The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is starting a new review of its recently completed $1 billion cleanup of PCBs in the upper Hudson River.
The EPA will hold the first workshop in a legally mandated review at 1 p.m. Thursday in the Saratoga Spa State Park administration building.
It will be the first of a series of workshops with the Hudson River PCB Site Community Advisory Group to discuss the review, which is legally required of all Superfund sites every five years, EPA officials said.
“The purpose of the five-year review is to ensure that the Hudson River cleanup is working as intended and will be protective of public health and the environment,” the EPA said in a statement.
Hudson River environmental groups, most of which are represented on the Community Advisory Group, have called for more dredging. A separate federal study has found PCB levels in fish are not dropping as quickly as had been hoped.
The PCBs — toxic polychlorinated biphenyls — were discharged from General Electric plants in Hudson Falls and Fort Edward between 1946 and 1977, and contaminated at least a 40-mile stretch of the river between Hudson Falls and Troy.
The EPA ordered GE to dredge 1.3 million pounds of PCBs from the river, in a project that began in 2008 and has cost GE more than $1 billion. The work ended last fall and decommissioning of the processing center in Fort Edward has begun, despite the pressure from environmental groups to keep it available.
EPA said Thursday’s meeting will cover the regulations that govern the five-year review process, and the anticipated scope and schedule of the review.
The five-year review is scheduled to wrap up by late April 2017. This is the project’s second five-year review; the first was completed in 2012.
Reach Gazette reporter Stephen Williams at 395-3086, [email protected] or @gazettesteve on Twitter.
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