Don’t drink too much Housatonic River water. Don’t swim in it for long. Don’t dig your hands into the river’s muddy banks and put your fingers into your mouth, as children like to do. While you are welcome to catch the river’s plentiful fish for sport—brown and rainbow trout, large- and smallmouth bass, northern pike, perch, bluegill, catfish, suckers—don’t eat them. The same goes for the ducks, weasels, and other animals that live along the riverbanks. The Housatonic contains some of the highest levels of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) of any river in America—or in the world.
The Housatonic River flows 149 miles, from the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, down the length of Connecticut, to the coast, where it empties into Long Island Sound and the Atlantic. For centuries, the Mohican and Schaghticoke Indians, and the creatures they subsisted on—squirrels, ducks, wild turkeys, turtles, frogs, and catfish (which were slathered in mud from the river bottom and baked over a fire)—lived on the Housatonic. The river is bucolic, and its pristine-looking waters draw legions of canoeists, fishermen, and campers. But the river’s clarity is deceiving.
Between 1932 and 1977, the General Electric (GE) plant in Pittsfield dumped or leaked thousands of pounds of PCBs into the Housatonic. Exactly how many pounds is disputed. GE has acknowledged that the plant discarded almost forty thousand pounds of PCBs into the river, which, the company is quick to note, was legal at the time. But others, including two former senior GE employees, and the watchdog group Housatonic River Initiative (HRI), believe the actual amount was at least 1.5 million pounds, and probably more. (Neither of these estimates include the other toxic substances—such as benzene, chlorobenzene, trichloroethylene, and methyl chloride—that GE buried around town.) Most of the Housatonic, from GE’s now shuttered plant in Pittsfield down to the river’s outfall in Long Island Sound, is tainted by PCBs.
PCBs are synthetic oils, made by heating benzene with chlorine; they are part of a class of chemicals known as congeners, which were once nearly ubiquitous industrial solvents, coolants, and lubricants. From 1903 to 1979 PCBs were used as fire retardants and hydraulic fluids, and in joint compounds, waterproofing, plastic manufacturing, surgical implants, and carbonless carbon paper.
Because they weigh 35 percent more than water does, PCBs don’t float in an obvious slick on the surface, like the oil in Newtown Creek. They drop to the bottom of a waterway, cling to sediments, and enter the food chain through aquatic plants and invertebrates. PCBs are classic legacy pollutants: they do not break down readily in H2O and can persist for years. After contaminated cooking oil poisoned thousands of residents in Japan and Taiwan, many countries banned PCB use in 1977. It took another two years before Congress banned PCB production and distribution in the United States. The compounds are now outlawed in most nations. But it is estimated that over 1.5 billion pounds of PCBs still linger in the environment. They have been detected in a broad variety of animal species and even in rain-forest tribes and Eskimos, who have never used them.
As they work their way up the food chain, PCBs bioaccumulate in the tissue of fish, amphibians, mammals, and birds. Predators at the top of the food chain—such as eagles, orca whales, or humans—carry the highest levels of toxins. Doctors call the load of pollutants that accumulates in animal tissues the body burden.
Prolonged exposure to PCBs can cause severe acne and rashes and has been linked to childhood obesity and diabetes. PCBs may damage the liver, cause hormonal disruptions, and impact fertility. In high doses, PCBs cause cancer in animals, and they are regarded as probable carcinogens in people; they are especially linked to cancers of the liver and biliary tract.
The maximum allowable exposure level of PCBs in humans is two parts per million (ppm). The Housatonic’s fish contain PCB concentrations of up to 206 ppm, which are among the highest levels ever recorded. Housatonic ducks showed average PCB levels of 100 ppm, levels rarely seen anywhere else in the world. One of the first ducks trapped near Pittsfield registered a PCB count of an astonishing 3,700 ppm, and its carcass was treated as “flying hazardous waste.” Even small amounts of PCBs are dangerous. In one study, half the mink puppies fed Housatonic fish with PCB levels of only 4 ppm died quickly, and the surviving pups eventually developed jaw lesions, tooth loss, anorexia, and then died.
A 2009 EPA study of the Housatonic concluded, “Fish, other aquatic animals, and wildlife in the river and floodplain contain concentrations of PCBs that are among the highest ever measured…. Natural recovery from this contamination … will take decades if not hundreds of years.”
