Environmental officials in the U.S. have ordered General Electric Co. to pay to remove tons of poisonous PCBs from the upper Hudson River.

The large dredging operation is expected to cost nearly $500 million. If GE refuses to clean up the river, the Environmental Protection Agency could start the work on its own and charge the company up to triple the cost.

The EPA plan is similar to the initial proposal, issued in August by the Clinton administration.

Hudson River, New JerseyCourtesy: Timothy D. Solberg, Ph.D., Manhattan Beach, Calif.

Environmentalists criticized the Bush administration's weakness on global warming but praised the EPA for resisting GE's huge advertising and lobbying campaign to weaken the plan.

The cleanup plans do not require any complicated technical requirements that many experts say could have delayed the project.

Cleanup plans

The plan is to remove 2.65 million cubic yards of sediment from a 60-kilometre stretch of the Hudson riverbed north of Albany.

GE is largely responsible for the PCB contamination. The company dumped about 1.3 million pounds of PCBs from two electrical plants before the federal government banned the pollutants in 1977. GE used PCBs – oily, yellow chemicals – as insulation and as a coolant.

A spokesperson for GE, which adamantly opposes dredging, said company officials had not yet seen the plan and would not comment until they reviewed it.

New York State officials have 15 business days to review the plan, which doesn't become official until it is formally assigned. The EPA said it will go ahead the cleanup plans.

Pollution problem

The EPA lists polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) as a probable carcinogen and says the chemicals pose risks to wildlife and people who eat fish from the Hudson.

For decades, there have been conflicting studies over what to do with the PCBs buried on the riverbed.

GE argues dredging would stir up the pollutants and cause them to flow downstream. Environmentalists caution much of the pollution was dispersed widely into the environment and cannot be recovered.

Local residents near the cleanup area in upstate New York fear an estimated 100,000 dump-truck loads of sludge will be put in nearby landfills. The EPA says residents will have a say, and regulations controlling air quality and noise will be placed on the cleanup operation.

The agency said the actual dredging will not begin until a detailed plan of the project is completed, which could take about three years.