No Retreat on the Hudson
The New York Times
Editorial, July 26, 2001
As President Bush's chief environmental officer, Christie Whitman has
absorbed plenty of abuse for the administration's generally deplorable
environmental record. Some of this criticism has been unfair, and in
many cases she has taken the fall for policies dictated by others. But
Mrs. Whitman will have only herself to blame if she chooses to scale
back the Clinton administration's plan that would require General
Electric to spend a half-billion dollars to begin the long-overdue task
of cleaning the upper Hudson River of toxic chemicals known as PCB's.
Rumors have been flying around all week that Mrs. Whitman, the
administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, would shortly
announce her own dredging plan, one that could well reduce the Clinton
administration's plan to a mere pilot project followed by years of
additional study and analysis. The reports - none confirmed by Mrs.
Whitman herself - have emerged from various members of Congress with
whom Mrs. Whitman has been conferring and from lower-echelon sources at
her agency. Gov. George Pataki of New York took them seriously enough to
call Mrs. Whitman on Tuesday and tell her, in firmer language than he
has ever used publicly, that he supports the Clinton cleanup plan and
that anything less would be unacceptable.
Mr. Pataki is hardly alone in these views. The dredging plan is
supported by Eliot Spitzer, New York's attorney general, Senators
Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles Schumer, and a majority of the
state's Congressional delegation. It is also supported by the federal
scientists in E.P.A.'s New York region who have spent nearly a decade
assembling a compelling, peer-reviewed case for dredging despite the
resolute opposition of General Electric. Mrs. Whitman is obliged under
law to consider the thousands of comments collected by her agency during
the last few months, and perhaps these comments have had an impact on
her thinking. But given her agency's painstaking work over the years, it
is hard to imagine what new scientific evidence may have come her way to
persuade her that the matter now requires further study.
Under the plan approved last December, dredges would remove about 2.6
billion cubic yards of sediment containing some 100,000 pounds of
polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCB's, from various "hot spots" along a
40-mile stretch of the river from Troy north to Fort Edward. The roughly
$500 million cost would be borne by G.E., whose upriver plants dumped
the chemicals in the river before they were declared illegal in 1977.
G.E. has never denied its responsibility for the chemicals but has
wrangled bitterly with state and federal agencies over how best to
handle the problem. The company has argued that most of the chemicals
are safely buried in the river's sediments and that the only "active"
PCB's are those still leaking from two old upriver plants - leaks the
company has already spent $160 million trying to plug. But the E.P.A.
argues that in an active, free- flowing river like the Hudson, the
sediments are constantly discharging chemicals into the water column and
must therefore be dredged.
This page has endorsed the agency's analysis and its plan, and has
called upon General Electric to do the statesmanlike thing and join
Washington and Albany in a comprehensive effort to restore one of
America's great rivers. Mrs. Whitman should now reaffirm the federal
commitment to this task.
The New York Times, Editorial, July 26, 2001