About forty miles south of Pittsfield, the Housatonic passes through the small town in northwest Connecticut where my parents have a house. Here, the river sweeps beneath a red covered bridge, past boulder-strewn banks and verdant hills. Despite warning signs posted on trees, my friends and I spent countless hours canoeing and fishing a ten-mile stretch of “the Housie” and occasionally swam in it and ingested its water. But it was not until I wrote this book that I realized how contaminated the river is. Nor did I understand why GE’s legendary chairman, Jack Welch, fought the cleanup of the Housatonic, and the nearby Hudson River, in New York, so hard for so long.
In 1903, GE, which had been founded by Thomas Edison a few years earlier, bought the Stanley Electric Company and began to manufacture three important product lines in Pittsfield: electrical capacitors and transformers, military ordnance, and plastics. For the next seven decades, Pittsfield was a one-company town, and the GE plant expanded to over 5 million square feet of buildings on a 254-acre site. “The GE” employed eighteen thousand people during the Second World War—75 percent of the local workforce—and as many as sixty-five hundred in the 1980s. But in the 1990s, the company began to shut down its Pittsfield operations and sent work to its plants in the South or overseas.
GE first used PCBs in Pittsfield in 1932, as an insulating fluid in its electrical equipment. But the plant produced so much PCB-contaminated oil that workers ran out of places to bury it on company grounds. Numerous pipes dumped PCB-laden water and oil into the ground, storm drains, and nearby Silver Lake, as well as directly into the Housatonic River. PCBs and other chemicals were poured into metal drums and buried off-site. PCB-laced oil was sprayed onto dirt roads as a dust suppressant. Wooden blocks soaked with PCBs were dumped into a nature preserve, Brattle Brook Park. Still, the PCBs kept piling up.
The Harvard School of Public Health sounded an alarm about the possible adverse effects of PCBs in 1937, but the companies that produced and used the chemicals ignored the warnings, and government regulators never addressed the question seriously. In the 1940s, a few Pittsfield residents complained about the PCBs, but most locals remained unaware of the problem or were unwilling to criticize the region’s biggest employer. GE assured citizens that Pittsfield would not be harmed, a message it repeated for decades.
In the 1950s, GE offered the residents of Pittsfield free “clean fill,” which was really fuller’s earth, a Kitty Litter–like substance used to absorb spilled PCBs. All that the recipients of the fuller’s earth had to do was to sign a waiver agreeing that they had received clean fill and would not hold GE liable for any health problems resulting from it. They happily did so—unaware that it was toxic, according to HRI—and used the fill in construction projects or to enhance their lawns and gardens.
In the 1970s Massachusetts health authorities discovered that milk from cows grazed along the banks of the Housatonic near Pittsfield was contaminated by PCBs. GE bought portions of two farms built on the river’s floodplain. Four decades later, signs are still posted along the river, warning of PCB pollution and advising people not to consume the Housatonic’s fish, waterfowl, frogs, and turtles. Yet some people ignore the signs and eat the local fish and ducks anyway—a practice, the EPA said, that makes them a thousand times more susceptible to serious medical problems.
In 1997, GE ran ads that said, “There have been a lot of studies of long-term worker exposure to PCBs, and they show overwhelmingly that even workers who had close contact with PCBs day after day showed no unusual health problems.”
That year, it was discovered that the soil in a playground in a largely African American neighborhood of Pittsfield was laced with PCBs. The revelation made headlines across the country. Then Lakewood, a neighborhood mostly populated by Italian American families, was discovered to contain extremely high levels of PCBs. One house lot was found to have 44,000 ppm of PCBs: GE bought the house, tore it down, and fenced off the lot. But the greatest indignity was Hill 78, once a five-acre ravine next to Allendale Elementary School. Beginning in the 1930s, GE began shoveling PCB-laced earth into the ravine until it grew into a tall mound. The pile remains today, looming about forty feet over the school. Soil samples from inside Hill 78 register PCB levels of 120,000 ppm. The soil around the school has been excavated and “capped” with untainted soil, but traces of PCBs have been found in air filters inside the school’s buildings, according to HRI. In the 1990s, the EPA said it would clean Hill 78, but in 2000 the agency suddenly reversed course. Not only would Hill 78 remain as it was, the EPA said, but PCBs dredged from the Housatonic would be added on top of it.
As GE began to lay off workers and pull out of town, some Pittsfield residents rose up to protest the toxic legacy it had left behind.
On a brisk November afternoon in 2009, Tim Gray pulled his blue minivan to a stop along the Housatonic River in Pittsfield and pointed upstream at the hulking shell of the old General Electric plant. “When the EPA and the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) people first got here, the situation was so out of control that they became shell-shocked,” he said. “That plant was literally marinating in toxic chemicals. The regulators had no idea what to do. They weren’t evil people, it’s just they had never seen anything like it before. When a few of us tried to help, they didn’t want to hear from us.”
