FORT EDWARD — Workers are widening the Champlain barge canal this winter along the 114-acre Hudson River PCB sediment processing and transportation site in Fort Edward.

The additional 65 feet of space will allow a small fleet of barges filled with river sludge to land and unload the contaminated material for processing.

“The canal is drained; it’s now at the lower level,” said Tim Kruppenbacher, site operations manger for General Electric Co.

This is why GE contractors are doing the widening work through the winter months.

Welders and other construction workers, braving bitter cold and snow, have built pilings along the wharf area.

When dredging on the Hudson starts in the spring of 2009 in the Fort Edward and Moreau area of the river, normal river and canal traffic will continue.

The pleasure boats, yachts and commercial barges taking the Champlain Canal from the Hudson to Whitehall, Lake Champlain and points north will find easier passage with the widened canal in Fort Edward.

On schedule

GE officials say that the processing and transportation site is now 45 percent complete and on schedule.

Large buildings that will be used to receive, filter and stockpile river sediments contaminated by PCBs are going up on the sprawling site that was just a corn field in early 2007.

“They are on schedule and things are going well,” said David King, director of the Hudson River Field Office for the Environmental Protection Agency.

GE officials say the site will be operational by the end of 2008. “Dry” testing of the various buildings and systems will be done late this year, with more extensive “wet” testing in early 2009.

In 2002 the federal government ordered GE to conduct and finance the estimated $700 million environmental cleanup of about 2 million cubic yards of PCB contaminated river sediment. The dredging will be done on a 40-mile stretch of the Hudson between Fort Edward and Troy.

The PCBs were discharged into the Hudson from GE’s Hudson Falls and Fort Edward capacitor plants for 30 years, ending in 1977 when the practice became illegal.

PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, are described by the EPA as a probable carcinogen that also cause other health problems in humans and wildlife.

More than 20 years of discussion, testing, heated debates and planning have gone into what is described as the largest environmental cleanup project in the nation’s history.

Legal and logistical obstacles have been addressed and apparently solved. Finally, the cleanup project appears to be moving forward.

Dredging was first projected to start in 2006 but has been delayed several times, mainly by the huge size of the undertaking.

“My dream is to be able to bring Peter Seeger up here to see the first bucket of PCBs dredged,” said Manna Jo Greene of the environmental organization Hudson River Sloop Clearwater.

Greene is a member of the EPA’s Hudson River project Community Advisory Group. She attended an EPA-sponsored tour of processing the transportation site on Jan. 24.

Seeger, a legendary folk singer and supporter of environmental causes, is 86 now but still performing, Greene said. He is still closely involved with the Sloop Clearwater, the graceful sailing ship that goes up and down the Hudson encouraging river restoration and environmental awareness. It’s a floating classroom.

Greene said the Hudson was considered by many a “big sewer” back in the 1950s and 1960s.

Seeger sailed the Clearwater from New York to Washington to encourage passage of the first Clean Water Act back in the early 1970s.

“Now the pollution that is left is invisible,” Greene said. “It [the Hudson] looks so much better.”

But Greene, a staunch advocate for river cleanup, believes that the PCB problem can be removed and solved.

Early complaints

King, who provides federal oversight for the project and the processing and transportation site, said he has had very few complaints recently from neighbors of the site in Fort Edward.

In April, May and June of 2007 this wasn’t necessarily the case.

Sand and silt from the construction site was blowing around and the backup beeper noise from the large trucks was driving some neighbors crazy.

“We had sand storms here,” said Julie Wilson, who lives near the southern end of the site and operates a well-known perennial farm there.

“Until we complained they did nothing about it,” she said during a recent telephone interview.

The same with the backup beepers on the trucks.

Wilson said you couldn’t carry on a conversation when the trucks were working the site last spring and summer.

She complained to GE and the EPA. The truck backup beepers were replaced with special “quacker alarms” that are not as loud and intrusive. GE added more water trucks to keep dust down at the site.

Wilson is currently worried about a large earth berm being created along the southern boundary of the site, not far from her property.

If nothing is done to stabilize the earth, much of it coming from the canal widening work, she is afraid there will be more spring and summer dust storms.

Wilson would like GE to plan vegetation on the berm that would attract some of the birds that once frequented the rural site.

“The bird population is so diminished,” Wilson said. She and her late husband, Jim, were avid birdwatchers.

Wilson plans to contact the Audubon Society to get its recommendations on the type of vegetation to plant on the large earth berm.

Tax concerns

Fort Edward town officials are also concerned but not about the birds as much as the tax implications involved in assessing the site.

The 114 acres is owned by a subsidiary of D.A. Collins Companies of Mechanicville. GE leases the land from this limited liability company.

Fort Edward Town Councilman John Rieger asked for GE’s and EPA’s help in getting a proper appraisal of the property now that millions of dollars of work have been done on it.

“This is a major concern with this community,” Rieger said.

He said the tax issue will have a big impact on the town, Washington County and the local school district.

“We intend to meet all our obligations to the town,” said GE spokesman Mark Behan.

“We expect to meet all our tax obligations,” Behan said at a community advisory meeting Thursday in the Fort Edward firehouse.

Behan stressed the “net economic impact” of the construction at the huge processing and transportation facility.

Construction at the site started in April, 2007. D.A. Collins Companies is doing the civil construction work. An average of 130 employees, mostly union workers, are on the job each day, Behan said.

He said more than 85 local companies have been hired by GE and its contractors.

GE just hired The Shaw Group Inc., a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Baton Rouge, LA, to operate the processing facilities at the Fort Edward site.

The value of Shaw’s contract will be included in the company’s fiscal 2008 second quarter backlog but was not disclosed by GE or the Shaw Group.

The Shaw group pledged, in a news release about the contract, to “utilize local subcontractors and local manpower from Washington County and the Capital District Region in New York.”

The processing and transportation site includes five miles of railroad siding tracks that were installed this summer and fall.

The site will also include a large water treatment plant that will filter and treat the PCB contaminated water that is squeezed from the river sediment and return it to the barge canal.

The processed “filter cake” of PCB-contaminated sediment will be loaded onto totally enclosed gondola railroad cars and shipped to a permitted hazardous waste landfill in Andrews, Texas.