest of River — The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that its representatives will be hosting a public meeting focused on General Electric Company’s (GE’s) Revised On-Site and Off-Site Transportation and Disposal Plan on December 4, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., at Taconic High School, 96 Valentine Road, Pittsfield. The document was released by GE on October 15, with the recent iteration touting a transportation program within the Housatonic Rest of River remediation project that includes an increase in hybrid truck/rail and hydraulic pumping methods to move toxic dredged materials from the waterway over its October 31, 2023, predecessor proposal. The revised proposal also offers three sites for rail sidings. The measure follows an outpouring of responses made by state and local officials as well as area residents over the safety of GE’s initial plan, deeming trucking to be a more dangerous transportation option.
In June, the EPA referred the document back to GE, strongly advocating company engineers evaluate other transportation options, including rail, as well as more efforts to gain efficiency in the process.
The process stems from decades of GE depositing the now-banned polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the Housatonic River from its Pittsfield plant. A December 2020 permit encompassing the Rest of River remediation—from the east and west confluence of the waterway through Connecticut—was agreed to by the EPA, environmental departments, and town officials. That agreement allows for the most contaminated materials to be transported out of the area, with those materials containing the lowest contamination destined for an Upland Disposal Facility (UDF) in Lee.
The 2020 permit also placed the authority to approve GE submittals for the Housatonic River cleanup squarely with the EPA, with Massachusetts and Connecticut state agencies given an opportunity for review and comment.
Per EPA staff, hard copies of the revised transportation plan can be found at the Lee, Lenox, Pittsfield, and Hunt Libraries.
Public input on the plan is due January 15 and can be submitted to R1Housatonic@epa.gov.
EPA responds to report, requested repairs covering status of Columbia Mill Dam
As required by the 2020 settlement agreement, GE must monitor non-GE-owned dams on the Housatonic River in Massachusetts, including the Columbia Mill and Willow Mill dams, with the results of this year’s September 3 inspections of those dams recently released by GE subcontractor GZA GeoEnvironmental Inc. (GZA). Although the reports reflected that the dams were in about the same overall conditions as the 2023 review, a February 2023 comment from Lee officials enumerated specific repairs to the Columbia Mill Dam they felt should be done so that the dam remains in working order until the remediation efforts take place. The Columbia Mill Dam is set to be taken down during that process.
The Berkshire Edge reached out to the EPA to find out if that work had been performed.
Here is a link to the report.
“The performance of the repairs was evaluated during the 2024 Annual Visual inspection of Columbia Mill Dam,” stated EPA spokesperson Jo Anne Kittrell in an email response, attaching a copy of the report with a photo log. Additionally, Kittrell cited Appendix D (Maintenance Tracking Table) of the report as providing “the status of all maintenance items, when the condition was observed, proposed response, and the current status of the condition.”
Matching up Appendix D to the February 2023 list of requested repairs, the report shows that temporary repairs were made to the spillway and concrete issues in July, with continued monitoring to occur for most of those repairs. Regarding logs and debris collected in the spillway, the report shows this issue wasn’t “observed to be impeding flow” during the recent inspection but the condition will continue to be monitored. A downstream spillway face crack was measured, establishing that a baseline for future monitoring and vegetation on the dam’s right embankment will fall under the vegetation management protocol. Cracks in downstream walls will continue to be monitored, per the report, as will minor base leaks and cracks/exposed rebar in the mill foundation wall as well as a bulge in the stone masonry wall downstream.