Gray first encountered PCBs in 1976, when, as an undergraduate studying natural resource science at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, he and some friends tested the Housatonic’s water and discovered PCBs in the river below the GE plant. His research was ignored, but, indignant about the pollution, Gray, now a soft-spoken greenhouse operator, helped form the Housatonic River Initiative, won allies, and kept shouting from the rooftops until his foes had no choice but to listen.
Gray and his neighbors, many of whom were former GE employees, are working-class people who live along the Housatonic. As they see it, GE made a mess of the river and should clean it up. “We want our grandkids to have ‘a fishable, swimmable’ river, like the Clean Water Act says,” Gray explained. “It’s pretty simple—or, at least that’s what we thought when we started this thing.”
HRI has been a constant thorn in the side of both GE and Massachusetts regulators, using its own experts to show that GE dumped far more PCBs into the river than it claimed; that PCBs have leached under the river and can evaporate into the air; that over eight hundred barrels filled with PCBs were dumped into the Pittsfield landfill; and that ducks poisoned in Massachusetts can fly into Connecticut.
This enrages local boosters. Pittsfield is the county seat, a city of forty-five thousand set in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains. The region is gentrifying from a rural agricultural and industrial zone into a popular destination for urban transplants and arts institutions. But the legacy of GE’s pollution is a shadow that looms over the aspirational dreams of developers and politicians.
The aquifer beneath Pittsfield holds a vast store of water, but it is heavily contaminated by industrial chemicals, including PCBs, and cleaning it would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, the city draws drinking water from nearby reservoirs, which are clean. But the tainted groundwater could impede future growth, as could HRI’s constant harping about the Housatonic.
One former mayor of Pittsfield called Tim Gray “the worst thing that ever happened to Pittsfield,” among other names. But such attacks only stiffen HRI’s resolve.
Standing in his kitchen, Dave Gibbs, a rangy former crane operator at the GE plant who is now the president of HRI, said, “The company never said nothin’ to me—or any of the other workers—about the danger in those chemicals. Nothin’!”
Gibbs lives off Newell Street, with a view of the GE plant from his backyard. For years, a grassy field there was used by GE as a chemical dump. The Boston Globe unearthed a 1948 memo showing that GE officials were worried about residents’ growing opposition to the burial of PCBs: “This is the last section anywhere near the plant where we can dump most anything,” one company man confided to another. “I would hate to have them take it away.” In 2000, EPA inspectors discovered dozens of old capacitors, corroded barrels filled with PCBs, and what Gibbs calls “a Campbell’s soup of dioxins, ethylene, solvents, and other toxic chemicals” buried in the field. When GE contractors excavated the field, Gibbs and his wife clandestinely videotaped the contractors crushing barrels and spreading chemicals as they worked.
The top two feet or so of earth in Gibbs’s yard was scraped away and replaced by clean fill. But Gibbs doesn’t believe it helped. The field behind his house yielded PCB levels of three hundred thousand parts per million, he said, “which is basically pure product.” Though it is impossible to prove a link to the PCBs, Gibbs’s dog developed a rare blood vessel cancer and died, and several neighbors—including his parents, sister, and aunt—contracted leukemia and other cancers, and several of them died. Gibbs and at least 150 other residents who live along the Housatonic in Berkshire County have PCB levels higher than the EPA limit of 2 ppb in their blood.
“You lied to me, General Electric!” Gibbs shouted from his deck. “Now my job is to find some very sharp sticks and poke you in the eye.”
In 1991, the federal EPA began legal proceedings to define the scope of the Housatonic’s pollution by GE. The company steadfastly maintained that its dumping of PCBs was legal and safe, and refused to acknowledge it was responsible for cleaning the river. Nevertheless, the EPA found that exposure to PCBs led to “increases in cancer mortality in workers,” while experts worried that major storms or floods could spread PCBs widely and in uncontrolled ways. In 1996, the government sued GE, and the following year placed the Housatonic and Pittsfield on the Superfund National Priorities List—a preliminary step the government takes before designating a contaminated site ready for Superfund cleanup, which acts as a stern warning to alleged polluters. In a settlement, GE begrudgingly agreed to clean a half-mile stretch of the Housatonic below its Pittsfield factory.
One major roadblock was Jack Welch. A Massachusetts native, Welch began his storied career at GE in the Pittsfield plant in 1960, as a $10,000-a-year engineer; he later rose to become the plant’s manager. In 1998, when Welch earned $83.6 million a year as the company’s chairman and CEO, he testified, “PCBs do not pose health risks. Based on the scientific evidence … we simply do not believe that there are any significant adverse health effects.”
