Today, 200 miles of the Hudson River is classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as a Superfund site — one of the largest in America. The agency recently significantly scaled back its water supply cleanup plan at one site in Dutchess County.
Lower Hudson Valley Bureau Chief Elias Guerra spoke with EPA Remediation Manager Michael Sivak and EPA Regional Administrator for New York Michael Martucci about cleanup of Superfund sites in the Hudson Valley.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: this conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Guerra: Specifically, one issue that that WAMC has been covering is in Hopewell Junction, and the the issue goes back several decades. From the '70s through the '90s, where this manufacturing company was dumping industrial chemicals into the ground that ended up eventually in the groundwater. And I understand, from the EPA's recent decision amendment, the remediation plan is to essentially keep monitoring the situation. I wonder if you can talk me through this decision.
Sivak: When EPA was investigating the Hopewell Precision Superfund site, we approached the site with two through two different remedies. Our first effort was to immediately take people off of contaminated drinking water and give them a clean drinking water supply, and then we turned our attention towards cleaning up the groundwater. The original remedy that we selected is a technology called aerobic co-metabolic bioremediation, we call it ACB for obvious reasons, and that is a remedy that, if it were to be implemented, would require hundreds of ports, hundreds of of injection ports to be drilled throughout the affected area. It would have been very intrusive. It would have been challenging to implement. We would have needed to get access rights from all of those private property owners where we would needed to install those ports, and so we did some analysis of that information and concluded that in roughly the same amount of time that it would take to implement this very intrusive remedy, we could reach the same cleanup standards for our groundwater under this much less intrusive remedy, yet still very effective remedy that allows for the groundwater to clean up naturally without all of these wells being installed.
Guerra: I want to switch over to the other area, Mike, that you mentioned, Wappinger Creek, which I understand, as you described, the EPA has chosen the most comprehensive cleanup plan, which involves dredging out all of the toxic soil. Can you talk me through why it was important to have the most comprehensive cleanup plan in the creek, and what will that look like?
Martucci: You're talking about two centuries of industrial contamination that have contributed to contaminants in Wappinger's Creek, and because Wappinger's Creek is tidally influenced, it's a little challenging because the sediments can move tidally.
The investigation, which has taken some time, but is a very important part of the process, yielded specific areas where we believe removing contaminated sediments, sediments specifically that are contaminated with mercury are going to make considerable differences in the health of the ecosystem of the creek, in particular as it applies to fish and the ongoing impacts to fish that have resulted in the State Department of Health issuing fish consumption advisories and encouraging people not to fish there, and directing people not to consume fish in that area.
Guerra: I want to move over to the largest super fund in the United States, which you described, the Hudson River. Can you talk to me about polychlorinated biphenyls? What are the dangers of PCBs, and and how did they end up there?
Martucci: The Hudson River Superfund site is a site that this agency spends so much time and energy working on.
As you point out, it is a site that spans hundreds of miles in distance. It is particularly complicated because you're talking about PCBs that are in a water body. That water body is tidally influenced, so that means that as water moves around, so do sediments.
PCBs are a significant concern because they're a carcinogenic and they pose a huge health to human health and the environment. And there was extensive dredging done in portions of the Hudson River, the most polluted portions of the Hudson River. And the agency in late 2024 determined that there wasn't enough information available just yet on how the river was recovering post dredging.
We're also looking at upland areas. The Hudson River is tidally influenced and prone to flooding, and that flooding has resulted in PCBs being brought up into upland areas adjacent to the river, and those are areas that we are interested in, and will devise cleanup plans for.
The Hudson River is has one responsible party, General Electric (GE), and our process has involved working with General Electric on pathways forward. A large portion of the money that GE has spent that's been identified by Scenic Hudson was spent for the dredging activity that I just described, but that is only one of a number of activities that will be required to happen on this site. As I said, GE has responsibilities for cleaning upland areas. GE has responsibilities for for determining a plan forward, working with us to approve a plan forward on the Lower Hudson River and any cleanup that might be necessary in that area. So their obligation here in the river is hardly done.
