Bayer paid PA $100 million for PCB damage. The Poconos got nothing.
In September 2023, Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection quietly announced that Bayer, the German pharmaceutical giant that bought Monsanto in 2018, would pay $100 million to settle claims that Monsanto contaminated 1,300 miles of Pennsylvania streams and 3,600 acres of lakes with PCBs over five decades. Every waterway in this region eventually connects to the Delaware, and eventually connects to NEPA, yet no one is talking about the effects PCBs are having there.
What Happened
Between 1929 and 1977, Monsanto produced roughly 99% of the polychlorinated biphenyls used in American industry. PCBs were the miracle chemical of the mid-20th century: fire-resistant, chemically stable, useful in everything from electrical transformers to caulking to carbonless copy paper. They were also, as internal Monsanto documents later revealed, known within the company to be toxic long before Congress banned them in 1979.
PCBs don’t break down. They persist in sediment, bioaccumulate up the food chain, and are linked to cancer, immune damage, developmental problems in children, and endocrine disruption. Roughly fifty years after the ban, they are still showing up in the tissue of fish, waterfowl, and humans across the Delaware River watershed.
Pennsylvania sued Monsanto, along with its corporate descendants Solutia and Pharmacia, in December 2020. Nearly three years later, the state announced the settlement. Bayer paid $99.5 million plus $500,000 in costs. As part of the deal, Bayer admitted no wrongdoing and maintained that Monsanto never manufactured or disposed of PCBs in Pennsylvania, a legal fiction that ignores where the products actually ended up.
Of the $100 million, $8 million was earmarked for “communities impacted by the spread of PCBs.” The remaining $92 million went to reimburse state agencies (DEP, DCNR, Fish and Boat Commission, Game Commission) for money already spent on decontamination.
So to sum it all up: the state got repaid. The people living downstream got a promise of $8 million to be distributed somewhere, somehow, to some communities. There is, nearly three years later, no public accounting of where that money has gone or who has received it.
The Rural Gap
Pull up Pennsylvania’s official fish consumption advisory. Look for PCBs. You’ll find warnings on the West Branch Brandywine Creek in Chester County, the West Branch Schuylkill River in Schuylkill County, the tidal Delaware south of Philadelphia.
Look for PCBs in Wayne County. Pike County. Monroe County. Lackawanna. Luzerne. Carbon. Bradford. Susquehanna. Wyoming. Sullivan. You won’t find them. Not in a single county north of the Philadelphia suburbs.
What you’ll find in the Poconos is mercury advisories: two meals a month on largemouth bass out of White Oak Pond in Wayne County, two meals a month on smallmouth bass from Tobyhanna Creek where it runs through Carbon and Monroe, two meals a month on largemouth from Stairway Pond in Pike County. The same pattern extends across NEPA. Every county shows mercury advisories on record. Not one shows PCBs.
This doesn’t mean PCBs aren’t here. The Delaware River Basin Commission does its most intensive PCB fish sampling in the tidal estuary near Philadelphia. Northern watersheds get a fraction of the same scrutiny: the upper Delaware in Wayne and Pike, the Lehigh in Carbon, the Susquehanna and its tributaries running through Lackawanna, Luzerne, Bradford, and Susquehanna Counties.
Absence of data becomes absence of problem. That’s how the map gets drawn.
Meanwhile, in January 2025, a Cornell University study conducted in partnership with the Pennsylvania Game Commission tested five species of commonly hunted waterfowl across the northeast Atlantic Flyway, including birds harvested in Pennsylvania. Every single bird sampled contained detectable levels of PCBs. Mallards, black ducks, and green-winged teal, the birds most commonly taken by NEPA hunters, carried higher contamination loads than Canada geese and wood ducks.
Pennsylvania has no waterfowl consumption advisory. None. Hunters in the Poconos are cleaning and eating birds that a peer-reviewed study just confirmed contain the same chemical Bayer paid $100 million to settle over. The state has issued zero public guidance.
The pattern is consistent: state warnings cluster where the voters cluster. Fish advisories map onto population density, and waterfowl advisories don’t exist at all. Dermal exposure gets almost no public health messaging, despite the fact that PCBs can be absorbed through the skin during prolonged contact with contaminated water, sediment, or soil. That last one matters if you’re a river guide or a kid who spends every summer in the Delaware.
Who’s Actually Exposed Here
The Poconos isn’t a place where people commute to the water. It’s a place people live on and eat what comes out of.
The outfitters. Kittatinny Canoes, Adventure Sports, Northeast Wilderness Experience. Guides who spend six months a year with their hands and feet in the Delaware. Occupational dermal exposure to PCB-contaminated water and sediment is the primary non-dietary exposure pathway identified in federal risk assessments. There is no OSHA guidance specifically warning river outfitters about PCB exposure in Pennsylvania waterways. There is no PA Department of Health outreach to the industry. These are workers, and no one has told them what they’re working in.
