NY Sues Trump Admin Over Unfinished Hudson River Clean-Up

NEW YORK — State officials are suing the Trump administration's Environmental Protection Agency for letting a company off the hook for an allegedly incomplete Hudson River clean-up of possibly carcinogenic materials, the state Attorney General's office announced Wednesday.

Attorney General Letitia James and Gov. Andrew Cuomo filed a lawsuit against the EPA for issuing General Electric Company a "Certificate of Completion" for cleaning up the Hudson River of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.

"[President Donald] Trump’s EPA is failing New Yorkers and the environment by putting the priorities of polluters first," Cuomo said in a statement.

State officials said that the EPA's own five-year review found that the clean-up was not enough to protect human health and the environment, according to the lawsuit. James and Cuomo are suing to have General Electric's completion certificate scrapped, according to James's office.

James and Cuomo filed the lawsuit months after they announced their intent to sue when the Certificate of Completion was first issued to General Electric in April.

"We will not allow the EPA to let big polluters like General Electric off the hook without a fight," James said in a statement.

James added fish in the Hudson River are still "too contaminated" to eat from the PCBs, which are possibly carcinogenic materials once used in rubber products, hydraulic equipment and carbonless copy paper before a 1979 ban, according to the EPA.

"EPA is allowing tons of PCBs to remain in river sediments knowing that thousands of New Yorkers — many of whom represent low income, immigrant, and minority communities — supplement the food on their families' tables with contaminated fish they catch in the Hudson River," Sierra Club's Atlantic Chapter Conservation Director Roger Downs said in a statement. "A full cleanup of the Hudson River is not only the most effective and science-based remedy to the problem, it is the kind of justice these communities deserve"

Before the PCB ban, General Electric dumped an estimated 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River.

Some 200 miles of the Hudson River — from Hudson Falls, New York to The Battery — are now designated as a Superfund site. GE had pulled up contaminated sediments from the riverbed through a process called dredging to clean up the river, and in 2015, the lawsuit says, the company completed remedial dredging.

The company, which has invested $1.7 billion in the clean-up, stood by how much it had reduced PCB levels.

"EPA conducted a comprehensive review of the Hudson River dredging project and concluded that dredging successfully reduced PCB levels, no additional dredging is warranted, and GE met all of its obligations," a GE spokesperson said.

"New York state’s data showed that 99% of locations sampled in the Upper Hudson met the cleanup standard that EPA set. Environmental conditions in the Hudson will continue to improve and GE will continue to cooperate with both EPA and New York State," the spokesperson said.

The EPA declined to comment since the litigation is pending, according to an agency spokesperson.

This article has been updated with when General Electric stopped dredging the Hudson River.