Hudson River PCB cleanup put off a year

The dredging of PCBs in the Hudson River won’t start until the spring of 2008 because unresolved legal and environmental issues can’t be decided in time to build a cleanup facility before spring 2007, Environmental Protection Agency officials said yesterday.

“We’re no longer looking at 2007,” EPA regional spokesman Leo Rosales said. “We think 2008 is a more realistic goal.”

The EPA began work on this cleanup effort in 1990, when a two-year study was supposed to figure out what General Electric Co. needed to do to lower the levels of polychlorinated biphenyls that showed up at unhealthy levels in the Hudson River.