General Electric Co. proposed a 2011 schedule for continued dredging of the Hudson River, even as GE and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency continued negotiations on how any second phase of the project might proceed.
Under order from the EPA, Fairfield-based GE is dredging up contaminated mud from the Hudson River bottom, caused by decades of pollution from GE factories upstream. With GE having spent $830 million on the cleanup to date, the Hudson project already ranks among the largest and most complex environmental dredging projects in U.S. history.
GE conducted the first phase of the project in 2009, with more than 500 employees working around the clock between May and October under EPA oversight. GE said the first phase tested the project”™s ability to achieve three engineering performance standards established by EPA; according to GE, a panel of independent scientists said the project will likely take far longer than originally envisioned in part due to higher-than-expected levels of PCBs getting swept downstream, and called for major changes in order to minimize further pollution.
“GE is committed to following the guidance of the panel of independent scientists who evaluated this project and unanimously recommended another year of dredging and data collection to ensure that the final decisions on this massive cleanup are based on the most reliable scientific data,” said Ann Klee, vice president of corporate environmental programs at GE, in a press release. “Now, we have data and actual dredging experience that should not be ignored ”“ and the opportunity to improve this project, reduce the downstream impacts and make the cleanup more effective.”