The EPA argued that the PCBs should be scraped out of the Housatonic and sealed away in a landfill, but Welch vehemently disagreed. He hired scientists and lawyers and spent years challenging the need to remove the contaminated mud from the river bottom—an expensive, technically challenging process. The company’s lawyers devised a clever argument that it repeated as often as possible: dredging up PCBs would only stir them into the water column and cause more health problems than if they were let alone; if let buried in the river’s sediment, the PCBs would bio-degrade over time.
HRI and others disputed this logic (the EPA notes that the type of PCBs found in the Housatonic take “hundreds of years” to degrade), yet regulators were unable, or unwilling, to force the company’s hand.
GE used the same argument to deny that it was responsible for cleaning another load of PCBs—at least 1.3 million pounds’ worth—that the company had dumped into the Hudson River, in New York, between 1947 and 1977. The Hudson is an estuarine river, with a rich fishery famous for its runs of striped bass and shad. But in 1976, all fishing was banned in the Hudson’s upper reaches, due to concerns over toxins in the sediment and fish. In 2002, the EPA issued a Record of Decision, which defined 197 miles of the Hudson a Superfund site (the largest in the nation), and required GE to undertake a massive restoration effort.
Although the Superfund law holds polluters retroactively responsible for any cleanup, GE maintained that the PCBs in the Hudson were better left undisturbed, and delayed the case for years. Between 1990 and 2005, activist shareholders discovered that GE had spent $122 million on political donations, lobbyists, scientific experts, and lawyers—such as Harvard Law School’s constitutional expert Laurence Tribe—to avoid dredging the Hudson.
In 2001 Jack Welch retired and was replaced as GE chairman by Jeffrey Immelt, who agreed to work with the EPA to dredge the Hudson clear of PCBs. In May 2009, a dredge lowered a blue clamshell bucket into the river near the town of Moreau, New York, and brought up the first scoop of toxic mud, which it deposited in a hopper barge. Once dewatered at a $100 million GE treatment plant, the contaminated Hudson mud was wrapped in plastic and shipped by rail to a dump in West Texas. By the time it is finished in 2015, GE’s remediation of the Hudson will be the most complex and expensive environmental cleanup in history. The first phase will remove 22 tons of the pollutant from the river; the second phase will remove 102 tons. Federal officials say the program will cost $750 million, though industry experts estimate the total cost will be “much larger than that.”
Money helps to explain GE’s recalcitrance: the company is wholly or partially responsible for 175 Superfund sites across the country, according to Harper’s. If it is forced to clean up the Hudson and the Housatonic, then GE could well be obliged to pay for expensive cleanups elsewhere.
Cleanup of the Housatonic has gone more slowly, with much less fanfare than the larger Hudson case. By 2008, GE had spent $250 million to clean a two-mile section of the river below its Pittsfield plant. The EPA maintains that the two miles of dredged river will not become recontaminated by PCBs, but that seems like wishful thinking. PCBs remain in the river’s banks, in its wide floodplains, and in storm drains that empty into the river. Silver Lake, which feeds the Housatonic, and Woods Pond, through which the river flows, remain polluted by PCBs. And the 147 miles of river south of the cleaned zone remain contaminated, mostly at dam sites, where PCBs collect. In preparation for a second phase of remediation, GE proposed a set of Corrective Measures, which outline ten different options for cleaning the “rest of river” downstream of the remediated zone. One plan calls for PCB-laden mud to be dredged from the river and its flood-plains, loaded into trucks, and deposited in landfills or local ponds over the next fifty years. This scenario scares local people. But a coalition of environmentalists, sportsmen, and environmental groups complain that GE’s plan is outdated and hugely expensive, could remove the dredged material by railway instead of trucks (as is done along the Hudson), and is akin to a blunt instrument that will damage wildlife and will not guarantee the removal of PCBs.
Instead, activists propose a ten-point plan that emphasizes careful, cost-minded planning, environmentally sensitive remediation of PCBs in only a few sites at a time, and postfact evaluations of the effectiveness of the cleanup.
“We’ve made progress, but there’s just so much more to do,” sighed Tim Gray. “I doubt this river will ever be ‘fishable and swimmable’ in my lifetime, if ever.”
He was cautiously optimistic that President Obama’s EPA would push GE to undertake a more extensive cleanup than President Bush’s did. But GE will likely resort to its by now familiar strategy: drag out the case for as long as possible, use up HRI’s limited resources, and bog down regulators. If that fails, the company could take the case to the US Supreme Court, where Chief Justice John Roberts has proven to be industry-friendly.
