Walking the Berkshires

What Lies Beneath: The Housatonic, Part II

For most of the twentieth century, Pittsfield Massachusetts was one, big company town.  General Electric dominated the local economy, at one time employing over 13,000 workers at its 250-acre facility on the East branch of the Housatonic.  Three GE divisions operated from Pittsfield, and the plant was a major producer of electrical transformers.  From 1932 until 1977, it also produced tremendous amounts of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) that, according to the EPA ,"reached the waste and storm water systems associated with the facility and were subsequently conveyed to the East Branch of the Housatonic River and to Silver Lake."

In fact, there were several ways that PCBs from General Electric spread to the surrounding environment.  They were dumped directly into the river for years, and the full amount has yet to be tallied.  Massive plumes of contamination several feet thick beneath the GE facility transferred PCBs to the river and to the surrounding neighborhood.  Tons of contaminated soil were used as fill - given away for residential and commercial construction sites and used to fill in oxbows in the Housatonic for development.  Seasonal floods left contaminated sediment in the floodplain far downstream.  PCBs have been detected in air samples taken from many basements in Pittsfield.

These vectors are documented by the EPA.  Then there is the gray paint.  I took a "toxic tour" of Pittsfield recently with Riverkeeper Tim Gray, and we visited a home in the Newell Street neighborhood where the back stairs had been painted medium gray with GE paint.  The paint held up very well in that high traffic area, and according to the owner, was made with PCB oil as an additive. Surplus paint found its way home with employees, and nobody knows how many homes may have been contaminated in this way.

Just beyond the backyard of this residence is a chain link fence with a sign warning of PCB contamination on the other side.  There is a high tension line and a power company right of way beyond the fence, and a pit lightly covered with blowing sheets of plastic in which hundreds of drums filled with PCB contaminated soil and transformers have recently been uncovered.  The homeowner has a video camera pointed out his attic window at the site, which provided evidence that drew the EPA's attention to this previously undocumented dumping ground.  Former GE workers suggest that there are other undocumented sites like this throughout Pittsfield saying; "Just follow the wires."

Even more than the much abused Housatonic, Silver Lake is Pittsfield's Cuyahoga. This body of water next to the GE facility was historically so saturated with chemicals that in past decades it sometimes caught fire.  Under the consent decree that governs the PCB clean up, Silver lake will have a small area dredged but the remainder of this 26-acre impoundment will be capped, with the contamination left in place beneath the new fill.  PCB levels in Silver Lake fish reach more than 200 parts per million (ppm).  In contrast, the US FDA determines a maximum PCB level of 2ppm as the threshold for human consumption.

GE's best-known slogan proudly claims "We bring good things to life."  Bringing things to life with electricity is what got Dr. Frankenstein in trouble.  This corporation has a very poor track record when it comes to pollution and owning up to its responsibility for clean up.  GE's misdeeds in Pittsfield, the Hudson River Valley, and in many communities nationwide represent a litany of corporate shame, yet bringing GE to full account often seems a Sisyphean undertaking.

The consent decree among GE, state and federal regulatory agencies, and some stakeholders for addressing the PCBs from Pittsfield was a compromise negotiated in 1999.  A two-mile stretch of the East branch has been dredged and its banks reclaimed with rock and native vegetation.  The contaminated sediments do not travel far from the river, however.  Those with ppm of 50 or less are trucked a short distance away to Hill 78, a disposal site adjacent to Allendale elementary school that has grown alarmingly in size since the clean up began.  The "hill" was originally a ravine that drained through the GE facility and on to the Housatonic.  Debris was dumped there for decades before it became an official disposal site, and is one of the reasons it was selected to receive "moderately contaminated material" from the cleanup.  The nastier stuff is supposed to go to nearby Building 71.

