After carefully considering public comments, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has finalized its third periodic review of the cleanup of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the Upper Hudson River.
The EPA said that they looked at all the project data for water, fish and sediment collected between 2016-2021, and the fish data from 2022.
The EPA’s review concludes that the levels of PCBs in water and fish are going down overall, but more fish data is needed.
The agency needs at least eight years of data after dredging to draw science-based conclusions about the rate of recovery in the fish. The eighth year of fish data was collected in 2024.
EPA said that the results of that sampling will be available in 2025.
The EPA is set to release an addendum to the report when enough fish data is available, as soon as this year but no later than 2027.