Rhode Island Neighborhood Trapped by Pollution

June 19, 2007 - TIVERTON — Imagine living in a place where you can’t plant a flower, dig a garden, sell your house or let your children play outside, where hidden toxins darken the soil and a summer breeze carries the fear of airborne particles infiltrating your lungs.

This is Gail Corvello’s nightmare, and it unfolds every day in a neighborhood that looks like any other to an outsider, with tidy homes and lawns sloping down to Mount Hope Bay.

Yesterday morning, Corvello stood outside her Bay Street house, which doubles as a daycare center, and ushered four young children, ages 2 through 5, outside into the brilliant sunshine.

It was nearly five years ago that construction crews installing a sewer line on Bay Street dug up the telltale blue soil that would change the lives of Corvello and some 250 people in this working-class slice of North Tiverton, just beyond the Fall River line.

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