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Lee residents lambast General Electric over cleanup transportation plan shortcomings

Housatonic Railroad Company offers a glimmer of hope for those advocating for the use of rail to transport PCB-laden material to the UDF in Lee.

Lee — With the town recently ranked ninth best small town in the Northeast by a national publication, residents fear that accolade will be short lived once its picturesque landscape becomes dotted with toxic-waste-filled trucks headed to a local Superfund site. Those citizens came out in droves to a November 28 Select Board meeting, hoping federal agency officials and the company who created the mess would help protect their “gateway to the Berkshires.” Alas, many came away from the session empty handed.

“You are destroying our town and October Mountain,” Lee’s Janice Braim said to GE officials attending, adding that the river will not be usable after remediation efforts that aren’t slated to fully cleanup the waterway. “It’s time to do the right thing.”

The action stems from a remediation plan approved in 2020 by the Environmental Protection Agency following years of General Electric Company depositing the now-banned polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the Housatonic River from its Pittsfield plant. The plan was agreed to by officials—including a representative from each of five affected towns of Great Barrington, Lee, Lenox, Sheffield, and Stockbridge—during closed negotiations. The plan allows for the most contaminated materials to be transported out of the area, with those materials containing the lowest contamination destined for a Upland Disposal Facility in Lee. The Rest of River is the third segment of the Housatonic to be remediated, from the confluence of its east and west branches in Pittsfield to Connecticut.

On October 31, GE released its transportation plan for the PCB-laden soil and sediment, with that plan showing that the materials would be mostly moved by trucks and, to a lesser extent, via hydraulic measures. That plan cited the lack of existing usable railroad siding—areas for the cars to be offloaded and onloaded from the track—as the predominant reason the method was not selected. Public comment for the plan ends February 1.

Dr. Charles Kenny, who heads up the Tri-Town Boards of Health, addresses GE officials regarding the shortcomings of their Nov. 28 presentation of a transportation plan in conjunction with the remediation of the Housatonic River. Photo by Leslee Bassman.

GE Project Coordinator Andrew T. Silfer was in the hot seat for the Lee Select Board meeting, presenting the identical documents and rationale opposing the use of rail as in the company’s October 31 release before the floor yielded to Dr. Charles Kenny, who heads up the Tri-Town Boards of Health. The group—the health department for Lee, Lenox, and Stockbridge —recently voiced strong support for rail transportation as being safer and less of an infringement on residents.

“I am very disappointed with this presentation,” Kenny said to applause. Calling the presentation “inadequate” and “seriously misleading,” he said GE’s transportation proposal doesn’t put forth measures to maximize the material to be transported off site by rail as required by the 2020 permit, including evaluating adding new rail siding to make rail transport viable. “The consideration that new rail staging could be constructed is not in this proposal at all,” Kenny said.

Additionally, according to Kenny, transporting the PCB toxic waste by rail to the local UDF has not been investigated as other methods of transportation have. He touted that the EPA should consider the use of rail for local transport to the UDF and study the impact of the proposed truck routes on citizens’ health, including children.

Residents of Lee and surrounding towns line up on Nov. 28 to ask questions of GE and EPA officials focused on the transportation plan for dredged toxic waste materials from the Housatonic River. Photo by Leslee Bassman.

At the meeting, residents voiced concern over whether the transported materials would be dry, thereby making it easier for the PCBs to become airborne, while others identified GE’s transportation approach as “a dinosaur” for such an innovative technology company. Stockbridge resident Denny Alsop discussed a petition that now amasses 2,000 signatures, including those of high-profile citizens and government officials, calling for a thorough public discussion of the use of rail as a transportation option. More residents offered information about the high number of accidents occurring in the state, questioning the possible hazardous result of a vehicle incident involving a truck carrying toxic waste within the area, as others clamored for a process to supervise truck drivers as well as safety measures to confine the truck cargo from escaping.

Silfer responded that GE will hire a reputable contractor who will manage the trucking aspect of the project.

“Twenty-five million dollars compensation for the severe environmental and harmful effects on our health, both in the past and inevitably in the future, is an insult,” Lenox Dale resident Phoenix Haynes said, adding that GE earns about $209 million daily, or $25 million in just under three hours, the amount the company is compensating each of the towns of Lee and Lenox. Those numbers comport with what the company garnered in 2022, about $83 billion. “They’re pitching pennies at the expense of our health and safety,” Haynes said of GE’s proposal.

Stockbridge Select Board member Patrick White and Great Barrington Selectboard member Leigh Davis spoke at the meeting, with White vowing his support for Lee and Davis delivering a blistering recapitulation of the presentation. “I’m very, very disappointed, and I actually feel that this presentation was an insult to those who are gathered here,” she said, adding that no attempt was made by GE to discuss the feasibility of using rail as the transportation mode. “That is our number one priority: to take this toxic material off our streets and onto someplace that does not affect us and impact our children and impact our lives. And I did not see that. I did not see [a] cost analysis.”

