Heading to Texas, Hudson’s Toxic Mud Stirs Town

[IDemo]

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Published: May 30, 2009

EUNICE, N.M. — There are not many towns in America that would welcome the 2.5 million cubic yards of toxic sludge being dredged from the bottom of the Hudson River in New York, but to hear Mayor Matt White tell it, Eunice is one of them.

Storing waste nobody else wants means more jobs, Mr. White said, and the oil workers here are used to living with hazards. After all, there are several oil wells in the town itself. One of them is a block from City Hall.

“We have deadly gases in the oil fields,” he said. “It’s more deadly than any of the stuff they are going to put in the ground out here.”

From the edge of town, one can see huge berms at the landfill where General Electric plans to bury the dried sludge that is tainted with 1.3 million pounds of PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls. They flowed into the upper Hudson from two G. E. factories for three decades before they were banned, in 1977. In high doses, the chemicals have been shown to cause cancer in animals and are considered a probable carcinogen in people.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/science/earth/31waste.html?_r=1&hp

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. Classic case of a big city exporting its pollution elsewhere

In California, Kern county tried to block LA from doing that. Courts found against them.

[Botany]

2. not a good thing but the PCBs in the Hudson had to go ......

.... all the people (in most cases poor) who ate fish from that river were getting a
good dose of toxins. Better that the PCBs are are underground and wrapped in
a plastic / fiber liner than in the Hudson.

BTW this should have been done years ago but Jack Welch blocked any action ...
least G.E. had to be held responsible for it's mess.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

4. Should have been buried in Central Park...

NYC has no right to export it toxins upstate, let alone out of state. NYC poisons should stay in NYC

[kestrel91316]

3. Hey, at least where that stuff is now, it ain't flowin' ANYWHERE,

because it's DRY down in those parts. And besides, TX can't be harmed by toxic sludge because Gawd is on their side, as good Christians.