Organochlorines in New York and the Hudson River: Sources, Environmental Distribution, and Health Risks

Overview

Hudson River

The geographic focus of the Mount Sinai Superfund Basic Research Program is the watershed of the Hudson River, a national heritage river that covers more than one quarter of New York State's land area. The lower Hudson, the nation's longest Superfund site, is contaminated with Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) derived from the General Electric capacitor manufacturing plants in upstate New York. The River, more than 300 kilometers long, crosses 9 watersheds covering more than 24,000 square kilometers. This vast region extends from north of Albany to the New York City Harbor.

Contamination History

Between 1946 and 1976, the General Electric Corporation dumped approximately 1 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River from its two manufacturing plants in Hudson Falls and Fort Edward, New York. In 1976, following the Environmental Protection Agency’s ban on the manufacture of PCBs, GE stopped use of these toxic chemicals. By then, however, the Hudson River was already contaminated. Today indirect leakage of the chemicals continues from the now abandoned plants. In 2001 the federal government passed legislation requiring GE to dredge the river of sediment containing thousands of pounds of PCBs.

• The watershed of the Hudson has been densely populated for 350 years and industrialized for more than 200 years.
• The watershed is home to about 12 million people, about 4 percent of the population of the United States. One-third are members of racial and ethnic minorities.
• Three million children under the age of 18 reside in the Hudson River watershed; 1.6 million of those children are under the age of 5.
• One-third of the children under 18 in the Hudson River watershed — more than 1.7 million — are living in poverty.
• The watershed contains hundreds of hazardous waste disposal sites, of which 21 in New York and 70 in New Jersey have been placed by EPA on the National Priorities List (NPL) as Superfund sites.