Three Years After Settlement, Work On Housatonic Remains Undone

 HARTFORD (AP) — Three years after General Electric Co. agreed to pay $7.5 million to Connecticut to dredge cancer-causing PCBs from the Housatonic River, the work has not been done.

An advisory group charged with coming up with a plan has not met in a year. The CT Trustee Sub-Council, the state entity that oversees the advisory group, has canceled all but two of its meetings since December 2003.

The delay, state officials say, is an unintended consequence of a review of all state contracts that grew out of the Rowland Administration scandals.

“We shouldn’t just think because Connecticut got $7–$8 million in the settlement that the PCB problem went away,” Curtis Read of Bridgewater, whose lab, Hydro Technologies, tests Housatonic sediments for PCBs, told WNPR-FM.

Veronica Varela, who represents the US Fish and Wildlife Service on the subcouncil, said the effort panel “hit a roadblock” before it could move forward with the next phase of restoration work.

Lynn Werner of the Housatonic Valley Association, a member of the advisory board, said the Rowland resignation and subsequent contract review “put a huge kibosh on moving ahead with any kind of speed.”

Connecticut and Massachusetts each received $7.5 million five years ago to clean PCBs from their sections of the Housatonic downstream from GE’s Pittsfield, Mass., plant.

GE used PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, in the manufacture of electrical transformers in Pittsfield from the 1930s until 1977, when the government banned their use.

GE, which acknowledged in 1981 that the PCB pollution came from its transformer plant, has finished dredging the half-mile of the river that is closest to the plant.

Over the next two years, Massachusetts and federal regulators will decide how much of the remainder of the river there should be excavated, with the total costs expected to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Dan McGuiness, executive director of the Northwestern Connecticut Council of Governments, said people are frustrated not only by the lack of progress in Connecticut, but also by the lack of communication from the state Department of Environmental Protection.

“I think the DEP is losing a lot of credibility on this project,” he said. “They keep setting deadlines. The deadlines pass and nothing happens,” he told WNPR.

DEP Commissioner Gina McCarthy said she was not even aware of the problem until recently. “It’s clear that we have to take a look at it,” she said. “If there are projects waiting to be funded and it’s a matter of looking at doing the contract we should be moving forward on it. No excuses.”