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Negative Hudson River Superfund remediation effectiveness: clamshell dredging massively mobilized sediments, increasing PCB contamination
Comments on US EPA’s Proposed Second Five-Year Review
Robert A. Michaels, PhD, CEP; and Uriel M. Oko, PhD, PE
This article is derived from our 30-August public comments submitted to EPA:
Michaels, Robert A.; and Uriel M. Oko. Negative Hudson River Superfund remediation effectiveness: clamshell dredging massively mobilized sediments, increasing PCB contamination. Comments on US EPA’s Proposed Second Five-Year Review, 69 pages including appendices, 30 August 2017.
We have studied the proposal to dredge, and its implementation, since 2007 (Michaels and Oko, 2007, 2010, 2017a; 2017b, in press). Our contributions regarding reasonably anticipated and actual project effectiveness were ignored in the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) first five-year review (US EPA 2012) and in its proposed second five-year review (US EPA 2017). Our studies, ignored by EPA, focused on all stages of the dredging project, starting with EPA's a priori assumptions (Michaels and Oko 2007). We concluded that EPA’s analysis that was used to justify dredging was biased. That conclusion was based upon our findings that critical assumptions made by the Agency were erroneous, and that all identified errors were made in the dredging-friendly direction rather than randomly.
We then studied dredging while in progress, during Phase 1 of the project, and found critical deficiencies in the project and in monitoring programs to document it (Michaels and Oko 2010). Most recently we studied dredging during and after Phase 2 of the dredging project (Michaels and Oko, 2017a; 2017b, in press). We reported negative Hudson River Superfund Site remediation effectiveness:
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CITATION: Michaels, M. Oko.
remediation
Robert A.; and Uriel Hudson River Superfund clamshell dredging massively mobilized sediments, increasing PCB contamination -- Comments on US EPA's proposed Second Five-Year Review. Collingswood, New Jersey, The Certified Environmental Professional (Newsletter of the Academy of Board Certified Environmental Professionals; ABCEP), pages 4-6, September 2017.
Negative effectiveness:
clamshell dredging massively mobilized sediments, increasing PCB contamination rather than decreasing it. Our purpose in providing these comments is to motivate EPA to address the serious concerns that we have expressed both publicly and privately regarding the expected and the actual performance of the clamshell dredging project.
Our 2007 and 2010 peer-reviewed Environmental Practice articles (Michaels and Oko 2007, 2010) predicted that primitive clamshell dredging in the Hudson River would massively mobilize buried PCB sediments, and spread them to an expanding area of river ecosystems that include fish and birds. Clamshells basically are floating backhoes that are useful for navigational dredging. Our 2017 articles (Michaels and Oko 20174; 2017b, in press) analyze the structure of clamshell dredge buckets used in the Hudson River, and the computerized dredge bucket data produced on each closure (the ‘bucket files’). We found that 75-80 percent of dredged sediment is returned to the river in mobile form, rather than removed to waiting barges for off-site disposal.
Safe PCB dredging requires more advanced hydraulic (suction) technology to minimize toxic sediment mobilization. That’s what environmental advocates have advocated, and that’s what environmental advocates have achieved, for example, in the New Bedford Harbor in Massachusetts, the Cumberland Bay in Plattsburgh, New York; and in the Fox River in Green Bay, Wisconsin. That’s what a year-long advertising campaign said that GE would do in the Hudson River PCBs Superfund Site, though that plan was abandoned in favor of clamshells.
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation recently reported to the EPA that GE’s sevenyear clamshell dredging project has failed to meet its cleanup goal, to reduce safely and substantially the longterm downstream transport of PCBs. This has resulted,
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most notably, in the project leaving excess PCB levels in fish, which will not abate to acceptable levels for human consumption for most of a century. DEC appropriately called for extensive sampling for PCBs “all the way to New York City,” and called on EPA to finish the job and hold GE accountable for cleaning up the Hudson River.
The question of whether remnant PCB-contaminated sediments can be removed via further clamshell dredging, however, depends upon whether PCBs are elevated because dredging remains incomplete, or because dredging was undertaken over a seven-year period. Our research indicates that PCB mobilization constitutes an ecological cost of PCB sediment removal via clamshell dredging. Mobilization already has far exceeded the minute amounts of PCBs seeping into the river that initially motivated and justified the dredging remedy.
