Perspectives on PCBs: Experts React to Hudson River Review

The Hudson River remains one of the nation's largest EPA Superfund sites due to its historic PCBs contamination. Photo Credit:Riverkeeper

Following General Electric’s 30-year discharge of harmful chemicals into the Hudson River, from 1947 to 1977, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency intervened, calling on the company to clean up the contamination via dredging of sediment. Fast forward to this past July, when the EPA published its initial third review of the clean-up efforts — the agency concluded that still more data is needed to determine whether those efforts are sufficiently protecting human and environmental health. 

In the words of this latest report, the EPA requires at least eight years of enough post-dredging data before it can identify a “meaningful time trend” for the concentrations of PCBs — polychlorinated biphenyls — in both fish and the water column, while also stating an additional need for extra time to analyze PCB levels in sediment. But as the extended Nov. 7 public comment deadline on the draft review approaches, not everyone agrees with the agency’s findings.

According to an independent review conducted last year by The Friends of a Clean Hudson — a coalition of environmental organizations — available data demonstrates that, in fact, levels of PCBs in fish and sediment have not been decreasing at the necessary rates. An FOCH extended analysis, released in June, also supports the independent review’s conclusions.

“Those uneven patterns should bring EPA to the conclusion that it’s not a protective remedy at this point. All that means is that EPA needs to go back and evaluate the remedy and figure out what needs to be done,” said Drew Gamils, senior attorney for regional nonprofit Riverkeeper. “Is it additional sampling? Is it targeted dredging in certain areas? Understanding that is going to take years, but they’re not even starting the process if they’re deferring a protectiveness decision.”

The EPA contends that PCB concentrations in fish, sediment and the water column are smaller than they were before dredging was completed, and the agency does plan to come to a protectiveness determination once more data becomes available. That determination would be added as an addendum to the review either in 2025 or by 2027 at the latest.

“We don’t need to know 100% that things are a certain way. We just need to be sure that we’re not making a poor decision or making a mistake,” said Gary Klawinski, Hudson River project director for the EPA. “We’re looking to get enough years of fish data — and it’s not just data, it’s information too. We have seen some things in the fish, like, we’ve noticed that certain species are recovering better than others. We don’t know the rates yet, but we can tell that some are doing better than others, so we’re starting to probe into that in more detail than we already have.”

That uncertainty remains a part of the underlying scientific process at hand, but striking a balance between today’s best available facts and tomorrow’s ideal conclusions can be tricky. “In my world, we would say they might not have the statistics, and what that means is that they don’t have enough, but you have to make sure it’s not an excuse,” said Chris Reddy, senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “It’s an understanding that if you try to conclude right now, you would have an incomplete answer. It’s something like, if you took a cake out of the oven halfway through, the cake is not cooked.”

The July draft review concerns a 40-mile-long portion of the Upper Hudson, where GE discharged 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the river from its Hudson Falls and Fort Edward capacitor manufacturing plants. Although a manufacturing ban on the human-made chemicals went into effect in 1979, it wasn’t until 2009 that GE followed through on the EPA’s request that the company dredge and remove millions of cubic yards of sediment from the most polluted areas.

“EPA has been assessing the PCBs pretty much from the time they were identified to be a risk to the public, and so, EPA has a long history of work on the Hudson,” said Klawinski. “PCBs are no longer used, and what’s still getting in the environment is what remains in the river.”

Once the dredging process wrapped up in 2015, it was the EPA’s turn to evaluate the status of the river’s PCBs — an issue which relates to a carcinogenic class of chemicals that bioaccumulate up the food chain from fish to the people who consume them. But despite their infamous “forever chemical” labeling, PCBs do possess the capability to become less toxic in certain cases.

According to Reddy, who has previously collected and analyzed PCB samples from the Hudson, former GE scientist John Brown discovered that microbes can degrade PCBs in areas with no oxygen. However, these areas do not apply to this review’s jurisdiction. “The very, very top of the Hudson River sediments are oxygenated, and so is the water. In those conditions, the PCBs are not going to break down that quickly,” said Reddy.

From a weaker immune system to low birthweight rates, researchers have found significant health effects associated with PCBs. And people who fish in the Hudson, particularly members of environmental justice communities, must continue to follow detailed advisories about which kinds of species they can consume in different parts of the river.

“It’s advised that if you are going to eat a fish from the Hudson River, you want to properly cut the fat off,” said Gamils. “Make sure you’re removing the skin, make sure you’re removing other parts of the fish that have the most fat that would therefore have the most heavily concentrated PCBs.”

Part of the reason behind the EPA’s involvement in the clean-up stems from the status of a 200-mile-long section of the Hudson River — from Hudson Falls, New York to New York City — as a superfund site. The Superfund program operates on a national level, designating the EPA to lead clean-ups of contaminated sites across the country. For each site, the agency produces a review every five years to decide whether the so-called cleanup remedy is protecting people and the environment.

Beyond dredging as a targeted approach, the EPA also accounts for a period of natural recovery, which the agency predicts will last over 50 years. It involves a lot of sampling, as the EPA works with GE to investigate PCB concentrations in the Upper Hudson floodplain and collect data in the Lower Hudson River. “The whole Hudson team is very active dealing with the PCBs throughout the Hudson, so that’s where I see things headed,” said Klawinski.

Of course, all those plans will take place under the backdrop of global warming impacts, as extreme weather events become more frequent in the age of the climate crisis. “When people say, ‘Oh, the 10-year storm or the 100-year storm,’ they’re saying that there might be a storm that happens every 100 years that is so unbelievably intense that it has the capacity to resuspend and remobilize all these [PCBs],” said Reddy. “The risk of leaving them alone and letting Mother Nature do its due is that they will not be gone.”

But still, perhaps an additional danger lies in the fact that PCBs remain invisible to the naked eye — a point to keep in mind amidst all the forces at play. “When you look at the river, you don’t know they’re there unless you learn about the historic contamination of PCBs in the Hudson River. You don’t see the dredging vessels, those have been removed and taken out of the river several years ago,” said Gamils. “Getting the public interested and aware of this issue again has been difficult, so that is definitely one of our biggest pushes.”