Support Water Quality
“How’s the water?” That is the single, most frequently asked question that Riverkeeper’s boat captain, John Lipscomb, hears when he is out patrolling the Hudson River. With the arrival of warm weather and the opening of the swimming and boating season it is no wonder people want to know how the water is.
Many of us at Riverkeeper remember when the Hudson, its fish and fauna, were under siege, victims of the massive, uncontrolled dumping of raw sewage and toxic waste.
The worst chapter in the long saga of pollution on the Hudson General Electric’s dumping of 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson which rendered the river a national superfund site is about to be rewritten. As of this month, GE’s PCB cleanup is finally underway!
It is a hard-won victory for Riverkeeper. We were the first to sound the alarm back in the early ‘70s and have worked tirelessly for more than a decade to get GE to remove the PCBs it dumped into the river, a crime that contaminated fish, destroyed property values and the local commercial fishing industry, and crippled the economy of Ft. Edward and Hudson Falls, which played host to the two capacitor plants that did all the damage.
For local residents, the clean-up will remove the scourge of living at the heart of a “Superfund” site, thus allowing the local economy to pick up again. For the rest of us around the globe, whose blood already contains some of GE’s PCBs, we will sleep better knowing that a major source of PCBs has been removed and stored safely.
And this is just one of the many success stories we have spearheaded in our ongoing work to protect and restore the Hudson. But none of these successes would have been possible without the support of dedicated members like you.
Every gift we receive allows us to pursue citizen complaints of illegal dumping, track down polluters and take the legal action needed to stop them. That’s why the Hudson River is a model for ecosystem restoration around the globe.
With the Hudson healthier than it’s been in decades and millions of people enjoying it again, we need system-wide water quality testing with published results available to the public.
At Riverkeeper, we believe that everyone who swims, kayaks or fishes in the Hudson River deserves to know, with as much certainty as possible, how clean and safe it is. Until now, testing of the Hudson has been intermittent and without scientific rigor.
With your support, Riverkeeper has established a new, higher standard of water quality monitoring and reporting on the Hudson.
In 2006, we teamed up with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University to launch the Swimmable River Campaign—the first study of its kind to regularly test the Hudson’s entire span, from south of New York Harbor to north of the dam at Troy, and to share the findings with the public within a matter of days.
Water Quality Testing
It costs $250,000 a year to keep this program going. Please make a gift today to keep this unique and important work funded!
Charitable contributions do not always produce immediate and visible results. But rest assured that every dollar you donate to Riverkeeper works for you. Already, we have tested 876 samples from 80 locations and published the findings online at Swimmable River.
Summer is coming and the Riverkeeper boat and our researchers are already out on the river, conducting the Hudson’s only estuary-wide water quality testing program. We need your continued support to sustain our work and to put the answer to “How’s the water?” in everyone’s hands.
We hope to hear from you soon. And we hope to see you and your family out on the river.
Sincerely,
Alex Matthiessen
Hudson Riverkeeper and President