Wasted

To residents of a working-class Lowell neighborhood, having a toxic waste site in their back yard was bad enough. When a trash-handling plant tried to move in next door, they said it was time to stop dumping on their community.

by Ben Geman

In Ayers City, a blue-collar stretch of tightly packed houses south of downtown Lowell, kids once played a game unique to the neighborhood. They called it "Light the Ground on Fire," and it involved tossing matches onto a strip of industrial Tanner Street to see if it would ignite, remembers Norine Brodeur, who grew up and raised her children in Ayers City. "The kids would like to watch the fire dance and the dirt burn," she recalls now, nearly 20 years later. "It would burn in different colors."

Today, it's clear why. Tanner Street was once home to the Silresim Chemical Corporation, which recycled solvents from other firms until it went bankrupt in the late 1970s, abandoning waste drums just hundreds of feet from nearby houses. Chemicals seeped into the ground, contaminating it so badly that today the parcel is on the US Environmental Protection Agency's list of "priority" Superfund sites -- it's undergoing a $41 million cleanup that will continue for decades. "You could call this a chemical trespass," says David Ozonoff, chair of Boston University's Department of Environmental Health, who led a 1983 study that found elevated rates of respiratory problems, bowel dysfunction, and other ailments in Ayers City. "Or a chemical mugging."

The drums are gone now, and the land is capped with clay and stone while specialists from the Army Corps of Engineers, working behind KEEP OUT signs and barbed wire, slowly clean the Silresim site. But two decades after Silresim was abandoned, residents have woven its impact on Ayers City into a fight against what they call a new threat to their neighborhood. In a pending lawsuit, a New Hampshire company is asking Lowell Superior Court to overturn the Lowell Board of Health's rejection of its bid to build a trash-transfer plant on the lot next to the Silresim site. The board's March 1998 decision followed months of hearings in which residents' groups fought the plan after state environmental officials gave it the green light. Ultimately, the health board found several reasons to reject Merrimack Valley Processing's bid to use Tanner Street for its plant, which if built would handle 500 tons of trash per day. Increased truck traffic. Noise. Possible air pollution.

But one reason stood out. Citing the damage Silresim had already done to the area, the board called the case a matter of "environmental justice" -- a term academics and activists have used for about a decade to argue that poor and minority neighborhoods shouldn't be stuck with the nation's waste-handling facilities and similar burdens simply because they lack political muscle. "The natural inclination is to put facilities like this in neighborhoods that have difficulty defending themselves against this kind of project, and where others have already gone," says Evan Slavitt, the board's attorney.

Changing the law When the Lowell Board of Health blocked the siting of a trash-transfer station next to a Superfund chemical-waste site on the city's south side last year, it relied on a creative interpretation of state environmental law. Members said the issue was one of "environmental justice," calling it unfair to increase the stress on neighborhoods already coping with environmental burdens. It's not certain whether the board's decision will hold; the company seeking to build the plant has appealed the decision in Lowell Superior Court. But the case could spur an important change in state environmental codes -- one that would help low-income and minority communities, which often face more than their share of hazards, to avoid new risks. As part of its work with residents opposing the trash-transfer station, the Boston-based nonprofit group Alternatives for Communities and Environment (ACE) began lobbying state officials last fall to incorporate environmental-justice concerns into Massachusetts policy. Because the concept is not part of the state's current rules, the Lowell Board of Health addressed environmental injustice as one of the broadly defined "nuisances" that can warrant rejection of a plant. Now, the Lowell fight has led the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to mull over revising the criteria for siting new waste-handling plants so as to consider the "cumulative burden" existing industries have placed on a neighborhood. The state could offer that change for public comment within the next two weeks, according to James Doucett, the DEP's deputy director of business compliance. Doucett says the proposed rules would allow regulators to consider the burdens placed on a neighborhood by various types of contamination -- i.e., water pollution from one industry combined with air pollution from another. That's not easy, though -- Doucett notes that establishing "cumulative burden" is an inexact science. "We know how to add up air pollutants and water contaminants," he says, "but when you add the air and water to someone's individual health, it is quite complicated." Doucett stresses that the state's plans are preliminary and that public hearings and comments will be considered once any plans are floated. What's obvious, though, is that the Lowell residents' fight could resonate well beyond their city. Says ACE lawyer John Rumpler: "It's a crucial first step toward integrating the idea of environmental justice into DEP public policy."

The fight in Lowell could help change that decades-old trend. It's all but unheard-of for local governments to factor environmental justice into urban planning, yet the Lowell health board's action demonstrates a tool for them to do so: boards of health, often staffed only part-time, nonetheless wield enormous power in Massachusetts, acting as a check on regulations that allow clusters of potentially unhealthy industrial uses near residential areas. At a time when the film A Civil Action is dramatizing the damage polluters inflict on their neighbors, the Lowell fight tests the ability of cities and residents to shake off new risks. "It's very courageous of the board of health to use that [environmental justice] criteria. . . . It's not a conventional edict of public-health policy," says Ken Geiser, a professor of work environment at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell's Toxic Use Reduction Institute.

