I think there are few people who would disagree with the only true thing he said during the entire press conference. No one in this country has ever seen anything like the year we have just endured.
The summer-long event combines a gallery space featuring paintings of the outdoors by local artists, environmental literature on display, and a live panel of speakers featuring prominent movers and shakers in the Housatonic River and Hudson River cleanup efforts.
Warren adopted a new speaking tactic and abandoned her previous style. Instead she embraced the well-worn path of a campaigner—making a more cynical appeal for quick applause by promising to fight the Republicans and leaving the details of that fight for another day.
While we like to think the Berkshires is populated with good people and only good people, we are not always right. The combination of bad actors and naiveté has resulted in more than one Berkshire swindle.
GE has formally objected to EPA’s final cleanup remedy, challenging the agency’s directive to transport and dispose of the PCB waste to an off-site facility.
Although EPA’s final remedy requires the General Electric Company to transport and dispose of PCB waste in a federally approved landfill, the company is fighting tooth and nail to dispose of contaminated waste locally.
Gov. Charlie Baker’s administration is quietly flirting with massive private companies like Comcast to deliver what will likely be inferior and expensive service to rural towns. “It’s a slow-rolling tragedy that will blight Western Massachusetts for generations.”
-- Susan Crawford, Harvard law professor and director of the Berkshire Center for Internet and Society
If this decision holds strong against what will likely be a protracted legal fight from GE, the $613 million cleanup will go forward eventually, and the PCB-contaminated waste will be shipped out of state.
The GE-owned parcel at Rising Pond here — earmarked by the company for a PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl) dump --is zoned for residential use only, according to Great Barrington Town Planner Christopher Rembold, who said the town’s zoning regulations “do not allow an industrial-type use.”
Housatonic homeowners are now worried about their property values — not to mention potential health risks from a nearby dump — and prospective homebuyers are now saying they won’t buy in Housatonic.
Mega March Against the Dumps, a community-organized march through the center of town in opposition to GE’s plan to build PCB dumps in the local area, will take place on Sunday, July 3, at noon, on Main Street in Great Barrington, Mass.
Rose will discuss the life of the Berkshires' Mum Bett -- who later changed her name to Elizabeth Freeman -- the first black enslaved person to gain her freedom in a court of law based on the principle of general equality.
GE doesn’t want the Environmental Protection Agency telling it to ship the contaminated sludge from the Housatonic River to a certified remediation facility in Texas. It wants to drop it into three Berkshire landfills instead.
General Electric proposes to stash PCBs from the river in three landfills: one next to Woods Pond in Lenox Dale, another near the Mass Pike in Lee, close to Goose Pond, and the third adjacent to the Rising Pond dam in Housatonic.
According to the Federal Register, EPA scientists have stated that toxic landfill liners are no guarantee and that landfill pollutants can “migrate into the broader environment. Eventually liners will either degrade, tear, or crack and will allow liquids to migrate out of the unit.” GE wants three more PCB landfills in the Berkshires. But the EPA insists on out-of-state disposal in an approved PCB facility. The matter will likely be settled in court.
