Heading to Texas, Hudson’s Toxic Mud Stirs Town (Eunice, NM)

There are not many towns in America that would welcome the 2.5 million cubic yards of toxic sludge being dredged from the bottom of the Hudson River in New York, but to hear Mayor Matt White tell it, Eunice is one of them. Storing waste nobody else wants means more jobs, Mr. White said, and the oil workers here are used to living with hazards. After all, there are several oil wells in the town itself. One of them is a block from City Hall. “We have deadly gases in the oil fields,” he said. “It’s more deadly than any of the stuff they are going to put in the ground out here.” From the edge of town, one can see huge berms at the landfill where General Electric plans to bury the dried sludge that is tainted with 1.3 million pounds of PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls. They flowed into the upper Hudson from two G. E. factories for three decades before they were banned, in 1977. In high doses, the chemicals have been shown to cause cancer in animals and are considered a probable carcinogen in people. The landfill lies five miles away in Texas, right across the state line, and belongs to Harold C. Simmons, a Dallas billionaire who was a large campaign contributor to former President George W. Bush and Gov. Rick Perry. Some environmentalists warn that the landfill is too near the giant Ogallala aquifer to store such hazardous materials, an assertion the company says is a lie. The federal Environmental Protection Agency’s office in Dallas and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality have sided with the company in the debate over the aquifer. But some confusion remains, and three state environmental officials have resigned in protest over granting the company permits for the radioactive waste. A little closer to Eunice, just inside New Mexico, an international consortium is building a uranium enrichment plant, with the blessing of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission...NYTimes