Officials: Village water will be protected

PHOTOGRAPHER: Bob Conner

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Federal and state officials assured more than 100 residents at a public meeting Tuesday that their drinking water supply would be protected from contamination, but they didn’t say how.

That didn’t satisfy local officials or residents, many of whom raised health concerns about the long-term effects of drinking water tainted with PCBs.

“I’m determined we’re going to shut down the village water system one way or another,” said Mayor Ernest Martin. He said it is his opinion it will not be safe to drink the water once the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency starts dredging the Hudson River next spring.

Town Supervisor Shawn Connelly said that as a last resort, if the EPA won’t pay the estimated $7.5 million to hook Stillwater up to another water source, the town could borrow the money and seek to recover it from the EPA. He said contracts need to be in place within the next month or so with one of two private companies in order to get a new system online before dredging starts.

David King, director of the EPA’s Hudson River Field Office, said it will take four to six weeks for the agency to decide how to proceed. More testing needs to be done, he said, along with evaluation of alterative sources and treatment options. If the EPA does wind up paying infrastructure costs to hook up Stillwater, he said, General Electric Co. may be liable for some of that money.

GE is paying for most of the dredging project because its capacitor factories in Washington County were responsible for polluting the river with polychlorinated biphenyls, which they were permitted to discharge into the Hudson until the 1970s.

Lloyd Wilson, a senior official at the Bureau of Public Water Supply Protection in the state Department of Health, said the DOH is testing the village of Schuylerville’s water supply this week. Schuylerville, like Stillwater, draws its water from wells near the Hudson River. Stillwater’s water was found in DOH testing released this month to have contamination as high as 119 parts per trillion, well below the allowable standard of 500 parts per trillion. But officials are concerned those numbers would rise once the multiyear dredging project starts — the purpose of which is to remove PCB-tainted sediment from the Hudson.

Wilson said drinking water with 500 parts per trillion could slightly raise cancer rates by 5.5 cases per 1 million people — which is more than 200 times the number served by the Stillwater village water system.

Trustee John Basile said the village has already spent more than $40,000 on a planned $750,000 pollution-control project at the water plant, under a consent order with the state Department of Environmental Conservation, money that will be wasted if the plant goes off line.

The village would likely not have agreed to that project had it known about the PCB contamination in its system, he said.

A DEC official at the meeting offered to contact the agency’s office dealing with that issue, but Martin said he has already written a letter there.

Wilson said new technology has allowed new and expensive testing methods that discovered the low-level PCB contamination this year.

He also said the state wanted to do the testing close to the time of dredging.

Earlier Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-Greenport, met in Washington, D.C., with EPA officials including King and Alan Steinberg, Region 2 administrator.

She got no assurances from them about what EPA would do for Stillwater.

The EPA has agreed to provide infrastructure connecting the downriver towns of Halfmoon and Waterford to the Troy water system.

EPA spokesman David Kluesner said earlier that the EPA is presuming there is some connection between the PCBs in the river and the Stillwater wells, but needs to get more information.

Wilson said the legal agreement establishing the dredging project requires the EPA to protect public water supplies, but it’s the EPA’s project and the DOH does not have a specific position as to how Stillwater should be supplied with safe water.