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Town officials in Lee, Mass., will meet with Sen. Warren's staff to discuss options to stop PCB dump

A "No PCB Dumps" sign in Lee, Massachusetts, where the EPA plans a disposal site for sediment containing PCBs, in a file photo.
Nancy Eve Cohen
/
NEPM
A "No PCB Dumps" sign in Lee, Massachusetts, where the EPA plans a disposal site for sediment containing PCBs, in a file photo.

Officials in Lee, Massachusetts plan to ask Sen. Elizabeth Warren's staff next week what she is doing to prevent the construction of a toxic waste disposal site in their town. The disposal site is part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's plan to clean up PCBs from the Housatonic River.

General Electric released PCBs into the river up until the 1970s while it manufactured electrical transformers at its former plant in Pittsfield.

Lee officials contacted Warren's office after she told NEPM in February that she is wrangling with the EPA over cleaning up the river without storing toxic waste near it.

Warren's office set up a meeting with the town, then canceled it, and according to town officials did not respond to repeated requests to reschedule.

On Wednesday town administrator Chris Brittain sent Warren a letter requesting a meeting and copied it to several news outlets.

"As of the date of this letter, the Town has still not received a reply to set a new meeting date," Brittain wrote in the letter.

A member of Warren's staff called him on Thursday morning and apologized for not getting back to the town sooner, which Brittain said he appreciated. Warren's office set up a meeting for next week with Brittain and Sean Regnier, chair of the Lee Select Board.

Brittain wants to find out if the PCB storage can be moved out of the Berkshires.

"We at least want to find out what, if anything, can be done at this point on a federal level."

The town recently filed a lawsuit against Bayer, the owner of Monsanto, which manufactured PCBs and sold them to General Electric.

A spokesperson from Warren's office emailed the following statement: "Senator Warren recognizes the community’s concerns about the EPA’s process to hold GE accountable for cleanup of the Housatonic River. Her office received the letter from Lee Town Administrator Brittain and scheduled a meeting to discuss this important issue in more detail."

Nancy Eve Cohen is a former NEPM senior reporter whose investigative reporting has been recognized with an Edward R. Murrow Regional Award for Hard News, along with awards for features and spot news from the Public Media Journalists Association (PMJA), American Women in Radio & Television and the Society of Professional Journalists.

She has reported on repatriation to Native nations, criminal justice for survivors of child sexual abuse, linguistic and digital barriers to employment, fatal police shootings and efforts to address climate change and protect the environment. She has done extensive reporting on the EPA's Superfund cleanup of the Housatonic River.

Previously, she served as an editor at NPR in Washington D.C., as well as the managing editor of the Northeast Environmental Hub, a collaboration of public radio stations in New York and New England.

Before working in radio, she produced environmental public television documentaries. As part of a camera crew, she also recorded sound for network television news with assignments in Russia, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba and in Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia.
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