Meet the Housatonic
A contaminated river flowing through the heart of the county is like a scar on our heritage and on our main source of the economy: tourism. The Housatonic gets a fraction of its recreation potential because it is contaminated by PCBs.
Right now the river would be teeming with swimmers, kayakers, and people looking to fish and eat what they catch. Everyone is scared away by the warning signs notifying the public that the river is polluted.
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Meet the People of the Berkshires
The Housatonic is the heart of the Berkshires. That legacy, and the health of the people who live in the Berkshires, are now under direct threat because two multi-billion dollar corporations dumped toxic forever chemicals into our waterways and refuse to make it right.
For generations, residents could have fished, recreated, and relied on the Housatonic as a major resource for their livelihoods but GE and Monsanto have turned the river from an asset into a liability.
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When a river is polluted by forever chemicals, the damage to the quality of water, land, and air is serious and long-lasting. GE’s “solution” to fix this situation is to dredge and dump the PCBs on land.
GE wants to just move the PCBs to a dump site, which would simply relocate toxic waste from one place to the other and create a dump instead of investing in the latest technologies to clean up the dangerous chemicals.
The dump that GE is proposing will inevitably leach chemicals into the surrounding environment. That is not a clean-up solution.
When PCBs are dumped into a waterway like a river, there is only one way to destroy them: remove and remediate.
The technology to clean up this polluted waterway exists. Someone just has to pay for it. GE created this problem, now they should pay to fix it.
A real clean-up of the river would involve removing the chemicals GE dumped there and destroying them, such as through bioremediation.
There’s no third choice. The stuff is immortal. It’s going to be here long after we’re gone unless you reduce it to its basic elements.
Take Action
Clean rivers are a significant source of recreation, tourism, real estate value, and ecological beauty. All of that is lost when a river is contaminated by persistent toxic chemicals like PCBs.
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There’s an opportunity here for GE to work with the town of Lee to right a historic wrong. These corporations created this crisis. Now they need to fix it. Follow the story.
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