It took some creativity for Slavitt and the board to work the concept into the official deliberations. State law allows health boards to examine several factors when deciding whether a site is suitable for a waste-handling plant. Environmental justice is not among them, yet the concept of "nuisance" is. Solution? The board called environmental justice a "nuisance" issue. "It's precedent-setting in Massachusetts. . . . This [sets] a substantial precedent that's consistent with modern thinking on how you understand environmental issues," Slavitt says of the board's decision. Lowell policy, in other words, vaulted beyond state statutes on environmental justice. Indeed, the board called the absence of that concept from the list of relevant criteria a "regrettable omission."

Memories of what Ozonoff calls the "chemical mugging" of Ayers City have never been far from the movement against the trash-transfer facility. For Ayers City residents like Carol McCarthy, it's been a very personal struggle -- not just to improve Lowell's image, but to keep their small neighborhood free of new burdens. "They [Merrimack] thought we were poor, stupid people who would welcome them with open arms, not fight this, not even know how to start," says McCarthy, co-chair of the Sacred Heart Neighborhood Improvement Group, one of more than 20 organizations that opposed the plan before the board of health. "It has cost thousands and thousands for them to fight us. Now, we are still fighting and they are still spending."

The preschool teacher offers many reasons why Ayers City is the wrong site for the trash-handling plant. And while residents would undoubtedly have opposed the plan even if Silresim had never existed, McCarthy says the protest stems partly from Tanner Street's history: "What we are saying is that the neighborhood can't take it, the street can't take it." Quoted in 1997 in the Lowell Sun, McCarthy complained of "dumping" on Tanner Street. "Please leave us alone and let us recover from Silresim," she said after the Department of Environmental Protection declared the Tanner Street site suitable for the plant.

"I think the intensity of their outrage, and the feeling of insult being added to injury, was heightened by the previous burdens borne by the neighborhood, most notably Silresim -- no doubt about that," says John Rumpler, an attorney with Boston-based Alternatives for Communities and Environment, which is representing a coalition of neighborhood groups that have intervened in the court case in an effort to uphold the decision.

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The Silresim "burden" dates back to 1971, when the company (its odd name is the last name of its owner spelled backward) began operations on Tanner Street. For seven years, Silresim reprocessed and stored industrial waste from other firms -- glue, pesticides, and other compounds with far longer names.

Eventually, after being cited for several violations in the mid-1970s, the company fell behind in its reprocessing work; it ceased operations and declared bankruptcy in 1977. The waste storage drums remained, corroded and leaking -- about 30,000 of them, soaking the ground. Years after the site was abandoned, community organizers -- including Cambridge environmentalist and recent congressional candidate John O'Connor -- began pushing for the site's cleanup and calling attention to reports of illness in Ayers City. Norine Brodeur, who served as president of Lowell Fair Share and founded an Ayers City chapter, recalls that her children were often ill with persistent colds and sore throats, problems her neighbors were found to share. Fair Share, in a survey of neighborhood residents, found a variety of health problems, including skin rashes, headaches, and respiratory infections. Many local women reported miscarriages and stillbirths, according to a state report that cites the Fair Share survey. (According to a 1995 state assessment of the site, variables such as workplace hazards and smoking levels were not factored into the survey.) Brodeur, who later founded the Greater Lowell Environmental Campaign, miscarried twice, misfortunes she believes were linked to Silresim. "We wanted to think we were safe in our own back yards," says Brodeur, who now lives in Florida. "And we were not."

Ayers City residents' belief that chemicals once stored at the site were causing illness was backed up in the 1983 clinical study led by Ozonoff, which found elevated rates of respiratory problems and bowel dysfunction. The study also showed that proximity to the site was associated with easy bruising or bleeding, chest pains, and headaches. It's clear that even after the barrels were removed, chemicals from Silresim saturated the ground. Ozonoff recalls a chemical stench in the air around the time the study was conducted, and his wife complained of her nose burning; "it was obvious there were chemicals all over the ground" at the abandoned site, he says. In 1983, after intense lobbying, the site was placed on the EPA's National Priorities List and capped to limit exposure.

According to an article by Ozonoff that appeared in a scientific journal in 1987, several chemicals -- including the compound trichloroethylene, which is linked to leukemia --were stored at the site and were detected in the air nearby. Trichloroethylene is the same compound found in the polluted Woburn wells at issue in the case that inspired A Civil Action. A public-health assessment performed by the state for the federal government in 1995 reports a "significant" elevation of leukemia among women for the period 1982-1989 in the census tract containing Silresim. It's probably impossible to tell whether exposure in Ayers City will lead to future illnesses -- Ozonoff notes the long latency period for many cancers and the inherent difficulties of trying to study cancer in small populations. "What do I think will happen to people in the long term? It's my belief, absent any evidence, and my hope that nothing happens," he says. "But they were placed at an unnecessary risk."

