Online or by mail: Patrick Thomas White Committee • 81 Hawthorne St. • Lenox, MA 01240

Housatonic River and General Electric...

Let’s remember the key fact with all of this: General Electric’s poisoning of our river and the floodplains adjacent to it. Let's not forget what this poison does: it causes cancer.

If you think that these actions were all in the past, think again. Recently, GE opposed improvements to the Pittsfield facility that collects PCB runoff before it is dumped in the river. Why? Well, money of course.

This is the same General Electric that opposed the 2016 settlement that would have incinerated or otherwise safely disposed of dredged PCBs out of state, resulting in the 2019 agreement that will leave these PCBs atop of liners at the Lee PCB dump, a dump with the sciency-sounding name of “Upland Disposal Facility.” Why? Well, money of course.

This is the same General Electric that seems to oppose efforts to use trains to keep tens of thousands of truckloads of PCBs off our streets as they remove them from the river for transport to Lee. Why? Well, money of course.

This is a company run by a man named H Lawrence “Larry” Culp. Larry got paid $22 million the year after he tanked the better clean-up option, saving GE $200 million. This is a company that enjoyed profits of $9 billion last year alone on revenue of $80 billion. This is a company with a market capitalization of $121 billion. The additional cost of the preferred clean-up would have represented just 1/10% of 1% of its net worth, and just 2% of the profits from just one year. You sure are earning that big giant salary, Larry. And the GE Board is certainly doing its job of getting Larry to focus on squeezing every penny he can out of those quarterly earnings reports.

You know, my best friend growing up lived on Cherry St. about 100 feet from the river. Steve Rose was his name. He never smoked, yet he died of a rare throat cancer about a year ago. My friend D., who is still with us so I won’t use her name, lived across the street, about 25 feet from this river. She got a similar throat cancer, though they lived their adult lives 3,000 miles away from each other. Now I know better than to link these specific experiences with General Electric, but there is no doubt we have cancer clusters all along that river starting in Pittsfield and heading south. And there is no doubt that polychlorinated biphenyls are one of the most carcinogenic substances known to man.

Thankfully, local parents are more aware of PCBs than ours were in the 1960s and 1970s. Thankfully, the parents in town I know don’t let their entrepreneurial children enter the river to retrieve golf balls and sell them back to golfers for $.25 each, after hand-cleaning the silt off them. Thankfully, our modern farmers no longer locate their farms on the riverbanks as an easy source of irrigation and drinking water, as farmers did for hundreds of years up until the scope of General Electric’s malfeasance was widely known. Thankfully today’s parents and farmers know better than to play or grow in our forever-tainted floodplain that is known as the Housatonic and its shores. Small thanks indeed.

At least we humans can avoid the river, unlike the beavers and otters and turtles and trout forever forced to live in this beautiful yet despoiled habitat.

Which brings me to the payments GE made to municipalities. Mine got $1.6 million. This tiny payment, when you think of the scope and scale and duration of the impacts of this crime, when you think about the permanent human and environmental toll of GE’s actions, when you shudder reflecting on the still-hidden 55-gallon drums of buried PCBs, hidden without record throughout the county, this tiny payment could not possibly represent more than 1/100th of a penny on every dollar of actual impact.

Now that I have that off my chest: what's next?

Here's specifically what I will do and continue to do to hold GE accountable:

• Find more money. It's not too late to just fund the $200 million to eliminate the dump. If we can't shame GE, how about we shame the state and federal government?
• Hold GE accountable for health impacts. The removal of PCBs is only part of the story. I want a study of health outcomes for those who have been exposed to PCBs. I want the full-throated support by the state for the folks who are suing GE for compensation for health impacts.
• Do the hard work to keep GE honest. No cutting corners. Trucks vs. Trains is a good example. One idea is saves money. The other idea is good. How about just once in a while, EPA, we do what's best for the region?
• Build allies wherever we can. You may have read a recent article in the paper related to the Stockbridge Mohicans and burial sites. It's just one example. I can build stronger allies at the State House if you send me there.

I want to end by quoting my good friend Denny Alsop, whose life has been dedicated to this river:

"Here is a sentence from the address given by W.E.B. Du Bois at Searles High School in Great Barrington.

"'We should rescue the Housatonic and clean it as we have never in all the years thought before of cleaning it, and seek to restore its ancient beauty, making it the center of a town, of a valley, and perhaps — who knows — of a new measure of civilized life.'

"Here is General Electric and the Environmental Protection Agency's version: A river punctuated by dump and dams holding industrial poison for a thousand years."

Listen to Denny. I know I am.

PS: Running costs money. I need your help. If you believe, like I do, that we have hope, that we can control our own destiny, that we can move the needle on the seemingly intractable issues we face, please consider donating to my campaign.

Stockbridge Old Town Hall.