http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/feckless_feds_harming_hudson_56WZXp9M0gPoRlmt7zOuJP
The federal Environmental Protection Agency faces a major decision next month: whether and how to proceed with the controversial Upper Hudson River dredging project, one of the largest environmental cleanups in US history.
Will the EPA keep its promises to the public? Thus far, its record is poor.
It promised to do the job in two phases -- and to pause after the first phase to judge its effectiveness, based on a set of strict scientific criteria. Yet it declared last summer's first phase a "resounding success" -- dismissing the inconvenient fact that dredging resulted in higher levels of PCBs in water, air and fish.
The supposed point of dredging is to reduce PCB levels -- and the EPA went ahead with the project despite critics' warnings that it would instead increase them.
Here are some promises the EPA has violated:
* To keep the resuspension of PCBs during dredging to just 0.13 percent of the PCBS dredged. This is important because resuspension spreads contamination downstream, reducing the cleanup's effectiveness.
In fact, dredging released 40 percent more PCBs to the lower Hudson than the EPA said it would allow.
* That dredging would reduce PCBs in fish, even in the years when dredging was being performed. In fact, levels rose up to 400 percent.
There's more:
* The EPA promised dredging would last only five years -- thereby ensuring that it would be more beneficial than other cleanup strategies, and to "limit the duration of construction-related impacts." Later, the agency extended the schedule to six years.
Now it says the project will take longer. Yet that extends the negative environmental impacts, and disruption of the river and the community -- with no offsetting benefit.
* PCB levels in air also rose during dredging, exceeding the EPA's standard more than 100 times. Somehow, the EPA nonetheless concluded that the work proceeded "without having excessive resuspension or air emissions."
Most troubling is the EPA's reversal on its commitment to limit the PCBs dispersed downstream. Rather than enforcing a strict limit and revamping the project to meet it, the agency has recommended tripling the PCBs that can flow into the Lower Hudson in Phase 2.
Yet that would clearly exceed the level that the EPA itself has said would "deliver an unacceptably large mass of PCBs to the Lower Hudson." Somehow, the EPA now insists this PCB release will have no environmental impact. Huh? If PCBs are so harmless, why dredge in the first place?
By any standard, the first phase of dredging was a failure. But rather than own up to the problems, the EPA is preparing to require an even larger project than it initially envisioned -- because, it says, the river's condition "disturbs the conscience."
Perhaps the EPA isn't inten tionally harming the Hudson. But it is institutionally wed to its own huge dredging project and fears the repercussions if it makes a candid assessment and considers alternative approaches.
Some blithely dismiss concerns about dredging because "GE is paying for it," but they miss the point. GE may be writing the checks. The Hudson and the people who live near it are paying the price.
Sharon Ruggi is a former president of the National Association of Resource Conservation and Development Councils and a member of the environmental group Citizen Environmentalists Against Sludge Encapsulation.
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