As in the case of Newtown Creek, the only “permanent solution” for cleaning the Housatonic is to dig up all of the buried chemicals; treat all of the polluted water, sediments, and floodplains along the entire length of the river; and replace the soil with clean fill so that no PCB contamination is let. Even Tim Gray doesn’t believe such comprehensive remediation is possible. What he does envision is something nearly as radical: turning Pittsfield’s misfortune into its salvation.
Industrial pollution is a national—and global—problem, and as Gray sees it, this presents an unusual opportunity. He envisions transforming Pittsfield from a down-on-its-heels Industrial Age shell into a booming, Silicon Valley–like hub for the study of pollution control, a magnet for academics and businesses to pursue innovative remediation technologies. Gray has already investigated a number of novel techniques, such as using bacteria or earthworm enzymes to “digest” pollution. Why not scale this research up a hundredfold and turn it into a revenue producer?
“I could really see turning all the negatives into a big positive for the region,” he said. “I mean, why not—all we need is funding.”
Standing in front of Pittsfield’s dark, haunted GE plant, the idea seems quixotic, at best. But Gray is not delusional. Similar initiatives to turn industrial toxins into profits have taken root in places even more blighted than Pittsfield—such as Butte, Montana.
From the late nineteenth through much of the twentieth centuries, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company extracted tons of silver and copper from mines bored around Butte, known as “Mining City” and “the richest hill on earth.” But the company also dumped tons of mine tailings (waste rock) and heavy metals directly into Silver Bow Creek, which flows into the Upper Clark Fork River, creating a poisonous plume 150 miles long. ARCO, the Atlantic Richfield Company—now part of BP—bought Anaconda in 1977. In 1982, as copper prices dropped, it shut down the company’s Berkeley Pit and removed pumps that had kept it dry. Since then, about 2.6 million gallons of water have flowed into the thirty-nine-thousand-foot-deep pit every day.
The water in the pit is oxblood red at the surface, a color derived from iron and manganese; deeper down, the water turns a lime green, from heavy copper compounds. The water is also suffused with heavy metals and toxic chemicals, including arsenic, lead, cadmium, zinc, and sulfuric acid. It is, in essence, an acid lake.
In 1995 a flock of 342 snow geese landed on the poisonous lake, and every one of them died. ARCO blamed the death of the geese on a “grain fungus,” but the theory was widely ridiculed; tests showed that the acidic water had eaten away the epithelium that lines the esophagus and then attacked the birds’ internal organs. Since 1998, BP-ARCO and regulators from Montana Resources have used a pontoon boat on the lake and an observation shack overlooking the pit; using shotgun blasts and “wailers” that emit predator calls and loud electronic sounds, they scare birds away from the lake. The system has been relatively effective, though dead birds continue to be found in the pit. One day in November 2007, thirty-six ducks and geese and one swan landed on the lake, but the bird patrol was blinded by snow and fog; all of the birds died.
As the copper mines began to shut down, the Anaconda smelter closed in 1980. Butte slipped into decline, and the population drained away. Starting in the 1970s, a group of enlightened residents—led by Donald Peoples, a former football coach and mayor—branded Butte the “Can-do City” and worked to replace three thousand lost jobs. In 1989, Peoples joined Mountain States Energy (MSE), a fifteen-year-old civil engineering company that treated Butte’s toxic pit as a laboratory for developing new pollution cleanup processes and businesses. The company worked with the US Departments of Energy (DOE) and of Defense to engineer new ways to safely store industrial and military waste. It developed a plasma furnace that cooks toxins down to a sludge that hardens into an inactive substance. And it runs the Mine Waste Technology Program for the DOE: “The need is great,” MSE’s website proclaims. “Remediation cost for abandoned mines are estimated between $2 billion and $32 billion.” MSE has clients in Japan and South Korea and is courting business in Europe.
By 2007, the Berkeley Pit had filled with 37 billion gallons of toxic seepage. Researchers had assumed the waters were too poisonous to support life and were shocked to discover the presence of more than a hundred types of microbes—fungi, bacteria, and algae—that had adapted to the extreme conditions. The organisms, known as extremophiles, are believed to be unique to the pit. They are being closely studied because some of them inhibit the growth of cancer cells in a laboratory setting; they have also shown the potential to inhibit enzyme reactions associated with multiple sclerosis and Huntington’s disease. As unlikely as it may seem, Butte’s extreme water pollution—and perhaps Pittsfield’s—could one day lead to profits or even to breakthroughs in health care.