The year 2010 may well be a significantly cleaner one for the city of Pittsfield. The decade-long process of cleaning up the former site of General Electric's shuttered plant and its surrounding area was initially mandated by a consent decree from a U.S. district court in October of 2000. Pursuant to that decree, ongoing cleanup efforts at the GE site have been implemented by a consortium that includes the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' Attorney General's Office, Executive Office of Environmental Affairs and Department of Environmental Protection, as well as the State of Connecticut's Attorney General's Office and Department of Environmental Protection, the U.S. Department of the Interior, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the City of Pittsfield, the Pittsfield Economic Development Authority and General Electric.
On Jan. 28, U.S. EPA project manager Dean Tagliaferro provided the Citizens Coordinating Council group with an update on the progress of the cleanup. According to Tagliaferro, the remaining areas scheduled to be addressed within the next year are those at the sites referred to as "East Street Area 2-North and East Street Area 2-South," two regions comprising 100 acres wherein the debris from recently demolished buildings will be crushed, roughly 20,000 cubic yards of PCB-contaminated soil removed and clean fill trucked in to fully remediate the areas. Cleanup at Silver Lake and Unkamet Brook, as well as remaining portions of the contaminated section of the Housatonic River, are also in the planning stages, and will likely proceed within the next two years.
The General Electric plant in Pittsfield manufactured electrical parts, the principal offenders being two types of transformers whose production was responsible for extensive pollution of the 254-acre site with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from 1932 until 1977. In that year, the use of these chemicals was banned by the federal government due to extensive evidence linking them to cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and a host of other ailments. The decade-plus-long process represents the culmination of an ambitious 22-parcel cleanup initiative that, all told, could cost GE over $1 billion to complete. For further information on the GE/Housatonic River Site cleanup effort, visit the EPA's website at www.epa.gov/NE/ge.
