Category: Housatonic River

Me/We and the EPA

By Mickey Friedman May 12, 2017 I first met the Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1990s. Glad to see them because the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was doing a lousy job with GE and PCBs. The EPA had the power…

Our Clear and Present Danger

July 19, 2016 By Mickey Friedman Anyone who has watched the ducks paddle from one end of Woods Pond to the other, would be hard pressed to appreciate that the Housatonic is our very own toxic waste repository. So very…

For Landon, Alesia, and Hazel

By Mickey Friedman April 10, 2016 My friends Landon, Alesia, and Hazel live a short walk from GE’s planned PCB-dump off Van Deusenville Road in Housatonic, Massachusetts. Depending on how much or little work GE is forced to do in…

Rise Up for Rising

March 26, 2016 By Mickey Friedman Like many stories, the story about the Lenox or Lee or Housatonic PCB Dump begins and ends with money. The money Monsanto made selling PCBs to GE and Westinghouse. The massive amounts of money…

Time is a River, Housatonic

By Mickey Friedman November 17, 2015 Not surprisingly, after all this time, politics prevailed. And the Environmental Protection Agency will allow General Electric to leave great quantities of PCB contamination in our Housatonic river system. Even though with every additional…

A Horse Named Sue

October 12, 2013 By Mickey Friedman If we lived in the Twelfth Best Small Town in America I probably wouldn’t say anything. But somehow here in The Best Small Town in America, a dollar starts out a dollar, but becomes…

The River: It Ain’t Over

October 2, 2012 By Mickey Friedman A loyal reader admonished me recently: “You haven’t written about the River in a while!” Sometimes thinking about the thirty year fight for a PCB cleanup makes me want to go to sleep for…

GE Brought A Good Thing To Life

March 10, 2011 By Mickey Friedman Having grown up on city streets, I wouldn’t have known a vernal pool if I had fallen into one. Today I’m writing about vernal pools because they are central to the battle about how…

The Fish, the Ducks, & the Clucks

By Mickey Friedman October 21, 2011 The Fish are the fish that swim the Housatonic River; the Ducks are the ducks that travel the flyway, stopping to live for a bit in the Housatonic. And the Clucks, well read on,…

The Rising: A Fishable, Swimmable Rising Pond

By Mickey Friedman August 12, 2011 GE sees Rising Pond and sees a PCB dump. I see Rising Pond and I see a gem, the cornerstone of a renewed and restored Housatonic, Massachusetts. I see people fishing on the banks,…

Conflicting Ideas for the EPA Remedy Review Board

By Mickey Friedman August 5, 2011 EPA Region One officials responsible for the GE/Housatonic River site spent two days on July 27-28, 2011 presenting a cleanup plan for “The Rest of the River” to the agency’s National Remedy Review Board…