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No more dredging for Hudson per EPA

Jun 02, 2017 12:03 am
The Daily Freeman reports that the Environmental Protection Agency released a review of the six-year, $1.7 billion Hudson River cleanup June 1, and the agency said it will take decades to get the waterway healthy again. But Catherine McCabe, Acting Regional Administrator for EPA's Region 2, says neither data, science nor law supports requiring General Electric to do more dredging. Between roughly 1947 and 1977, GE released between around 1,000,000 pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River. General Electric removed 2.75 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment from a 40-mile stretch of the upper Hudson during the six-year cleanup. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand Tweeted, "Clean air and water shouldn't be up for debate for New York’s families. This decision is awful news for the Capital Region and Hudson Valley." The report says fish in the river could be safe to eat again once a week in "55 years or more," although river data collected by EPA during the last year are "not sufficient" to project that timetable more precisely. The Daily Freeman reports