Says GE should still pay for damage
Environmental groups were not happy when, three years ago, the federal government said General Electric had done enough to clean up the toxic pollutants it dumped into the Hudson River over three decades.
Scenic Hudson on Tuesday (April 12) said it had studied the damages that GE should still pay and came up with a bill for at least $22.1 billion. It argued the trustees of the federal Natural Resource Damage Assessment, created in 1980, could pursue the money.
Under a 2006 order, GE spent $1.7 billion dredging 310,000 pounds of PCBs from the river north of Albany at what the Environmental Protection Agency said was the most polluted 40-mile stretch.
Scenic Hudson, which is based in Poughkeepsie, said it commissioned three analyst firms to arrive at an estimate. The study calculated that the damage by GE to the Hudson’s wildlife, drinking water and recreational fishing was $11.4 billion and that additional dredging was needed at a cost of $10.7 billion.
Why not $1 trillion? This is a pipe dream.