Davis said she was “humbled” by what the Lee residents are going through as Great Barrington’s involvement in the process won’t occur until a decade after the start of the first section of remediation, Reach 5A that includes the area from Pittsfield to the Lenox line.

Housatonic Railroad Company steps up as a glimmer of hope for residents

During the meeting, Lee Select Board Chair Robert “Bob” Jones read an email he recently received from Corporate Counsel at Housatonic Railroad Company Parker F. Rodriguez. The Berkshire Edge received a copy of the correspondence that not only provides support for a rail transport of the toxic waste materials but goes a step further, offering contributions to the project, including “some track and possibly labor” for construction of rail siding.

Although GE, in its October 31 release, provided a truck trip would still be needed on both ends of a rail trip to the UDF, Rodriguez refuted that argument as “intellectually dishonest” since a clearing and leveling would be needed for trucks at the dredging location just as it would be needed to create a rail siding. Additionally, property rights would need to be obtained by GE, whether truck or rail is used, he stated in the email. No trucks would be required to unload railcars at the UDF if rail access was built right into the facility, Rodriguez stated.

According to Rodriguez, “rail access to the UDF is needed for efficiency,” and his email provided the process that could be used to load and remove the train cars on sidings without interference with GE’s schedule, a timetable that would be “dependent on the trucker’s schedules,” he said.

“My question for GE and [consultant] Arcadis is why hasn’t a legitimate and comprehensive cost-benefit analysis been done to look at truck versus rail?” Rodriquez asked in his email. He asserted that the truck trips in GE’s presentation don’t account for comparisons of pollution emissions for trucks versus rail or actual cost analyses. Rodriguez outlined the benefits of rail over truck, including fuel efficiency, injuries or accidents, wear and tear on local roads, and greenhouse gas emissions, but he stated that his company has “never been asked by GE to provide actual transportation costs on a per-railcar basis.”

With grants available and contributions by Housatonic Railroad as options for financing a rail transport method, Rodriguez concluded by asking, “why is GE being allowed to pass on the environmental cost of favoring trucks onto the community in order to save themselves money on infrastructure?”

However, Rodriguez’s stance is not new.

A September 25, 2008 correspondence from Housatonic Railroad Company Vice President F. Colin Pease to Silfer offered its “flexible and frequent rail freight service” to the project, with tracks running parallel to the Housatonic. Additionally, the text noted that the highest concentrations of contaminated sediment exist just upstream from four major dams located at mills served or once served by the railroad, with the capacity to “upgrade or install sufficient rail infrastructure that could be used for loading and shipping rail cars.”

The Pease correspondence read, “Loading contaminated material onto rail cars at sites very close to where the material is extracted from the [R]iver will enable GE and EPA to minimize the impact of the clean up on local communities such as Great Barrington, Lee and Lenox. Further the locations are sites that have been used for industrial type activity for many years and thus would be more conducive to rail activities during the cleanup.”

In its written comments to the draft revised 2020 permit, Rodriguez, on behalf of the Housatonic Railroad Company, again stated the company’s support for transporting the contaminated material by rail, both to offsite facilities and the UDF, listing locations along the rail line appropriate for loading or transfer. “Housatonic Railroad is aware that the draft permit provides that waste material designated for off-site facilities must be transported via rail wherever possible, however, it is our opinion that rail may also be the best transportation option for waste material designated for the Upland Disposal Facility,” an accompanying August 21, 2020 letter states. The document’s rationale for rail includes that the method would lessen the project’s impact on the community by reducing truck traffic, damage to the roads, environmental harm, disturbances to residents, and risk of spilling contaminated material. Furthermore, the correspondence provides that one railcar can fit about three truckloads of waste.

EPA response to Housatonic Railroad comments

EPA Project Manager Dean Tagliaferro responded that his office heard the comments of attending residents, including a preference for rail versus truck, and may set up a meeting with Housatonic Railroad to gain more clarity on the issue, including how much space is needed to create a rail siding, how many rail cars fit on a siding, and the cost to build a rail spur at the UDF.

He told The Berkshire Edge that he knew the Housatonic Railroad Company was interested in participating in the project, according to the company’s response to the 2020 plan, but he wanted to “see GE’s plan first, get a handle on it.” He said, “I do think to the extent they are willing to meet with us and share their information, I think that would be helpful,” adding that he has not received the company’s email read by Jones.

Tagliaferro declined to extend the public input deadline for the transportation proposal. With transportation not due to start for a couple of years, he said the EPA can evaluate the comments and “give clear direction to GE for the follow up plan” before embarking on another joint meeting.

Although the Lee Select Board was praised by speakers for setting up the meeting, Select Board Chair Robert “Bob” Jones said GE “could have saved themselves a lot of time if they had had this meeting four years ago.” He added, “Whether [GE is] going to relent and actually listen to the people who live in the area, the people who live in the [Housatonic] River Corridor, that remains to be seen. The evidence is just piling up that rail is a far better option to transport this stuff.”

Attempts to contact Rodriguez were not returned by press time.

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