EPA effectively has obscured this reality by failing to monitor dredge mobilization of PCB sediments, instead focusing on ‘resuspension’. As EPA’s Peer Review Panel (Peer Review Panel 2012, page 36) informing the Agency’s first five-year review wrote:
“There is a very real need to set an allowable load limit for the Hudson River dredging project, but neither the data nor tools needed to do so currently exist. To that end, the project must develop a set of models that incorporate hydrodynamics, sediment transport, fate and transport of PCBs, and bioaccumulation of PCBs in the Upper Hudson River from Fort Edward to Troy Dam.”
‘Resuspension” vs. ‘mobilization’ might seem like a distinction without a difference... but it makes a huge difference. Massive amounts of dredged sediment fell back to the river bottom rather than being disposed to waiting barges. Only a tiny fraction of this material is detected in ‘resuspension monitoring’ at great distance from each dredge site. Indeed, even this tiny fraction exceeded EPA’s engineering performance standard (EPS) for resuspension, which resulted in EPA changing the standard and the downstream distance of the monitoring location (Michaels and Oko 2010). The massive amounts of sediment dropped back to the river bottom are mobile: they can be and will be moved downstream episodically when storms or other events produce high-flow conditions in the river.
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We termed this the ‘sediment mobilization discrepancy’. It represents more than merely a difference between a predicted vs. a measured parameter value. It represents a fundamental inconsistency in EPA’s past justification of the need to dredge versus EPA’s current characterization of the performance of the dredging project. The need for dredging was justified by the observed, persistent mobility of PCB sediments requiring, according to EPA, their removal via dredging. In contrast, in the new context of actual dredging, EPA dramatically has altered its concept of mobility. Mobility in the dredging project is newly quantified by the miniscule fraction of mobilized (‘resuspended’) PCB that is detected at significant distance downstream. Thus, EPA has ignored nearly all sediment and PCB mobilization in evaluating compliance with the Engineering Performance Standard for resuspension. In ignoring mobility of PCB-containing dredge-mobilized sediments for gauging compliance with the resuspension EPS, EPA has ignored a much larger degree of PCB sediment mobility than that which constituted EPA’s most essential basis for requiring, in 2007, remediation of the Hudson River PCBs Superfund Site via dredging.
Additional clamshell dredging demanded by many in the environmental community would do more damage. Political correctness cannot change the reality that clamshell dredging was and remains a bad idea for the Hudson River. Its PCB-sensitive species including endangered sturgeon and American eagles already have had more than enough PCB exposure due to clamshell dredging.
Long-term remediation projects undertaken under the Federal Superfund Act or its state equivalents are subject to five-year reviews. As dredging Hudson River PCBs was mandated in 2007, the first five-year review of the project was undertaken as required in 2012 (US EPA 2012). Accordingly, one of us (Michaels) informed EPA of the emerging link between PCBs and possible causation of autism and, in a public comment, suggested that the scheduled five-year review address this issue relative to numerous river communities alongside the path of the dredging project. The five-year review (US EPA 2012), however, neither addressed this issue substantively, nor alluded to it. Indeed, the word ‘autism’ was absent from the 82-page report. Given the high and increasing prevalence of autism, and its seriousness, cost, and apparent linkage to environmental agents that may include maternal exposure to PCBs during pregnancy, extending the
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dredging project should be predicated upon satisfactory consideration of this emerging public health issue.
The next five-year review of the dredging project is underway. On 31 May 2017, EPA released the proposed “Second Five-Year Review” for public comment. As with the first review, the second neither addresses the autism issue nor alludes to it. Indeed, the word ‘autism’ as before is absent from the 81-page report, notwithstanding several reports in the literature that were cited and considered in Michaels and Oko (2010, 2017a, b). Both published papers predate release of EPA’s proposed “Second Five-Year Review.”
