GE sued (more) over PCB clean-up

Poor, General Electric. The EPA makes the company spend hundreds of millions of dollars dredging the Hudson River to remove sediment-bound PCBs — something which everyone knew would stir-up the otherwise safely entombed chemical — and now the company is being sued for just that consequence.

According to CBS-6 (Albany),

SARATOGA — The Saratoga County Water Authority has filed a federal lawsuit against General Electric, seeking $27 million for the damages it says it incurred trying to avoid PCBs during GE’s dredging project in the Hudson River.

Law firm Dreyer Boyajian LLP said Thursday the Water Authority had to spend $27 million building a water treatment plant in the town of Moreau in order to stay upriver of the General Electric plants in Hudson Falls and Fort Edward plants and the PCB dredging project.

SCWA said the move was necessary to avoid possible PCB contamination in their water, as GE continues to dredge up the contaminants in a massive $500 million clean-up project.

PCBs are classified as the EPA as probably human carcinogens, associated with adverse effects on reproductive, endocrine, and immunological function.

Several town and villages within Saratoga County have already filed their own suits against GE for the damages and costs related to the PCB dredging project.

As this blog pointed out in August 2009,

Chalk up another green disaster, courtesy of:

• RFK Jr, Planetary Zero. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his activist group Riverkeeper pressured GE to undertake the clean-up. Ironically, Time magazine had declared Kennedy one of its “Heroes of the Planet” for his Hudson River activism.
• Corporate Neville Chamberlain-ism. GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt who, in hopes of appeasing the greens, reversed former CEO Jack Welch’s policy against dredging; and.
• Your gooberment at work. The EPA, which in forcing GE to dredge sediments that should have been left alone, failed its eponymous mission — environmental protection.