I've worked a number of years on the archaeology of the Hudson River,
Rogers Island is in, at Fort Edward, NY. Many of the small contracts
in archaeology have reflected some of the battles with General
Electric's responsibilities  (their corporate hdqrs. are in
Connecticut) with  the company's past contamination of the Upper
Hudson, one suit, fairly recently, is a $1 billion personal injury
suit filed in Fort Edward, over unregulated properties with
transformers stored or discarded on them leading to contamination by
PCB used in transformer oil. The Hudson River it a tidal estuary as
far as Albany, to the south of Fort Edward, and an ocean port since
the days of Fort Orange and the Dutch trade that started there,
Manhattan  and New Amsterdam (and perhaps Harlem) actually later
pursuits on the timeline.

The fish, especially the anadromous ones, such as "striped bass" near
the top of the "food chain" have been put on a "do not eat more than
once a month" and only over 24" (singer song writer Billy Joel was
arrested for a 23 1/2" once to draw attention to it, he builds boats
out there too) list, because of PCB uptake, dramatically affecting the
"sports fishing" industry of eastern Long Island, and its economy,
which replaced the once commercial fishing industry, now gone, as I
was told would happen when I first started out in "marine technology"
at the Suffolk County Community College.

Different designs for the cleanup have resulted in different impacts
proposed and archaeological potential to be determined, beginning in
1984 or so. I indirectly have been connected with these and a cleanup
of cadmium and nickel in the Foundry Cove in Cold Spring, NY. A number
of companies, Greenhouse Consultants, Inc., Grossman and Associates,
and TAMS, Inc. (now Earthtech, Inc.) have been involved in the
archaeology. Lastly for TAMS, I and another, were allowed to round up
all the cultural resource surveys at the New York SHPO office on
Peebles Island in Waterford, NY in a couple of days, (the summer of
2001 apparently) when another phase had been designed and the cultural
impacts needed to be further assessed in the Upper Hudson River, which
also contains  sources of hydroelectric power. Maybe you heard about
that day, the state capital of Albany was shut down over the heat,
afraid the system might "black out". It was so hot, one swing bridge
in Troy, NY could not close having expanded beyond the designed
tolerance.

The point is that area has been a hot button issue in New York State
since the early 1980's. Christine Todd Whitman, for example, the
former Governor of New Jersey, was the appointed director of the U.S.
EPA when it made its final determination to proceed with the clean-up.
And the last phase, of cultural resource assessment was, I was told,
actually requested by G.E.!

George J. Myers, Jr.
Once a NYPIRG employee