Water beneath Watertown, Massachusetts preschool is contaminated

February 15, 2008 - Storyville Preschool is sitting on a disposal site.

The Union Street property has recently been classified as a Tier II contaminate site after an environmental agency discovered dry cleaning solvent in the property’s groundwater.

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PCB levels unacceptable in Massachusetts schoolyard

December 16, 2007 - A new round of testing has discovered PCBs in a schoolyard that has been at the center of controversy surrounding the ongoing environmental cleanup.

The U.S. Environmental Protection said soil samples taken from a corner of a field at Allendale Elementary School revealed unacceptable PCB levels 1 foot under the surface. Although the agency said the pollution poses no health risk to pupils, faculty or nearby residents, a contractor is expected to begin a cleanup tomorrow.

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Federal Study to Determine if Contaminated Superfund Sites are the Cause of Disease Cluster in Massachusetts

October 14, 2007 - FOR MORE than 20 years, health officials have known about a puzzling concentration of the neurodegenerative illness known as Lou Gehrig's disease in the southeastern Massachusetts town of Middleborough. In the coming months, a study financed by the federal government and conducted by state environmental health scientists might answer the riddle of whether toxic waste from two Superfund sites in the town has caused the rare and usually fatal disease, which normally strikes just two of 100,000 people.

The state is also working to create a registry to keep track of the disease. In collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Environmental Health Tracking Program, such registries can build up the databases that researchers need to track diseases with suspected environmental causes. Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton of New York and Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah have called for a $100 million increase in the CDC program's budget to help the tracking program establish itself nationwide. Congress should approve the funding.

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Residents fear contamination is the cause of disease cluster in Middleborough, MA

October 7, 2007 - The big news in this struggling southeastern Massachusetts community is a proposed $1 billion casino complex that many hope will bring financial salvation.

But for a small group of residents, the hope for economic revival is overshadowed by health concerns. They are awaiting a report later this year that could reveal whether the dozens of cases of Lou Gehrig’s disease centered around a downtown industrial area were caused by pollution.

The cases, which both state and federal officials call a disease cluster, are located within a mile of Everett Square — a densely settled neighborhood adjacent to the town’s onetime factory row. It is now home to two Superfund sites.

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Confronting contamination in Somerville, MA

September 30, 2007 - Residents of the neighborhood around the contaminated site at 50 Tufts St. want to hire a consultant, both as their advocate and to explain the complex results of soil and water tests there.

A small group of residents of the East Somerville community near the Capuano Early Childhood Center has been meeting to discuss the contamination, which is more extensive than originally believed and apparently seeped from a warehouse where the dry-cleaning chemical tetrachloroethylene was stored for years.

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Massachusetts homeowners near underground chemical plume get vapor systems

September 15, 2007 -

When friends visit Michelle Morrell's back yard, they inevitably ask about the vertical white pipe that runs along the rear wall of her house, from her basement to the roof.

Then Morrell has to repeat the story: her home may or may not sit above groundwater contaminated by the old Nyanza dye company up the road.

As a precaution, federal officials installed equipment in her basement to divert potentially harmful chemical vapors from her house.

"People start going, 'Where do you live?"' Morrell said.

The Pleasant Street home she owns with her husband, Edward, is one of 41 Ashland buildings where contractors for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency spent the summer installing vapor mitigation systems.

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Massachusetts bill seeks environmental disclosures in home sales

July 20, 2007 - DANVERS - Tim and Stacy Creamer moved into their Burley Street home on Oct. 28, 2005. A day later, fumes from an oil spill from years earlier forced them out. Two weeks ago, the house was demolished and crews began removing the contaminated soil.

Tim Creamer hired a real estate agent - a so-called buyer's broker - and a home inspector to look out for him. Yet he didn't find out about the oil leak until after he'd bought the house and the sellers had moved to California, he said.

"It's pretty obvious there were undisclosed problems," Creamer said.

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Massachusetts bill to require disclosure of environmental hazards to homebuyers

July 15, 2007 - Pamela Wooten says nobody told her when she bought a Charlton home in 2004 that it sat on a former junkyard needing some $150,000 of decontamination work.
“(The seller) didn’t say anything about the property’s condition and we didn’t think to ask,” said Wooten, who plans to testify this week in support of a state bill requiring sellers to disclose environmental hazards.
State Sen. Michael Morrissey (D-Quincy) and state Rep. Theodore Speliotis (D-Danvers) are sponsoring a measure to mandate disclosure of known environmental problems within a half-mile of homes. Sellers would have to either check government environmental databases themselves or hire private firms that specialize in such searches.

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Work begins on 40 Massachusetts homes to protect residents from contamination

June 8, 2007 - Ashland - Federal officials have started installing equipment in about 40 homes to protect residents from potentially harmful vapors caused by contamination from the long-closed Nyanza dye company.

These homes sit on or near a three-quarter-mile long plume of groundwater contaminated by the old Nyanza factory, which operated from 1917 to 1978, according to the EPA. Several commercial buildings also are affected by the pollution.

An EPA risk assessment announced last year found that people who breathe air contaminated by the vapors from Nyanza for 30 years may have an increased risk of developing cancer.

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Cause of water contamination that sickened more than 100 people in Spencer, MA found

May 2, 2007 - The water contamination in Spencer that sickened more than 100 people last week was caused by treatment plant workers who forgot to flip a switch when they left for the night, state environmental officials said Wednesday.

The lapse let 34 gallons of undiluted lye seep into the drinking water supply for this central Massachusetts town, prompting a two-day water ban that shut down businesses and disrupted the lives of thousands of residents.

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Chemical Vapors in Plant Faulted for Blast in Massachusetts

May 10, 2007 - DANVERS -- The plant that exploded in November repeatedly violated safety regulations for the handling of flammable chemicals, and local, state, and federal agencies with oversight of the facility failed to inspect it, federal investigators said yesterday.

A seven-month probe by the US Chemical Safety Board concluded that workers, in part because of residents' complaints about the noise, regularly shut off a required ventilation system designed to prevent the buildup of chemical vapors, which ignited on Nov. 22.

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Worried Sick in Massachusetts

April 22, 2007 - Steve DaRosa wonders: Could his hair loss and his father's cancer have been caused by the toxic ash that was for years dumped across the street and subsequently spread over portions of adjacent land to make way for the high school? What about his 16-year-old daughter, who spends her days at a school still tainted with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), lead and other hazardous materials, then returns home, where soil samples taken from their yard have revealed the same contamination?

Steve DaRosa wonders, and he's not alone.

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