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Archives
December 7, 2001
Dredging urged for
Champlain Canal
Albany -- State officials want
EPA to include canal in plan in order to ease navigation
By DINA
CAPPIELLO, Staff
writer
First published: Friday, December
7, 2001, http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyKey=72239&category=Y
To deal with a two-decade backlog in the deepening of the Champlain
Canal, the director of the state Canal Corp. said Thursday that the
agency would seek to expand navigational dredging in the federal plan to
remove PCBs from the upper Hudson River.
"We are going to reinforce in every way we can the need for
navigational dredging,'' said Robert A. Brooks, the director of the New
York State Canal Corp., which maintains the state's 300-mile-long canal
system.
Brooks said the Canal Corp. would push the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency during its 36-month design phase for PCB dredging to
dredge more of the river channel.
The EPA plan, which was passed to the state for a 15-day review on
Tuesday, already calls for the navigational dredging of 340,000 cubic
yards of sediment from the river in order to get its dredges to the most
tainted spots in the Hudson.
But Brooks, at a forum held by the State
Council on Waterways in downtown Albany Thursday, said that
the 40-mile-long Champlain Canal, a part of the upper Hudson River
between the Federal Dam at Troy and Fort Edward, needs 525,000 cubic
yards of dredging to remain navigable.
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President Tom Ryan opens the Navigational Dredging Forum in
Albany in December. Speakers called
attention to the urgent need to dredge the Champlain
Canal, which has not been dredged for 22 years. In some spots,
the depth is now only four to five feet.
Shown from the left is Canal Corporation Director
Robert A. Brooks, Pat Juliano of the Hudson-Mohawk Council of
Yacht Clubs, Assistant Attorney General
Eugene Martin Leff, and Capt. Rob Goldman of
the Troy Town Dock and Marina. Not pictured is panelist Capt.
Dan Wiles of Mid-Lakes Navigation, Co.,
Ltd. (Photo by Peter Fleischer) |
Representatives of river communities and business owners who rely on
the river told stories Thursday of running aground and a waterway
becoming increasingly shallow.
In the last year alone, traffic on the Champlain Canal dipped by 1
percent, while boating on the rest of the canal system increased 9
percent.
Business owners blame the decrease to the state's inability to dredge
the channel while the federal government was deciding what to do about
PCBs.
The Champlain Canal has not been regularly deepened since 1979,
largely because the state couldn't get permits while the EPA was
evaluating the river's cleanup and the high cost of deepening a polluted
waterway. In April, 17 of 18 projects the Canal Corp. applied for were
rejected because of the contamination.
While a yard of clean sediment typically costs $6 to dredge and
dispose, PCB-tainted sediment can raise the cost to $198 a cubic yard,
Brooks said.
It is unclear whether the EPA would include more navigational
dredging since the agency is concerned mainly with protecting health and
the environment.
Another possibility is that the federal government could sue General
Electric Co., which discharged the PCBs into the river, after the
cleanup for the damage its pollution did to navigation.
"The potential health threat has always been recognized,'' said
Eugene Martin-Leff, an attorney with the state attorney general's
office. "Not enough attention has been given to the navigational
impact of the contamination.'' |
