ALBANY — Two emails about one of the world’s great rivers landed in my inbox within an hour of each other.
The first was about a city of Albany effort to boost waterfront access. The new gateways, the city says, will provide those wanting to see the Hudson “with clear directions to the riverfront and its many recreational assets.” Sounds good.
The second email was about a bill proposed in the Legislature that would ban the dumping of nuclear wastewater into the Hudson, as planned by the company that’s decommissioning the Indian Point nuclear power plant.
And there, in a nutshell, is the story of the Hudson River. Progress met by regression. Headway met by stupidity. We want the river to be an asset. We want to enjoy its beauty.
And yet we still treat it as a dumping ground for toxins.
This contradiction is not new, of course. Artists so celebrated the beauty of the Hudson that there’s an entire school of paintings named for it. Still, we industrialized much of the river and treated it as an open sewer, hideously epitomized by the decades-long General Electric practice of pouring PCBs into the water.
The Clean Water Act, passed in 1972, helped end the worst of those practices and has led to significant improvements in the cleanliness of the water. Yet municipal sewage overflows continue to pollute it.
Think about that. Here in one of the nation’s highest-tax states, our infrastructure is still so inadequate that human waste flows into the river when there’s heavy rain. It’s an appalling failure that, as the Times Union’s Rachel Silberstein recently reported, makes swimming in the river a risky proposition.
“I recommend people think about what the weather was like a day or two before they go to the beach,” said Dan Shapley, director of advocacy and policy at the environmental group Riverkeeper. “If there was a big thunderstorm that rolled through the afternoon before you go to the beach, that will probably have affected the water quality.”
Um, yeah. We’ll swim somewhere else, thank you.
I’ve been an advocate for remaking Interstate 787 into a boulevard because doing so would open up Albany’s access to the waterfront, free land for parkland and development, and allow the region to make better use of the Hudson as a recreational and economic asset. It’s what forward-looking cities around the world are doing, and there’s no reason why Albany shouldn’t join them. We should reconnect the city to the river.
But I’ll admit that remaking the highway can’t be the priority so long as the river continues to be polluted by sewage. As Silberstein noted, the Hudson’s waters around Watervliet, Albany, Troy and Cohoes are among the most contaminated in the state.
Now there’s a point of municipal pride. Yay for us.
Riverkeeper has estimated it would cost $2.2. billion to repair and upgrade wastewater infrastructure to the point where the Hudson could achieve the “swimmable” promises of the Clean Water Act. Yes, that’s a significant amount of money. Yes, it’s a commitment.
But for perspective, consider that the new Buffalo Bills stadium, funded significantly by taxpayers, is projected to cost $1.6 billion. The Wadsworth Center laboratory planned for the Harriman State Office Campus will cost $1.7 billion, at least, in a state where lawmakers routinely waste money and recently passed a $229 billion budget.
With so much money sloshing around, it’s a question of priorities. Why are we OK with such slow progress? What do we want the Hudson to be?
Alas, the plan to release wastewater containing tritium, a radioactive element and known carcinogen, suggests that the old mentalities about the river persist, that convenience and cost continue to trump sanity and caution, that we haven’t advanced as much as we might like to think.
A few suggestions: Let’s stop dumping toxins into the river under the mistaken assumption that the pollutants will wash away with no lasting effects on wildlife or human health. Let’s stop seeing the river as an easy place to jettison bad stuff. Why are we still having these debates?
The Hudson, of course, begins in the Adirondacks and ends at the southern tip of Manhattan. Save for a small piece of New Jersey, the Hudson is New York’s river, which means that we can’t blame its condition on some distant red state with lax environmental laws.
That the river is still polluted by toxins and sewage is New York’s shame. This failure, I’m sorry to say, is on us.
[email protected] ■ 518-454-5442 ■ @chris_churchill