Campaigning together in the Hudson Valley, Bronx progressive congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and local congressmember Pat Ryan held a joint press conference Thursday on the Kingston waterfront prior to an evening fundraiser about removing the pollution from the Hudson River.
The presence of Ocasio-Cortez, a bonafide political celebrity and infamous Republican bête noire, drew members of the political class from at least three counties to hear about the decades-long fight to compel General Electric to make amends for its 30 years — from 1947 to 1977 — of dumping polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the Hudson River. GE was finally forced by the Environmental Protection Agency to undertake remediation efforts along various sections of the river between 2009 and 2015.
The EPA says it still requires more data before it can weigh in on whether that cleanup was sufficient.
Congressmember Ryan, along with other political figures and an assortment of environmental activists, thinks not.
“Just a few months ago, the EPA failed us,” said Ryan. “There was a moment where they could have said, ‘You have to do more, you have not cleaned up and fully remediated the PCBs,’ … but instead, they kicked the can [down the road] for potentially five more years of really harming our community.”
Ocasio-Cortez highlighted the Hudson as an irreplaceable natural resource which binds together all New Yorkers — upstream, downstream, and inland.
“I think the right to clean water should be one of the most basic and essential functions of government, period,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “Whether it’s PCBs or PFAS, what we cannot allow is for private companies — not to make a buck, but to take a buck — because it’s our communities that pay the bill in cleaning it up, and that are in the hospital [paying] bills when we get sick.”
As an acknowledgment of public pressure, Ryan said, the EPA has extended the public comment period from October 8 to November 7. He entreated the public to make its voices heard and hold GE accountable for a full cleanup of the river “so that my kids and all of our kids and grandkids don’t have to continue to fight this fight that our parents and our grandparents fought.”
Public comments should be submitted to Gary Klawinski, director the EPA, at epahrfo@outlook.com.
The 200-mile stretch of the Hudson River from Battery Park in New York City to Hoosick Falls north of Albany has been declared the largest Superfund site in the United States.
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