The issues of whether EPA should consider the autism association, and whether the officially completed GE Hudson River dredging project should be extended to remediate remnant PCBs, both must be viewed in the context of EPA’s longstanding special mandate regarding children’s health, embodied by EPA’s Children’s Health Risk Initiative (US EPA 2001). In 1997 the Office of Children’s Health Protection was instituted within EPA. Its mission was and remains “to make children’s health protection a fundamental goal of public health and environmental protection... [by] ensuring strong standards that protect children’s health...” In short, EPA must be conservative, not only in protecting the scientific knowledge base, but in protecting public health, including children’s health (Michaels 2017).
All three of our already-published papers (Michaels and Oko 2007, 2010, 2017a), which are critical of EPA’s dredging project methods and effectiveness, are excluded from citation and from consideration by EPA’s proposed “Second Five-Year Review,” just as in 2012 EPA excluded from its first five-year review our two then-existing peerreviewed published papers. We respectfully call upon EPA to respond to our comments in its upcoming response document, and consider our reports in the final version of the Agency’s “Second Five-Year Review.”
Literature Cited:
Michaels, Robert A. Confidence in courts: a delicate balance. Science, 357(6353):764, Letters, DOI: 10.1126/ science.aao3967, 25 August 2017
Michaels, Robert A.; and Uriel M. Oko. Bias in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Health Risk Assessment Supporting the Decision to Require Dredging PCB-Bearing Sediments from the Hudson River. Environmental Practice (Cambridge University Press), 9:96-111, 2007
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Michaels, Robert A.; and Uriel M. Oko. Hudson River PCB Dredging: Midcourse Assessment and Implications Regarding Possible Project Continuation. Environmental Practice (Cambridge University Press), 9:377-94, 2010
Michaels, Robert A.; and Uriel M. Oko. Excessive PCBs in the Hudson River: attributable to incompleteness of dredging, or to seven years of dredging? Environmental Claims Journal, 29(2):115-40, 20174; online: http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/10406026.2017.1307007, 25 April 2017a
Michaels, Robert A.; and Uriel M. Oko. Lessons learned from legacy contaminants of emerging concern: Hudson River PCB dredging. Albany, New York State Bar Association, NYSBA Environmental Lawyer, 37(2), in press, Autumn 2017b
Michaels, Robert A.; and Uriel M. Oko. Negative Hudson River Superfund remediation effectiveness: clamshell dredging massively mobilized sediments, increasing PCB contamination. Comments on on US EPA’s Proposed Second Five-Year Review, 69 pages including appendices, 30 August 2017¢
Peer Review Panel. Hudson River PCBs Site Peer Review of Phase 1 Dredging, Final Report. Under contract to US Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC (Contract No. EP-W-09-011), 102 pages including appendices. Available at http://www.epa.gov/hudson/pdf/hudsonriver
phase1dredgingreport_final.pdf, 2010
US EPA. Region 2's Management of Children’s Health Risk Initiative and Related Projects. Office of Inspector General Audit Report, Grant Management, Report No. 2001-P-
00002, 129 pages, https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/
files/2015-12/documents/kidshealth.pdf, 30 January 2001
US EPA. First Five-Year Review Report for Hudson River PCBs Superfund Site. New York City, U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 2, Emergency and Remedial Response Division, 82 pages, 1 June 2012
US EPA. Proposed Second Five-Year Review Report for Hudson River PCBs Superfund Site. New York City, U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 2, Emergency and Remedial Response Division; 81 pages plus 15 Appendices, https://www.epa.gov/ny/second-five-year-reviewreport-hudson-river-pcbs-superfund-site-report-textappendices-o, 31 May 2017
Authors - Robert A. Michaels, PhD, CEP; RAM TRAC Corporation, Schenectady, NY; ram@ramtrac.com. Uriel M. Oko, PhD, PE; Recycle Management, Glenmont, NY; umoko@nycap.rr.com.
Publication citation
Michaels, RA; and Uriel M. Oko. Negative Hudson River Superfund remediation effectiveness: clamshell dredging massively mobilized sediments, increasing PCB contamination. Comments on US EPA’s Proposed Second Five-Year Review. Collingswood, New Jersey, The Certified Environmental Professional (Newsletter of the Academy of Board-Certified Environmental Professionals; ABCEP), pages 4-6, September 2017;