The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

5. Dredge Report

Suddenly GE (GE) is digging this pollution-control thing.

The industrial giant agreed Thursday to dredge the upper Hudson River, the New York waterway long contaminated with toxic waste from a pair of old GE plants. GE dumped some 1.3 million pounds of PCBs -- a viscous liquid coolant and probable cancer risk used in transformers -- into the river from plants in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls, N.Y., before the government banned the substance in 1977.

General Electric said the agreement with the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency underscores its "commitment to cooperate with the EPA, the state of New York and other stakeholders," Bloomberg reported.

Of course, the Fairfield, Conn., company has taken a winding path in finding that commitment. GE vehemently opposed dredging for more than 20 years until an EPA order mandated it. Indeed, GE spent years funding science aimed at showing the river should be left to its own devices. "Ironically, it is possible that dredging the river sediments would actually preserve PCBs and extend their lifetime by interfering with this natural bacterial activity already under way," GE scientist Daniel A. Abramowicz noted in a press release headlined "GE Accelerates PCB Biodegradation" and issued 16 years ago this month.

Of course, environmentalists aren't exactly doing somersaults, considering that the first phase of the cleanup calls for removal of 10% of PCBs starting in 2007. "It seems to be a tremendous victory for GE at the expense of public health, the Hudson River and its communities," Christian Ballantyne of the Sierra Club told Bloomberg. "It's like an oncologist going in and only taking out 10% of a tumor."

Well, you'd hate to interrupt that "natural bacterial activity."

Dumb-o-Meter score: 72. Who ever doubted GE's commitment to cooperating with the EPA, anyhow?

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