Hudson River project only the beginning

Published October 1, 2001

The massive dredging ordered by the Environmental Protection Agency will be the largest dredging project ever ordered and will make the upper Hudson River the nation’s most expensive EPA Superfund site. Even so, anti-corporate agitators are already using Whitman’s decision as a stepping stone for still larger, more expensive dredging proposals.

Next on the anti-corporate agenda is Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. Like the upper Hudson River, PCB deposits in the Kalamazoo River have been buried and entombed by years of sedimentation. However, the same political arguments that prevailed in upstate New York are being applied to the Kalamazoo.

Here, moreover, activists are calling for wholesale dredging along 80 miles of river–more than twice the dredging proposed in the Hudson. The estimated cost to dredge the Kalamazoo is fully $2 billion, or four times the record cost of the upper Hudson dredging.

In addition to the Kalamazoo River, dredging proponents are targeting a 39-mile portion of a harbor at the mouth of Wisconsin’s Fox River. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources is considering a plan that includes not only dredging, but additional costly steps to remove PCBs from their sedimentary tomb and relocate the material to new landfills.