It’s over. The petition of the Housatonic River Initiative (HRI) was denied by the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and Tim Gray, HRI Executive Director, said they will not appeal. 

The result? There will be a PCB dump in Lee, the money will be distributed, the dredging up of the polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)will begin, and the trucks will roll.

Trucks? Yes. Whatever PCB-laden muck is dredged up will be moved from the river to the Lee dump by trucks. The agreement upheld by the court says more than one million cubic yards of sediment with lower levels of PCBs will be dredged up, loaded on trucks, moved, and dumped in a hole in the ground in Lee. 

A dump truck has a capacity of ten to fourteen cubic yards, so how many trucks will it take to transport one million cubic yards? Approximately 85,000. An American football field is 120 yards by 53 yards (including the end zones). How long will it take to dredge and transport that volume? Years. It is years of dredging and loading, and thousands of trucks driving our country roads.

Once a member of ROR told a Stockbridge audience that “none of this will affect Stockbridge.” Boy, was he wrong. Imagine the impact on local life and our tourist economy of all those trucks. 

There is an idea about an alternative. Transport more than one million cubic yards of PCBs to the dump site by train. Ease the assault on roadbeds and traffic. Actually, that was the original plan — call it the Obama administration agreement.

The Obama administration agreement had the PCBs on a train. That train transported them to a PCB approved commercial storage and disposal site outside of Berkshire County. No part of that original agreement had PCBs buried in land bordered by the Housatonic River, Woods Pond, Woodland Road, and Willow Hill Road. 

It was the second agreement — call it the Trump administration agreement — that has the PCBs dumped in Lee in the exact location once chosen as a secondary water supply. 

But, wait, if we got the PCBs on a train…