Housatonic Makes Group’s 10 Most Endangered Rivers List

SPRINGFIELD, MASS. (AP) — The city-weary are still drawn to the Housatonic River’s serpentine twists through green hills and pastures lined with stone fences.

But beneath the gentle waters and piled high on the sand bars are tons of gravel contaminated by polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

A decades-long battle over the pollution has landed the stream that meanders through some of the most scenic areas of New England on its 150-mile journey from the Berkshire Hills to Long Island Sound on an annual list of the ten most endangered waterways in the country.

American Rivers, a Washington-based environmental group, ranked the Housatonic seventh on this year’s list, which is topped by the Colorado River.

“Cleanup of the river has barely begun,’’ said Rebecca Wodder, president of American Rivers. “We have put the river on our list this year to warn that it might never be finished.”

In 2000 a federal judge approved an agreement, expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, between General Electric and state and federal environmental regulators to clean GE’s sprawling Pittsfield plant site and the first two miles of the river.

GE, which acknowledged in 1981 that the PCB pollution came from its Pittsfield transformer plants, has completed dredging the half-mile closest to the plant. The federal government, with GE financing, is working on the remainder of the two-mile stretch.

But over the next two years, federal and state regulators will decide how much of the remainder of the river should be excavated.

The resistant chemicals paved the way for the electrification of the nation’s cities in the 1930s because they provided a safe insulating fluid for transformers.

But they have left another equally enduring legacy along this river, where William Stanley developed an alternating current transformer in his backyard workshop, and where the company he started grew into electronics giant General Electric.

Nearly 30 years after GE stopped dumping PCBs into the river, the sediment, fish and ducks still have some of the highest levels of PCBs in the nation, said Tim Gray of the Housatonic River Initiative, a citizens group that has been pressing for decontamination of the entire river.

“General Electric has prospered and our river has suffered,” said Audrey Cole, of the Housatonic Environmental Action League of Cornwall Bridge.

For more than two decades the states of Massachusetts and Connecticut have warned against eating fish from the Housatonic River. In 1999, Massachusetts added a ban against eating waterfowl from the river.

“The good news for the river is there is a process in place that to date has been working,” said Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for General Electric. “The cleanup and investigation is continuing.

“Ultimately we will have to do or fund the work that is recommended,” he said. “Our hope is that there is a decision that is reasonable and workable and based on good science.”

Also on the organization’s list of endangered rivers this year are Big Sunflower in Mississippi, Snake River in Idaho, The Tennessee River, The Allegheny and Monongahela rivers in Pennsylvania, Spokane River in Washington, Peace River in Florida, Big Darby Creek in Ohio and The Mississippi River.