PITTSFIELD — There’s good news for Bugs the Beaver and kin: Their habitat in Canoe Meadows Wildlife Sanctuary will not be torn apart by heavy machinery when the Housatonic River cleanup starts in earnest.

That was also good news for June Tooley, a city resident who has spent a good part of the past year and a half documenting the adventures of the beavers as they cut trees, build dams and swim within the 253 acres of Canoe Meadows.

This poster, created by June Tooley, shows Bugs the Beaver advocating for habitat at Canoe Meadows. She learned that work planned at the wildlife sanctuary would leave Bugs' home alone.

Tooley, a retired Berkshire Community College professor, arrived at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s office hours Tuesday at City Hall with many of the photo books she’s produced with her wildlife photography and observations. She also had a poster-sized photo with the message “Bugs says: Save our homes!”

Her concern was what will happen to beavers and other animals, birds and insects when the Rest of River project to remove PCBs in Reach 5A reaches Canoe Meadows.

But EPA staff had an answer that eased Tooley’s concern: What she and several others believed would be a total excavation of the sanctuary will, in fact, be confined to areas around West Pond, a Housatonic River backwater that has been contaminated with PCBs.

EPA is holding regular office hours in the Rest of River communities to help answer questions and concerns just like Tooley’s. She was among five residents who filed into Room 203, the infamously stuffy meeting room behind the City Council chambers, seeking information on how such a massive undertaking will interact with the natural world.

It was Tooley’s understanding that GE’s work at Canoe Meadows would involve much of or all of the sanctuary, digging up the wetlands where Bugs and family live. A post about the office hours, on the “No PCB Dumps Action Group” Facebook page, said Canoe Meadows “will largely be destroyed by excavation and backfill.”

That bothered Tooley, who has become an amateur naturalist and volunteer at Canoe Meadows. She finds its trails, wetlands, wooded areas and wildlife are “a magical place.”

It also troubled Colleen Campbell, who said being able to spend time in nature helped her cope with hard times.

“The wildlife there, the energy there, the trees there have saved my life over and over again,” Campbell said. I'm able to work in careers in nursing and mental health for the last nine years, and I truly believe my ability to get through what I went through in my life and help other people in the last 10 years of my life was through nature.”

Tooley asked questions about the plans, and whether contractors working for GE would find themselves having to make life-or-death decisions about sick or injured wildlife they encounter while working.

“Once the bulldozers go in, it can’t be undone,” she said.

Olivia Lopez, left, and Alex Carli-Dorsey of EPA on Tuesday look at June Tooley's collection of photo books from her visits to Canoe Meadows Wildlife Sanctuary in Pittsfield.

But Alex Carli-Dorsey, a project manager for EPA, and Tom Czelusniak of HDR, an engineering firm consulting EPA on the project, clarified that the work planned for Canoe Meadows will not encroach on the wetland areas in the southern end of the sanctuary, where Bugs lives.

On his laptop, Czelusniak pointed to a map on page 292 of the PDF version of the Reach 5A plan. It's Figure 8-1b, and it's a map showing what activities are planned for each property included in the Rest of River project.

The pink on the map, he said, showed where West Pond would be dredged and capped, and dark green where floodplain soils will be removed from an area frequently accessed by people. As he explained later, because the project is about reducing PCB exposure pathways, the removal standards reflect the likelihood of such exposure.

General Electric agreed to remove PCBs, which it used in the manufacture of power transformers in Pittsfield, in a consent decree approved by a federal judge in 2000. The chemical is a suspected cause of cancer and other health problems.

Czelusniak, a Lenox native who grew up near Woods Pond, said GE will be required to have biologists on site during the work.

“So that scenario you talk about of the bulldozer operator, like encountering something and not knowing what to do, GE is going to have a trained biologist available and on site,” he said. “There are a lot of assessments going on to understand what [workers] might run into, and then during the construction, plans for how to handle it and train personnel on site to handle it when the situation comes up.”

Carli-Dorsey said EPA would have staff and contractors on site as well.

“There will be multiple sets of eyes, and the community as well as a set of eyes,” he said. “So there'll be people watching. This is something that [project manager Josh Fontaine] says a lot — that you guys are like an extra set of eyes.”

That was welcome news to Tooley.

“This is like Christmas on my birthday,” she said upon learning that the scope of work would be a good deal less than she had been led to believe.

EPA staff said the interaction shows the value of holding office hours. The project documents are dense and full of scientific language, and being available to answer questions can help demystify those documents and make sure correct information is being shared, they said.

Along with Laurie Kropkowski and Dave Carrington, of Lee, Campbell asked the bigger questions EPA staff have faced at every public meeting since the cleanup plan was approved: Why are contaminated sediments being placed in a landfill in Lee near the Housatonic River, over a large groundwater aquifer, instead being treated on site or hauled away by rail?

That was the original plan for the Rest of River cleanup approved in 2016. General Electric successfully challenged that plan, and closed-door mediation resulted in the current plan, in which lower-level contaminated sediments will be disposed of in a lined landfill being built off Woodland Road in Lee.

Carrington said that’s “a temporary solution to a permanent problem. The dump will wear out before the PCBs do.”

Tom Czelusniak of HDR, an engineering firm consulting EPA, addresses concerns about work planned for Canoe Meadows as part of the Rest of River PCB removal project.

But Czelusniak said the point is risk reduction — putting PCBs in a controlled and monitored environment where they can be safely stored, rather than remaining in the wild where they work their way up the food chain to fish and waterfowl.

As for bioremediation, he said those technologies, while promising, have not shown they can be applied "at scale" on a project as large as the Rest of River cleanup.

EPA's next office hours will be held from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Aug. 5 at at Lenox Town Hall, and from 2 to 4 p.m. Sept. 22 at Lee Town Hall.