Lee — During a June 27 joint meeting between the Lee Select Board and personnel from General Electric (GE) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), GE representatives presented a preliminary transportation route for toxins—the now-banned polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)—that will be removed from the Housatonic River area to a proposed Upland Disposal Facility (UDF) in Lee.
A 2020 agreement between five Berkshire towns, GE, and the EPA stated that a UDF would be established in Lee following decades of PCBs deposited by GE from its Pittsfield electric transformer plant into the waterway. The plan is estimated to clean up about 30 percent of the total PCBs in the area of remediation.
At the meeting, town officials asked GE for a copy of the presentation to provide to residents and plan to have another meeting after those documents, including proposed transportation maps, are received. “These are our thoughts at the moment,” GE Pittsfield and Housatonic River Leader Andy Silfer said of the presentation. “We’re not just saying, ‘this is the end of it and we’ll talk to you later.’ We’ll be having more meetings.”
The routes
The primary preliminary proposed UDF route is down Lee’s Main Street, Routes 7 and 20, which houses much of its local economic sector, with other roads possibly impacted: Roaring Brook Road/Woodland Road and Routes 7 and 20 connecting to Mill Street and Willow Road. The proposed preliminary off-site transportation route runs through Routes 7 and 20 to access the Massachusetts Turnpike. In some stages of the remediation effort, South County roads—including Walker Road, Holmes Road and East New Lenox Road—may be used for transportation as well as Willow Hill.
The remediation areas will include staging areas nearby where the dredging will take place, but those areas haven’t been fully determined yet.
In the presentation, a slide indicated areas marked in red to denote Pittsfield residential neighborhoods around Pomeroy Avenue as well as other higher-value neighborhoods that were to be excluded from any such transportation plan in the permit.
GE officials plan to submit a formal transportation plan to the EPA by October 31, with feedback from the Town of Lee encouraged prior to that deadline, said Dean Tagliaferro, EPA Project Lead for the GE Pittsfield Housatonic River site. Following that submittal, the EPA will take public comments before responding to GE, he said. A Quality of Life Compliance Plan that addresses air quality, noise, odor, and light impacts during the remediation process is scheduled to be submitted by GE to the EPA in December. “This is just step one,” Tagliaferro said of the meeting.
Preliminary proposed schedule
GE’s proposal separates the river into different cleanup phases running from north to south, with transportation of the PCB-laden sediment to the UDF oroffsite. The fall-2023 transportation plan will focus mainly on the areas spanning from the confluence through Woods Pond, with some facets of the plan to be performed concurrently.
Phase 5A—that includes the area from the confluence of the river’s east and west branches to the Pittsfield Water Treatment Plant or city border—is slated to have its transportation disposal plan performed first. That phase will take four years and remove about 60,000 cubic yards of soil annually, with about 5,000 truck trips annually, averaging 25 trips daily. So, 16-to-20-ton trucks in this phase will be traveling about 198 days over the year, or about nine months given closures.
Phase 5B—that includes the area from the Pittsfield border to Roaring Brook—will take a year to complete and remove about 16,000 cubic yards of material annually, with about 1,350 truck trips, averaging seven trips daily.
Phase 5C—that includes the area from Roaring Brook to Woods Pond—will take about three years to complete and remove about 5,300 cubic yards of soil annually, with about 500 truck trips annually, averaging three trips daily.
Phase 6—that includes Woods Pond—will take about three years to complete and remove about 200 cubic yards of soil annually, with about 20 truck trips annually, averaging up to a trip a day.
Phases 7 and 8—below Woods Pond Dam to Rising Pond, and Rising Pond—will occur at least 10 years down the road.
Although GE estimated that the total volume of sediment removal from the river and flood plain would tally 1 million cubic yards, that number isn’t firm, with the company collecting more data to refine the figure.
How it’s proposed to work
At the meeting, GE proposed that off-site disposal would be by truck or railroad, while disposal at the UDF would be by either truck, railroad, or a sealed hydraulic pipeline. The latter method will pump the PCB-laden sediment in a water slurry three miles to the UDF using a series of pumps and a booster pump. At the UDF, the water will be removed, treated, and tested before being discharged back to the river, with the dried material left going into the facility. According to GE, about 285,000 cubic yards of sediment will be transported via the hydraulic pipeline, saving more than 8,000 truck trips per year.
But some Lee residents weren’t convinced that the method was sound and voiced concern over the pipeline leaking, presenting another issue for the town, while others were worried about toxic particles emitted into the air. “When you dredge a river and you don’t treat it and it becomes in the air, I pray that there isn’t any sort of accident, but accidents do happen,” said Peg Biron.
The trucks used in transport will be tarped for protection on a frame that goes over the material, holding it in place. The materials will also filter out water to protect against water leaking out. The trucks will be lined, and tailgates sealed. GE officials stated, however, that the trucking company hasn’t been hired yet and won’t be for some time until the transportation plan is secured and the project is sent out to bid. Residents asked to be able to determine the safety record of the trucking company to be used.
Lee responds
With a public comment period that initially was not slated for the meeting and no Zoom stream, local townspeople made their feelings clear, admonishing the group for calling the meeting at 11 a.m. instead of in the evening when more residents are free.
Select Board Chair Bob Jones said GE provided the meeting time to the town and, once the meeting began, expanded the comment period from 15 minutes to 30 minutes. He said the meeting was the first time the Board had learned of the proposals, including the use of Main Street in the transportation plan. “This is just a preliminary presentation,” Jones said. “This is the beginning of a long conversation.”
Jones added that transportation should be kept on Routes 7 and 20—but not via Lee’s Main Street—in addition to a route on Walker Street and the main streets of Stockbridge and Housatonic “because those people want a dump in Berkshire County and we don’t.” Jones said, “The routes should all be on the main highways, Routes 7 and 20, and [Route] 102 to the [Massachusetts] Turnpike or west through West Stockbridge.”
Lee resident Tim Gray said the EPA and GE aren’t releasing complete plans and reports such as the UDF plan and “can see it happening here with the truck traffic.”
Josh Bloom called the marked excluded residential neighborhoods—wealthier than other areas—as “economic discrimination and unfair to the residents of Lenox Dale and Lee.” “Trucks are going to be going down Main Street in Lee when we were told we would have influence over the routes,” he said.
“Nobody wants this dump,” said one resident. “Not one single person in town. We don’t want it.”
