With family in town, Lee Coleman intended to take Friday off. When he learned that the Hudson River dredging would finally start that day, he canned the day off.

Lee, who's stationed in our Saratoga Springs office, has covered this story for more than 30 years. Here's some of his own PCB history, written at my request:

I was a young, raw reporter for the Post-Star in Glens Falls back in the
early 1970s when I first started writing about PCBs. An old Niagara Mohawk
Power Corp. dam, located on the Hudson just below Fort Edward, was removed
in 1973. This combined with high spring runoff the next year or two drove
sediment trapped behind the dam downriver, in some cases plugging
navigation lanes. The sediment was full of PCB, polychlorinated biphenyls,
a combination of chemicals General Electric used in the manufacture of
capacitors. In 1974 or 1975 we learned that the PCBs were long-lived and
harmful to animals and humans. They were getting into the fish in the
Hudson, deforming them, and taking a toll on sport and commercial fishing,
a Sports Illustrated story reported.

I remember going to GE's Fort Edward plant about this time to discuss PCBs
with plant officials. One official handed me a small vial of PCBs. The
clear liquid in the vial was unusually heavy. I was shocked how heavy it
was. But it was clear, the official said.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation was studying the
situation and finally sued GE for discharging the chemicals into the
river. A $7 million settlement was reached in 1976. Some of this money
went to studying ways to remove the PCBs from the river.

The state proposed two different dredging projects in the late 1970s and
early-to-mid 1980s. I came to the Daily Gazette in 1981 and continued to
cover these many, many meetings and hearings for the Schenectady paper.
Both of these cleanup projects included a large hazardous waste (PCBs)
landfill along the upper Hudson River near Fort Edward. Plans for this
landfill incensed local residents. Why would anyone ever locate a
hazardous waste landfill on what is farmland, they argued.

An organization called CEASE (Citizen Environmentalists Against Sludge
Encapsulation) formed with hundreds of angry residents urging the state
not to dump PCBs in their backyard. Tim Havens, the owner of a farm and
garden equipment business near Hudson Falls, has been involved in that
group for 30 years. He remains a major opponent of dredging the Hudson to
remove PCBs.

Both of the state's dredge projects were rejected after years of planning
and hearings and hazardous waste dump siting board meetings. The opponents
were successful.

But then the Environmental Protection Agency became involved. In 1984 the
EPA took a "no action" position on removal of the PCBs. But later in the
1980s and early 1990s, some 200 miles of the Hudson River were declared a
federal Superfund site. In 1990 meetings and hearing started to discuss a
way of removing the toxic PCBs, which had dispersed into "hot spots"
between Fort Edward and Troy, from the upper Hudson. The final order to GE
from the EPA to pay for the dredge project came in 2002.
I must have 200 pounds of PCB-related documents here at the Gazette's
Saratoga Springs bureau. Some of the material came from General Electric's
massive public relations campaign in 2000 to convince the public that the
PCBs in the Hudson were being buried and were no longer a problem. The
Hudson was cleaning itself, GE said.

EPA studies and computer modeling showed otherwise. The PCBs continued to
be picked up in river water and made their way down the Hudson, over the
Troy dam, and into the lower part of the river, including striped bass
fisheries, as they had for many years.

Catch and release fishing is the only fishing allowed in the upper Hudson
and strict guidelines about eating any Hudson River fish in the lower
river remain in effect.

It will be wonderful to see the dredging start. I am an older reporter
now. Only time will tell how effective it will be. The first phase this
summer and fall is a test project, much smaller than a second phase that
would start after the EPA and GE study how the first phase worked. The
two-phases could take between six and ten years to complete. The cost will
easily jump from the projected $780 million to over one billion, in my
opinion. That the project has come this far and that it will actually
happen is amazing to me.