Representatives of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are holding a public hearing tonight on the agency’s cleanup plan for the Housatonic River tonight in Lenox, Massachusetts.In June, the EPA released a 13-year, $613 million plan to remove nearly 1 million cubic yards of contaminated material from the Housatonic River and surrounding areas. General Electric’s Pittsfield plant dumped PCBs into the river from the 1930s until the chemical was banned in 1977. The plan includes a mix of dredging and capping along a 10-mile stretch from Pittsfield to Lenox, which GE will be responsible for as explained by Dean Tagliaferro, the EPA’s project manager.
“We know it’s a big impact,” Tagliaferro said during an informational meeting in mid-June in Lenox. “We don’t know how GE is going to do it yet. We didn’t want to tie their hands with telling them exactly how to do the work. So that’s all going to have to be determined in the future.”
The hearing starts at 6:30 p.m. at Lenox Memorial Middle and High School.
