Housatonic Rest of River — With last fall’s filing of a second iteration to a draft transportation and disposal plan for the Housatonic Rest of River remediation project, General Electric Company (GE) found some success as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its conditional approval of the revised On-Site and Off-Site Transportation and Disposal Plan on April 30.
The EPA news release approving the plan can be found here.
The initial draft of the plan filed October 31, 2023, caused a stir among residents who feared the anticipated influx of trucks carrying toxic materials would harm the health of those in their path. The October 2023 plan can be found here.
The October 15 revised proposal filed a year later heeded the concerns of citizens as well as local legislators and health department members who decried the broad use of trucking as the primary mode of transportation. The revised October 2024 plan can be found here.
With a range between 75 percent and 80 percent of contaminated removed materials to be transported by rail and hydraulic pumping without the use of trucks, the new draft received a nod from EPA officials. It allows for about 17 percent of dredged soil and sediment transport to be via rail combined with trucking and “as little as approximately five percent of the material may be transported solely by truck to the Upland Disposal Facility (UDF).”
The Superfund project stems from a decades-long period of GE depositing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from its Pittsfield plant into the Housatonic River, with the PCBs used in its transformer production. A 2020 agreement between the EPA, GE, and five affected towns provided the remedy that includes routing the materials with the highest toxicity out of the area while transporting the remaining contaminated dredged soil and sediment in a to-be-constructed UDF, or waste facility, in Lee. The measure has long been opposed by Lee residents as a health hazard to the town’s citizens’ and way of life.
The Rest of River spans 125 miles from the confluence of the east and west branches of the Housatonic River in Pittsfield to Connecticut’s Long Island Sound.
The EPA’s April 30 announcement states its conditional approval to the revision reduces local round-trip truck trips by about 65 percent from the estimated 71,000 trips in the 2023 proposal to approximately 24,600 trips.
GE’s new work order, deadlines, transport provisions
The Rest of River remediation program is divided into sections, or reaches, with Reach 5A, a five-mile stretch running from the confluence of the Housatonic River at Garner State Park to the Pittsfield Wastewater Treatment Plant, set to be addressed first. Reach 5B runs from the Pittsfield Wastewater Treatment Plant to Roaring Brook and Reach 5C runs from Roaring Brook to the start of Woods Pond. Reach 6 is Woods Pond, Reach 7 extends from Woods Pond Dam to Rising Pond, and Reach 8 is Rising Pond.
Included in the EPA’s conditional approval are three locations now designated for rail spurs, areas needed for loading and unloading materials including Utility Drive (Pittsfield), Woods Pond/Berkshire Scenic Railroad (Lenox), and Rising Pond (Great Barrington). GE is obligated, under the approval, to submit a work plan by May 15 for the design of the Utility Drive and Woods Pond rail spurs.
The EPA is also requiring GE to develop a “backup plan” for transporting the materials by trucks in case the rail method is impacted by an issue such as staffing, equipment, train/rail coordination conflicts, and accidents.
Additionally, EPA gave a green light to the proposed rail transport of materials destined for the UDF from both Reach 5A and Rising Pond using the rail spur in Lenox.
The agency also approved using hydraulic transport for materials headed to the UDF from Reach 5C, Woods Pond, the Eagle Mill Dam remains, and the area behind the Columbia Mill Dam. Hydraulic transport, per the EPA, will be employed behind the Glendale (Stockbridge) and Rising Pond dams to the rail spur adjacent to the latter before being transported by rail to either the Woods Pond/Berkshire Scenic Railroad (Lenox) or off site.
