Costly Superfund dredging set for Hudson River

(AP) — People look funny at David Mathis when he takes a dip off his dock in the Hudson River. Health officials have long warned people not to eat fish caught from this slow-flowing stretch south of the Adirondacks and swimming here is unthinkable to many.

I worked for a year or so in an early 19th century “gas house” (where gas was made from coal) that was situated in a back yard of a home on the Hudson River. The elder gentleman who lived in that house, the father of the man who owned the land and rented us the gas house (which we used as a lab) fished for stripers off his porch every day, and often caught them. He ate all the stripers he caught.

These fish were living on the PCB sediments from the Waterford GE PCB plant (where I later worked on the RKO device which would be used to destroy the PCBs). Once I asked the man if he thought it was safe to eat the fish, and he yelled at me for a long time about how stupid the whole environmental movement was and how the hippies should just keep to themselves.

Within six months of that conversation he was dead of several forms of cancer that kinda all rushed in there at once.

Saying “I told you so” is not always fun.