Hey Stockbridge, it seems like a long way off. But it is not. The day is coming when we will routinely drive Rt 183 to Lenox behind a dump truck carrying 14 tons of toxic PCB sludge, or slurp coffee on our Main St. as the Diesel Particulate Matter from toxic exhaust settles on our croissants. We will routinely hear the roar of many new machines and heavy vehicles. Be amazed by new lighting for work areas. And this will be for years…
Norman Rockwell’s town has been poisoned, along with too many others. Now the price will be paid.
You may wonder about property values as the years of PCB removal work drag on. You may wonder about impact on local businesses, the fumes, noise, and traffic for the major non-profits on Rt. 183 and businesses on Main St. You may wonder about the health of your family, kids, friends, pets. You will be asked to trust the very organization responsible for the disaster to regulate the safety of the clean-up. And you will wonder if you can really clean the river with dredging. How did that work out over on the Hudson?
What about using trains to move the toxic waste? Not gonna happen. GE is an army of lawyers and bottomline executives with massive funds. We are volunteer governments and citizens, most of whom were cut out of the secret wheeling and dealing to finalize GE’s agreement to clean up its mess. Towns took the payoffs and Lee was stuck with the dump.
What about thermal desorption? Expensive, but more efficient and effective, safer. It destroys PCBs. Is it not better to destroy the PCBs on site then dump them in Lee? But that’s not the bottom line. We are not the bottom line. GE money is the bottom line. Per one of its 2023 Annual Reports, GE tells us “…our values are embedded in the purpose of building a better world.” This is great! Show us the values! Show us the better world! Can we get ours back after what you have done?
What’s that? It’s too late to do anything about switching to trains and dumping the dump? It all been settled legally on our behalf? Wow, that’s a relief! Now, if we could just dredge up some of those embedded values we might understand.
