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Activist, Congressman Debate Dredging of Decades of General Electric's Pollution From Hudson River

Aired August 01, 2001 - 14:32   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
NATALIE ALLEN, CNN ANCHOR: Congressman John Sweeney, whose district includes a portion of the Hudson River Valley opposed the dredging project. He joins us from Washington, D.C. Chris Ballantyne of the Sierra Club joins us from Albany, New York.

We thank you both for joining us.

Chris, I will start with you. GE dumped toxic waste for decades into the Hudson River. Give us an appreciation of what kind of mess we are talking about.

CHRIS BALLANTYNE, SIERRA CLUB: Over a 30-year period, General Electric discharged about 1.3 million pounds of toxic, cancer-causing PCBs into the Hudson. Many of them have washed downstream. The majority of them -- some 250,000 pounds -- remain concentrated in toxic hot spots, and our position is they need to be cleaned up.

ALLEN: Give us an example of how this can be dangerous to people and the environment.

BALLANTYNE: The Bush administration recently recognized that persistent organic pollutants, including PCBs, are a major threat to human health and need to be removed from the environment. PCBs are known to cause cancer in animals, and are a suspected human carcinogen. They cause neurological birth defect and a whole host of epidemiologic problems.

ALLEN: Congressman Sweeney, despite that, you oppose this dredging plan. Tell us why.

REP. JOHN SWEENEY (R), NEW YORK: Natalie, despite that -- because that's a lot of rhetoric -- the fact of the matter is the National Cancer Institute has taken PCBs off its list of known carcinogens. You presented the appropriate question: What is the cause on humans? We don't know that.

That aside, most of agree that we ought to have a remediation of the Hudson River, but the fact of matter is this particular plan, proposed by the Clinton administration and, I guess now to be instituted by the Bush administration, can't assure us that we are going to clean up the river and can't assure us that we're going to reduce the risk. The National Academy of Sciences said that this particular plan may lead to the resuspension of PCBS, therefore causing greater environmental hazards than may already exist.

ALLEN: What have you heard back from the people that live along this area?

SWEENEY: More than 70 percent of the communities that are there have had their local governments pass resolutions in opposition to this plan because they know it threatens their quality of life and their lifestyle. I think you have to understand that, for the past 20 years, federal government has come in, lied to these folks, misled these folks, and now threatens to take their personal property -- their homes, yards, and farmland -- from them as a means to carry out this plan. So there's a great deal of fear. Substantially so, my constituents are in opposition.

This is the worst example of how Big Government -- the federal government -- can come in and really affect the quality of life and the way of life of a community without really solving a problem. And the real tragedy and the real disaster that is to occur here is we were very close to negotiating a compromise settlement that would have met the environmental needs as well as the larger needs of the community that exist.

ALLEN: Let's get Chris to respond back to that.

BALLANTYNE: We differ with the congressman's assertions. We believe PCBs pose a serious threat to public health, that they need to be removed, and that General Electric, which for two decades has pretty steadfastly opposed any kind of a cleanup, needs to step up to the plate and accept some responsibility here.

ALLEN: Do they even know how to go about this dredging process? How much is unknown about how successful this could be?

Let's start off with Chris Ballantyne, and then we'll get back to the congressman.

BALLANTYNE: We absolutely know how to remove and control PCBs. And a whole host of concessions have already been made to residents in upriver communities in New York related to this cleanup. For example, there was concern that if material were taken out of the river, it would be stored in new hazardous waste locations in the river; that's not going to happen. It is going to be moved to a safe and secure landfill, if it's ever removed.

We believe that the clean-up needs to happen and that this administration needs to move aggressively to begin this.

ALLEN: Congressman Sweeney?

SWEENEY: The EPA has never shown the capacity to conduct a dredging of this size. In fact, they haven't successfully concluded dredgings of a fraction of this size. This is 2.7 million cubic yards of sludge material, or 100,000 dump trucks of material, that are going to be hauled out of river, through the properties of the people that live there. That's the first point.

The second point is GE has done some remediation work -- and I'm not, by any means, going to defend GE totally in this process, because my concern is the people who live there -- but the reality was we were so close, and the tragedy was we were so close, to agreement that included General Electric and included some reasonably minded folks in the environmental community, that we would have been able to begin this process a heck of a lot sooner than we are going to be able to now.

And as my friend Chris has pointed out in the past, the devil's in the details, and unfortunately, because of this action by the EPA and administrator Whitman we are probably going to look at a further delay and long, drawn-out litigation.

ALLEN: As you have just mentioned, it's a story that's going to go on for a while. We will continue to follow it. We thank you both for coming on and sharing your concerns about both sides.

Chris Ballantyne of the Sierra Club, Congressman John Sweeney, thank you.

SWEENEY: Thank you.

BALLANTYNE: See you, Natalie.

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