General Electric Co. hit back at a Harper's Magazine article critical of its handling of the Hudson River dredging project, with a point-by-point disputation of the story.
The magazine article, written by Columbia County freelance journalist David Gargill, found that an underground plume of toxic chemicals beneath the Hudson River could erase any progress made by the cleanups in Hudson Falls and Fort Edward.
The piece appears as the cover story in the December issue of the magazine. The story quotes Walter Hang, the president of Toxics Targeting Inc., an Ithaca-based environmental database company that tracks pollution around the state.
Hang is prominent in the field of environmental cleanups. Locally, he found in 2001 a PCB contamination in the West Glens Falls area of Queensbury.
For the Harper's Magazine story, Hang asserted that the contamination from GE's former plant in Hudson Falls and facility in Fort Edward is far more potent than most officials at the company or in government believe. If left untreated, Hang believes the plume could negate any progress made by the first six months of the dredging project.
But GE, the company responsible for discharging polychlorinated biphenyls into the river over a period of 30 years, responded with a Web site disputing the main claims in the Harper's story.
"Harper's Magazine for December features a long article on PCBs and the Hudson River that is rife with serious inaccuracies and baseless speculation," the Web site says. "GE alerted Harper's to problems in the story well before publication; Harper's published the claims anyway."
The page, which is posted on the General Electric's Co.'s main Web site that follows the cleanup, went live Wednesday. It is maintained by Behan Communications, a Glens Falls-based public relations firm that responds to press inquiries for General Electric.
The company disputes several points made in the story with the following assertions:
u An underground lake of PCBs is not leaking into the river.
u The story uses an incorrect methodology for measuring the contamination of PCBs in fish.
u Land-based PCB cleanups conducted by GE have been successful and not superficial.
u The discharges of PCBs by General Electric were legal and took place before the Clean Water Act passed in 1977.
The company takes issue with the story insinuating that the PCB discharges by GE were illegal and that the cleanup efforts are destined to fail. In addition, the site disputes the notion that GE provided PCB oil to residents and to spray down dusty roads.
"The cleanups are working: PCB levels in water downstream of the plant sites have decreased from five pounds a day in the 1990s to less than an ounce per day today," the Web site states.
Gargill, the writer of the article, said the response from GE was beyond nitpicking.
"I would say that mostly they're using semantics to try and refute what we state in very plain terms," Gargill said. "It's pretty weak relative to all the claims we make in the piece."
Much of what the company cites as incorrect was taken from studies by the state Department of Environmental Conservation and from state officials, Gargill said.
"When we're quoting (DEC engineer) Kevin Farrar, that's no longer our claim," Gargill said. "It's just a blatant misrepresentation."
But he was expecting a strong push-back from the company in response to the story, he said.
"I think they're going to fight like hell anyone who wants a vigorous land-based cleanup of the site," Gargill said.
He also took issue with the idea that Hang, the toxic database expert, was a "consultant" for the magazine.
"The idea that there was a quid pro quo here, that there was cash for information, is outrageous," he said.
The magazine plans to respond on its own Web site later this month to the GE arguments, he said.
Posted in State-and-regional on Friday, November 13, 2009 5:05 pm Updated: 11:05 pm. | Tags: Ge, Pcb
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