No Exit

For six years, a Tiverton neighborhood has been paralyzed. Since toxic soil was unearthed, hundreds of residents are not allowed to dig on their properties, they’re unable to move and the cleanup is stymied by legal battles.

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Purgatory is a neighborhood in Tiverton.

Not the Tiverton of summer homes and Bloody Marys aboard a yacht in the Sakonnet River but the side of town just south of the Fall River line, near Sip n’ Dip Donuts and Buddy’s Place diner. This neighborhood of proud ranch houses entered limbo in August 2002, after sewer construction crews unearthed cobalt blue soil beneath Bay Street. The soil was laced with cyanide and other hazardous materials that health officials term “probable carcinogens.” After further investigation, residents learned that their homes were constructed on fill contaminated with waste from a coal gasification plant; according to soil tests, at least eighty-five properties in a fifty-acre swatch in North Tiverton are polluted with arsenic, cyanide, lead and mercury. Since that toxic discovery, property owners’ lives have stagnated. They could use a summer home to escape to—and something stronger than a Bloody Mary.

Five years ago, the town issued a moratorium against digging on 130 properties (only eighty-five of those have been tested, but the remaining ones are thought to be contaminated as well), and at least 300 residents officially entered limbo. There is a lengthy list of what they can’t do, a longer list of what they must do differently, and no one knows when the issue will be resolved. They feel trapped. No one wants to buy their houses, and banks won’t loan them the funds to refinance. Meanwhile, there are a lot of behavioral and health disorders going around the neighborhood.

A dozen homeowners are gathered around a table at the Tiverton Community Center as the sun surrenders to dusk. ENACT, the Environmental Neighborhood Awareness Committee of Tiverton, meets biweekly to disseminate information about the contamination. The group also fundraises and produces stickers that read: “Bay Street Neighborhood: Total Clean-Up, NOT Total Denial.”

In a deposition last year, Joseph “Jose” Souza testified that he worked on the crew that cleaned out coal gasification waste at the Fall River Gas Company and helped dump the material in Tiverton during the 1940s. No one knows when the dumping began or when it ended; estimates have ranged from the early 1900s until the 1960s. Fall River Gas was later acquired by the Texas-based Southern Union, and the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) determined that Southern Union was responsible for cleaning up the contamination. In September 2006, the DEM levied a $1,000 a day fine against Southern Union for failing to submit remediation plans. The company appealed the notice of violation; an administrative hearing on the appeal is pending. Three years ago, more than ninety families filed four separate civil suits against Southern Union seeking unspecified damages. That legal battle is inclined to limp along for years.

“For several years, my administration has worked to force Southern Union to clean up the pollution in Tiverton,” Governor Donald Carcieri has said. “Unfortunately, Southern Union has done everything in its power to avoid fulfilling the company’s responsibilities, including tying the case up in a hugely expensive and seemingly endless court process. In the meantime, the people of Tiverton have been made to suffer.”

Bay Street is blue-collar country. Homeowners dirty their hands instead of paying others to work on their property, so they were the ones breathing and touching toxic soil. Some suspect their zip code makes them negligible. “We still haven’t convinced people we’re worth fixing,” Gary Rose says, his voice rising at the ENACT meeting.

Because of the contamination, Rose has forgone applying for more lucrative positions at his company that would require relocating. “If this happened in Newport or if it were a toxic spill in Narragansett Bay,” he adds, “politicians would be tripping over each other to get it cleaned up and get on Channel 10 news.”

“The process should be first you fix the problem and make it safe,” adds ENACT President Gail Corvello. “Then you go after whoever you have to for the money. But in Rhode Island that process is reversed. And Southern Union’s strategy is halt, hinder and delay.”

For thirteen years, Corvello, fifty-one, has operated Cozy Corner daycare out of her Bay Street home a half-mile from the gas plant. The business is licensed for eight children; before the hazardous waste was uncovered, she always had a wait list. “When people called to inquire about the day care, I always asked if they knew about the contamination,” Corvello says, smoothing her sensibly short salt-and-pepper hair. “I understood why people didn’t call back; I wouldn’t bring my daughter here.

“It pains me terribly that children may have been affected when their bodies are forming,” she adds. “I wanted everything to be healthy for them. I even had reverse osmosis filters installed on our taps and bought expensive stainless steel bottles so the kids wouldn’t drink out of plastic bottles.” She and the children grew broccoli, spinach, carrots, kale, pumpkin and zucchini in the yard. Corvello believed they were eating the fruits of an organic garden, but high-mineral vegetables such as spinach and kale are likely to absorb heavy metals.