The blockbuster agreement to remove toxic chemicals from the waterway brokered by the EPA between polluter General Electric and communities along the river was announced in early 2020.
Expected to cost at least $600 million and take 15 years to complete, it’s faced bitter opposition from some Berkshire residents and environmental groups frustrated with both the closed-door negotiations that led to the final plan and the methods the proposed cleanup will utilize.
Dean Tagliaferro of the EPA gave attendees – largely comprised of citizen and environmental organizations from communities along the Housatonic – an update on what’s happening with the massive project in the field going into 2022. Starting in the new year, GE will begin baseline monitoring of the river with a surface water sampling program.
“It takes the surface water, which will give you a concentration, mass per volume, and measure the flow, which is volume per time, and you'll get a loading and mass per year of PCB ounces per year," explained Tagliaferro. "And there's two branches of the river that flow in, the east and the west branch. Certainly prior to remediation in Pittsfield in the first two miles, the vast majority of the PCBs entering, continuing to enter into the rest of the river were from the east branch. So we want to re-look at that, and know what how much PCBs are entering rest of river via surface water. And the surface water does carry some suspended sediments, some bedload, it's called. So you're measuring the surface water, but it's picking up the particulate and the solid phase as it goes into rest of the river.”
GE’s decades of polluting the Housatonic from its Pittsfield facility in the mid-20th Century mostly happened on the east branch of the river.
“The main thing is to determine the amount of PCBs coming into rest of river," said Tagliaferro. "There's not a great place to collect samples on the west branch, it would probably be, for those familiar, would be on South Street. The east branch is a little easier. We're trying to determine what's the best location, do we need to sample both the east and the west branch? Is the loading, say, 70% east and 30% west, in which case we would definitely need to do that. Or if this shows that it's 99% of the east branch, we would like to probably just collect one sample as opposed to a composite and run it just for the east branch.”
The location for sampling at other polluted bodies of water attached to the river like Woods Pond in Lenox will also be determined. Tagliaferro was pressed on why surface water sampling is the chosen method of baseline monitoring as opposed to sediment sampling.
“Surface water is the best way to measure what's coming into the system," he answered. "Sediment sampling has been done extensively in the first two miles. I think the last one was done maybe two years ago, I think there were over 200 sediment samples. So that has been extensively sampled. We have been, EPA has been collecting surface water samples at Pomeroy on a quarterly basis for the last at least three or four years. And those results with the congener method are very low. So you're right, the surface water will not tell you the source of those PCBs, they're just going to measure the quantity of those PCBs. And based on all the sampling I've seen at the Pomeroy Ave Bridge, the concentrations are very low. In fact, using the standard PCB Aroclor method, they're non-detect.”
Along with the surface water sampling, topographic and bathymetric surveys will be taken of the area along the river south of the two miles already remediated within Pittsfield. Sediment, bank and floodplain sampling will also be conducted. The sampling portion of the cleanup is expected to continue through 2023.