A major problem with capping these contaminated materials with a few feet of sand at Hill 78 is hydrological.  The drainage of the buried ravine still orients toward the Housatonic.  However, there is reason to be concerned that surface water seeping through the top fill and heavily compressed, contaminated material may collect and disperse in other directions.  This phenomenon can happen in nature when beaver impoundments redirect both surface and groundwater flow, and is an engineering challenge at gravel pit reclamation sites where the material used to recontour the pit can be compacted by heavy machinery and affect groundwater hydrology.  Subsurface water can back up under such conditions and finds other ways to flow around the obstacles in its path.  Backing up from Hill 78 will recontaminate the playground at Allendale school, which has already had its PCB laden fill removed.  The chain link fence is just a shallow, foul ball off the first-base line of the elementary school's ball field.

Five years into the cleanup, concerns about recontamination, undocumented disposal areas, and the restoration needs of the rest of the river in Massachusetts and Connecticut remain unresolved.  There are powerful local and national interests that resist a full accounting and full accountability for GE's pollution of Pittsfield and the Housatonic River.  Were it not for the courage and power of citizen activism, and the professionalism and persistence of certain agency regulators, the City and the River would likely remain the "Love Canal" of the Berkshires.  Fortunately, the lights that shine on the PCB problem are not only GE's.  We'll discuss the role of informed citizen action in a subsequent posting.

Smoke on the Water: The Housatonic, Part I

I was driving east on Rte 2 this morning, and the steam rising from Miller's River had glazed the trees on either bank in glistening sheaths of ice.  They call it sea smoke in the Gulf of Maine, when water that is cold enough to kill an unprotected swimmer in mere minutes is still warm by comparison to the arctic air of January.  The cold streams and rivers of the Berkshires look like the Valley of 10,000 Smokes when the air plunges to sub zero as it has this week.  They are kin to the urban vapors that rise steaming from sidewalk grates when it's Christmastime in the City, and cousins to the midsummer wisps of fog that settle in the cool fens and seepage wetlands of the Housatonic watershed.

The Housatonic itself was smoking in the frigid air as I drove through Lee this morning, past the paper mills on my way to the Turnpike.  Not so many years ago, you could tell what hue of paper they were making on any given day by the stain of the water below the discharge from the mill.  Massachusetts has some of the most progressive wetlands and river protection laws in the Northeast, but for most of our association with rivers in New England we have treated them as sewers for the excretions of industry and convenient dumping grounds for the effluvia of human enterprise.

The Housatonic rises in several branches above Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and by the time it passes through this small city of less than 50,000 souls it has become so contaminated that the rest of the river through Berkshire and Litchfield Counties and down to Long Island Sound is unfit for drinking, swimming, or fish consumption, and will not likely return to fit condition in our lifetimes.  The main culprit is General Electric, which discharged untold thousands of tons on PCB-saturated sediment into the River for decades, and has resisted cleaning more than a couple of miles of river in Pittsfield as its obligations to redress its contamination of the main stem.  The Housatonic Watershed has the dubious distinction of being home to the most PCB-laden duck ever sampled in America, with grim implications for consumers of migratory waterfowl all along the Atlantic flyway.

For all the insults it has endured, the Housatonic has a rich heritage; in fact, the Upper Housatonic Valley has been proposed as a National Heritage Area.  The first naval vessel sunk by a submarine was the sloop of war "USS Housatonic", rammed with a torpedo-tipped spar by the CSS Hunley during the Civil War.  Crane Paper on the East Branch of the Housatonic in Dalton is the sole purveyor of currency-grade paper to the United States Department of the Treasury, making Sacajawea dollars even scarcer in Berkshire County than elsewhere in the nation. The oxbows of the Housatonic in Sheffield support remnants of major river floodplain forest, a natural community that has been virtually eliminated from the rest of its historic range.  The Great Falls of the Housatonic in Falls Village Connecticut are a regional treasure and historically represented the limit of upstream migration for eels and anadromous fish.  Since the power generators went to run of river rather than pond and release along the Connecticut stretch of the Housatonic, a more natural flow regime offers hope for better survival of cool season species in summer and a more diverse aquatic environment.

