David Rosoff MS’90 (geology) is the on-scene field coordinator for the Environmental Protection Agency working on cleaning up the Hudson River.

The Hudson River’s impact on American history is nothing short of stunning. For millennia, the Hudson has showered riches on the region: bountiful food, scenic vistas, and an important transportation route, to name a few. Today, a new chapter awaits the river. The mighty Hudson is poised to become the nation’s biggest environmental cleanup story—or else a lesson in how not to clean a toxic waste site.

The removal of PCBs from the Hudson has been a long time coming. For decades, General Electric dumped contaminants into the river, fought long and hard against a cleanup, all the while denying health problems relating to the polychlorinated biphenyls, the collective name for the group of 209 synthetic compounds better known as PCBs. But then in 2002, 18 years after nearly two-thirds of the Hudson was designated a Superfund site, GE did an about-face.

On May 15, 2009, the dredging of the Hudson River began.

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