While the decadeslong fight to clean up the Hudson River continues, organizations like Riverkeeper are trying to get help from lawmakers to pressure the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to require companies to clean up the polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) dumped into the Hudson River.

Most New Yorkers wouldn’t eat a fish caught in the Hudson River. It just isn’t safe. Tracy Brown, president of Riverkeeper, hopes to change that.

“This is a river that had, historically, a thriving commercial fishing industry, and where people were able to go down to the river and grab a fish and bring it home and put it on their table and feed their family," she said. "And having lost, that has been a huge tragedy for the Hudson Valley." 

According to the EPA, for 30 years in the middle of the 20th century, the General Electric (GE) Co., discharged over 1 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River. PCB chemicals are considered a probable carcinogen by the agency. GE is conducting the PCB cleanup, which is overseen by the EPA, but Brown says that so many years later, it’s not effective enough.

“Not only has the removal of the PCBs been lower overall than what the public wanted, now the recovery – the levels of PCBs in the river – aren't declining as much as was even promised based on that cleanup," she said. 

Federal lawmakers from New York were brought aboard to drive Brown’s message home: Legislative work is required because families are suffering from the inaction. 

“So it's the communities that really need to rely on fishing to add protein to their family diets, who really can't avoid exposure to PCB-contaminated fish," Brown said. "That's an environmental justice issue.” 

The EPA said it's mandated to review Superfund cleanups every five years when contaminants remain at a site, and document them in five-year review reports. It said it recently issued its third review of the Upper Hudson River cleanup, and have extended a 90-day public comment period on it to Nov. 7, 2024, to gather more input.

The EPA says it latest review concludes PCB levels in water and fish are going down overall, but it needs more years of fish data to determine if the cleanup is meeting expectations of its original plan.

The EPA said it will issue an addendum to the current five-year review report when sufficient fish data is available, as early as next year, and no later than the end of 2027.

"The report also contains the EPA’s proposal for expanded monitoring and special studies to bolster the data on which to base its conclusions," the EPA stated.

In a statement, a GE spokesman said, “The Hudson River dredging project removed the vast majority of PCBs from the Upper Hudson, led to broad declines in PCB levels, and is on track to deliver further improvements.”