The toxic waste cleanup of the Housatonic River will not pose a health risk from airborne PCBs, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Staff from the agency's New England office will hold a public meeting on Thursday evening in Lee, Massachusetts, to explain how the EPA plans to protect workers and the public.
A PCB dump is slated to be built in Lee as part of the cleanup plan. Many in the community, including the town's Select Board, oppose the disposal site.
General Electric, which contaminated the river, will dig up soil and sediment that contain the toxin. The EPA estimates the excavation will start in late 2026 or early 2027.
The EPA will require the company to conduct air sampling before and just as the work begins. If those samples show safe levels of PCBs, the company will sample active work sites once a week, for 24 hours at a time.
If those once-a-week samples exceed a certain level — one-tenth of a microgram per cubic meter — the EPA will require GE to stop work temporarily, conduct additional sampling, figure out the cause of the levels and propose to the EPA ways to control the airborne PCBs.
Dean Tagliaferro, the EPA's senior manager for the GE Pittsfield Housatonic River Superfund site, said that level is "very conservative" and will protect workers and members of the public.
"That would have to be exceeded continuously for over 25 years, for example, before they would be considered, in EPA's view, a threat to the public," he said.
University of Albany professor David Carpenter agrees the levels are conservative. He studies environmental causes of human disease and has researched the impact of of PCBs on the Hudson River, which GE also contaminated and was also responsible for cleaning up.
Carpenter said inhaling PCBs over long periods at certain levels "is associated with the greater risk of being hospitalized for respiratory infections, for diabetes, for high blood pressure, for heart disease."
Carpenter questions whether the EPA should actually require work to stop based on only a single day's measurements. He said he is a strong advocate of removing PCBs from the Housatonic.
"If you don't get the PCBs out of the river, people are going to be chronically exposed to PCBs in the air. So if anything, I think the EPA values are ... unnecessarily rigorous," Carpenter said.
The agency wrote in a fact sheet that the levels that require work to stop are "based on the conservative assumption that exposure occurs over an extended period of times (many years) every day."
"A one-time exceedance," the agency wrote, "would not result in increased cancer risks."
