Pollution of the Hudson River
Other kinds of pollution, including mercury contamination and cities discharging untreated sewage, have also caused problems in the river.
[6] The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) has listed various portions of the Hudson as having impaired water quality due to PCBs, cadmium, and other toxic compounds.
[7] Other ongoing pollution problems affecting the river include: accidental sewage discharges, urban runoff, heavy metals, furans, dioxin, pesticides, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).
By that time, the largest remaining factories in the area were owned by General Electric, which became primarily responsible for cleaning the Hudson River.
The plant's industrial waste (primarily lead chromate and other painting, cleaning, and soldering chemicals) would be emptied directly into the river.
The conclusions were extracted from a large database of mercury analyses of fish fillets accumulated by NYSDEC and collected over much of the length of the Hudson, from New York City waters to the Adirondack watershed.
The state requested that Entergy, the plant operator, replace its fish screens with cooling towers to mitigate the environmental impacts.
[19] The PCBs caused extensive contamination of fish in the river and apparently triggered a rapid evolutionary change in the Atlantic tomcod, which after about 50 years of exposure evolved a two amino acid change in its AHR2 receptor gene, causing the receptor to bind more weakly with PCBs than normal.
[6][22] PCBs are thought to be responsible for health concerns that include neurological disorders, lower IQ and poor short-term memory (active memory), hormonal disruption, suppressed immune system, cancer, skin irritations, Parkinson's disease, ADHD, heart disease, and diabetes.
Clearwater gained national recognition for its activism starting in the 1970s to force a clean-up of PCB contamination of the Hudson caused by GE and other companies.
[27] However, persistent pollutants such as PCBs and heavy metals, that had been discharged prior to implementation of the new permit requirements, remained in the sediments of the river.
[1] In 1980, Consolidated Edison (Con Ed) agreed to drop its 17-year fight to build a pumped-storage hydroelectricity facility on Storm King Mountain, after a legal challenge by the non-profit environmental organization Scenic Hudson.
[30] In 1984, EPA declared a 200-mile (320 km) stretch of the river, from Hudson Falls to New York City, to be a Superfund site requiring cleanup.
The worst PCB hotspots are targeted for remediation by removing and disposing of more than 2.6 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment.
[5][34] This stage (Phase One) of the cleanup was completed in October 2009, and was responsible for the removal of approximately 300,000 cubic yards (230,000 m3) of contaminated sediment, which was more than the targeted amount.
Phase Two of the cleanup project, led by GE and monitored by EPA, began in June 2011, targeting approximately 2,400,000 cubic yards (1,800,000 m3) of PCB-contaminated sediment from a forty-mile section of the Upper Hudson River.
[36] In 2010, General Electric agreed to finance and conduct a second dredging campaign at the Upper Hudson River between Fort Edward and Troy.