How the Housatonic came to be so devalued and degraded, and how citizen activism may yet turn the tide in its favor, will be the subject of subsequent postings.

"In The Bleak Midwinter"

"In the bleak midwinter, frost wind made moan,
earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
in the bleak midwinter, long ago."   

I have always loved this carol.  Christina Rossetti's melancholy lyrics come closer than most other Christmas music to capturing the heart of winter at the turning of the year.  She evokes the deep, expectant cold at the eve of the nativity, and her frozen, boreal landscape amplifies the accumulated cares and burdens of the human spirit.  Rossetti was a pre-Raphaelite poet, and one detects the solstice along with the savior in her haunting words.  They have all the romantic pathos of a Waterhouse painting, and yet the pure, bittersweet notes composed by Gustav Holst to accompany the carol have more of that crystalline, Maxfield Parrish hue. 

It is bitter cold here in the Litchfield Hills, and for the second night running we should dip below zero.  Those brave or unfortunate enough to be abroad before dawn and after moon-set may witness the Leonids' display.  I have an early dawn departure ahead of me, but I will probably still be deep in eiderdown until near sunrise.  If I do leave the house in the darkest hour, I'll probably recall a Christmas from my youth when the temperature reached a heart-stopping 32 below.  We had horses in the stable that we needed to keep warm on that morning, and a pet rabbit that moved into the house for a few days in the face of the bitter cold, so we didn't get around to opening presents until almost noon. 

There was the year a flock of evening grosbeaks descended on our feeders on Christmas Day.  We had a long, wooden bench covered in seed for ground feeders out beyond the French doors on the brick patio, and there must have been thirty of these marvelous birds clustered on those few square feet of black oil sunflower seed.

My father's birthday is a week before Christmas, and for many years we celebrated with an overnight trip to Manhattan on the 4th week of Advent.  We'd head down the Taconic Parkway from northern Dutchess County, winding through the Hudson Highlands on those narrow lanes with no shoulders that were designed for leisurely motoring rather than the daily commute.  We arrived on the upper west side in time for Dad to find an unobtrusive parking garage and pick out a Chinese restaurant for dinner. 

After dinner, we always attended the Paul Winter Consort's Winter Solstice performance at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.  This new age fusion of jazz, world beat, gospel and the vocalizations of animals has been an annual event at the cathedral for more than a quarter century, now.  I remember one year when the great, booming of a vast log drum proceeded down the aisle as if to kindle the fires of Yule.  Paul Winter's alto saxophone howling with a chorus of wolves, Eugene Friesen's cello keening like the Wendigo or leaping like Cossacks, and the unparalleled assemblage of percussion instruments reverberating through the world's largest Gothic cathedral were hallmarks of our annual winter pilgrimage to Gotham.

My Dad attended St. Thomas Choir School for 7th and 8th grade - his boy's soprano cracking to tenor in his second year - and we often took in the service of lessons and carols the following day before heading up 5th Avenue to gaze at the window displays and do most of our Christmas shopping at 1/2 dozen bookstores along the way.  The subway rumbles beneath the church every two minutes, and so the city is as much part of the service at St. Thomas as the music.

These two appearances in Church were often our only time we'd darken a sacred door for the rest of the year.  Religion is a deeply personal thing in our family.  My sister, I think, sometimes attends Quaker meeting, and has considered ministry as a way to better serve community and foster social change.  My father attended Episcopal seminary without final ordination, finding his vocation in teaching instead of the pulpit.  I celebrated one memorable Winter Solstice with the Waters of the Brandywine Grove of new-reformed Druids, and must say that any religion with Glenfiddich as its sacrament is worth considering.  Faith is elusive, but hope is evident even, and especially, in the bleak midwinter, with its frozen sap and starry skies and promise of Spring.