The hunt clubs. From the beaver ponds and Delaware bottomlands of Wayne and Pike, to the Susquehanna wetlands running through Bradford and Luzerne, waterfowl hunting is a serious tradition across NEPA. A serious duck hunter here may take and consume 30 to 50 birds a season. If the Cornell study’s findings hold (and there is no reason to think they don’t), every one of those birds carries a PCB load. Nobody has told these hunters anything.
The lake communities. Lake Wallenpaupack, Hemlock Farms, the Hideout, Wallenpaupack Lake Estates. Harveys Lake in Luzerne. Lake Scranton and the reservoirs in Lackawanna. Families who’ve owned camps for three generations, kids eating what dad catches, grandparents still fishing the same coves they fished in 1975. If the sediment carries PCBs (and downstream from these waters, it demonstrably does), the fish carry PCBs. No one here has been told otherwise.
The subsistence-adjacent anglers. Rural NEPA counties contain populations for whom a freezer full of fish and venison is not a hobby but a food strategy. These are the people the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry identifies as the highest-risk consumers of PCB-contaminated wildlife. They are also the people least likely to see a state-issued press release or a DEP advisory update.
The floodplain gardeners. PCBs in sediment migrate into floodplain soils. Vegetables grown in contaminated soil take up the chemical. If you have a garden within the flood zone of any Delaware, Lehigh, or Susquehanna tributary (and thousands of NEPA residents do), you have an exposure pathway the state has never quantified in this region.
The people most exposed to PCBs in Pennsylvania are not living in the counties where the state has documented the problem.
The Money
Back to that $8 million.
The Pennsylvania DEP has, to date, published no public breakdown of where the community fund has been distributed: no grant list, no named recipients, and no accounting of how much of the $8 million has actually left the state’s account in the nearly three years since the settlement was announced.
A Right-to-Know request would settle it. So would a phone call to DEP that they actually answered. What we have instead is the same pattern that governs almost every environmental settlement in Pennsylvania: money gets announced, credit gets taken, the money gets absorbed into state agency budgets, and the affected communities never see a line item.
The other $92 million? That went to state agencies to reimburse costs already incurred. It didn’t build a new water treatment facility in the Poconos, fund a PCB fish tissue study in Wayne or Susquehanna County, or pay for a waterfowl consumption advisory in Pike or Bradford. It reimbursed Harrisburg for money Harrisburg had already spent, largely in the Philadelphia region, where the PCB advisories actually exist.
The structural problem is not corruption. It’s calibration. The system is calibrated to notice the harm where the population is dense and the reporters are camped. It is not calibrated to notice, or to fund, or to warn, the rural counties whose waterways feed the very rivers being cleaned up downstream.
The Poconos got a share of the harm. The Poconos got zero share of the visible response.
That’s not oversight. That’s the design.
The Pattern
The PCB story is not unique. It’s a template.
Data centers get LERTA tax abatements to build across NEPA: Clifton and Covington Townships in Lackawanna, Jessup, Hanover Township in Luzerne, and locations in Monroe. Those subsidies flow out of rural communities to shareholders in cities Pennsylvania residents will never visit. Air quality monitoring in the region is essentially nonexistent outside a handful of state-operated stations clustered around population centers. Water testing for emerging contaminants (PFAS, 6PPD-Q, the next generation of chemicals we’ll be settling lawsuits over in twenty years) happens intensively in the urbanized Delaware watershed and sparsely, if at all, up here.
The rural counties bear the cost, absorb the pollution, host the infrastructure, and receive the least attention when it comes time to warn residents or fund remediation.
Call it whatever you want: neglect, resource allocation, political calculus. The pattern is real, and it applies to PCBs the same way it applies to LERTA abatements and fracking waste disposal, and the same way it will apply to whatever comes next.
The Poconos is a place people pay to visit and a place the state assumes will absorb whatever gets sent its way. The residents pay for the difference.
What Accountability Would Actually Look Like
Honest accountability isn’t complicated.
It would look like PCB fish tissue testing in NEPA waterways at the same intensity currently deployed in the tidal Delaware. A Pennsylvania waterfowl consumption advisory that reflects the Cornell study’s findings. A public accounting of where every dollar of the $8 million community fund has gone. Direct outreach (mail, radio, community meetings) to the outfitters, hunt clubs, and lake residents most exposed and least informed.
None of that requires new legislation or a new lawsuit. It just requires a state government that recognizes a person in Gouldsboro, Hawley, Honesdale, Tunkhannock, or Towanda deserves the same public health warning as a person in Chester County.
Bayer paid Pennsylvania $100 million to make this problem go away. It did not go away. It got moved off the front page.
The Poconos is downstream of every promise Harrisburg made about that settlement.
We are still waiting for the promise to arrive.
This piece was reported using publicly available sources including Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection press releases, Delaware River Basin Commission water quality reports, Cornell University waterfowl contaminant research, and federal ATSDR/EPA risk assessment documentation. A Right-to-Know request regarding disbursement of the $8 million community fund has been submitted to the PA DEP. Updates will follow.