Brodeur, too, worries about the long-term consequences of residents' proximity to Silresim -- including her own. Her home in Ayers City was among the closest to the site. The children she says had a hard time fending off sickness while growing up in Ayers City are healthy now, but she looks warily toward the future. "You always worry," says Brodeur, 46. "I worry they may get sick themselves or not have healthy children." She sees progress -- albeit delayed -- in the Lowell Board of Health's ruling that Ayers City has, in effect, been through enough. "Cities need to learn to grow and prosper in a way that the environment can be preserved," she says. "It seems to be sitting in [city officials'] minds now. I hope so. It sounds like they understand that what they do in one year can affect them for the next 100."

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Would this fight be necessary in Wellesley? "In my opinion, no way," says John Rumpler. In the Alternatives for Communities and Environment (ACE) office in Roxbury's Dudley Square, the 33-year-old attorney sits before a mass of maps and briefings that he believes make a good case for upholding the health board's decision. Rumpler and the neighborhood groups contend that emissions from the waste-handling plant would push the level of particulate matter in the surrounding neighborhood above safe limits. It's roughly the same case that ACE and activists made when opposing an asphalt plant proposed for the Roxbury/Dorchester border, arguing that it would worsen existing levels of respiratory trouble in surrounding neighborhoods.

In this case, Rumpler says there's proof, in black and white, that the fight over the trash-transfer site is a matter of environmental justice. He points to the Environmental Notification Form that Merrimack Valley Processing filed for the project with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, which gave the company the go-ahead on the Tanner Street site before the Lowell Board of Health said no. "If you look at the application by Merrimack Valley, and you look at where they investigated potential sites before they settled on this one, you will not find affluent communities at all," he says. "You will find they settled on Worcester and Lowell."

Gerald Moore, attorney for Merrimack Valley, calls Rumpler's analysis flawed. "That's a misunderstanding of supply and demand," Moore says. "You don't put 500-ton-per-day stations in [small] towns like Carlisle, because the waste stream isn't there."

A trash-transfer station is "a sensible and clean environmental way to deal with a problem that exists locally and will always be there locally," he adds. "The trash fairy doesn't come and take your garbage away at night."

And Merrimack Valley Processing, of course, doesn't share the view that a trash-transfer station on Tanner Street is bad for the environment. Using its own expert witnesses before the board of health -- and noting that it won the go-ahead to use the site from state environmental officials -- the firm said concerns over the plant's impact on the surrounding neighborhood were unfounded. Merrimack Valley refutes the testimony of the citizen groups' witnesses on several points, notably on the plant's impact on local air quality. In its appeal, the company contends that the board made a maverick decision, thwarting state laws governing how boards of health should determine the suitability of proposed sites. "You have people saying we can't have this heavy industry on Tanner Street because it is environmentally incorrect to have heavy industry in heavy industrial zones," Moore says. "Why zone land as industrial when you don't want industry there?"

Outside of court briefings, the company has focused more on the plant's economic than its environmental impact, arguing that the facility would add to the struggling city's tax base and employment rolls while cutting its trash budget. On the day of the board's March 4, 1998, decision, the company bought a full-page advertisement in the Lowell Sun. IN THE LAST 10 YEARS, THIS IS WHAT'S HAPPENED TO LOWELL'S INDUSTRIAL TAX BASE, read the text above a picture of a burly man representing 1988, when the tax base was $338 million. Standing next to the Stallone-esque figure is a shorter, twiggy Woody Allen look-alike, representing the shrunken 1998 tax base of $182 million. The paper's ownership didn't need convincing, supporting the proposed plant on the editorial page.

The company has a point about economic development being needed in Lowell. Textile mills on the Merrimack River once fueled a thriving economy, but the mills are gone. Now, the city of about 100,000 has a per capita income in the state's bottom 10 percent, according to the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development. Still, the plant's opponents aren't convinced that the transfer station makes even economic sense. Lowell resident Mark Cote, for example, argues that the city needs to draw visitors, not trash. To that end, it has turned two of the old mills into textile museums and built stadiums for minor-league sports franchises. "The city as a whole is trying desperately to change its image," says Cote, whose organization, Lowell Citizens for Environmental Justice, opposes the plant. "This would not help what we are working for with the museums and the national park. We're building a tourist industry. We have a baseball team, a hockey team."

Indeed, even from an environmental standpoint the fight over the trash-transfer station is not about stopping development. Opponents of the facility know Tanner Street will never be mistaken for Yosemite National Park. Carol McCarthy says she hopes less-damaging businesses will come to Tanner Street -- one possibility, she muses, is a collection of used-car lots. "We are not against business," says McCarthy, photos of the old waste drums spread out on her dining-room table. "We are against the businesses they are trying to put there."

The old pictures belie the notion that opposition to the transfer facility is just another case of "not in my back yard." Ayers City, plainly, has had plenty in its back yard. Environmental justice, John Rumpler says, is largely about looking at the "cumulative impact" of industries on neighborhoods like Ayers City. A waste-handling plant, in and of itself, may not overburden a neighborhood. But when it comes on top of a Superfund site, a metals-recycling facility, and other industries on Tanner Street, it's a different animal.

For McCarthy, the concept of environmental justice resonates. Walking through Ayers City on a recent night, not far from the fence marking Silresim and the lot where Merrimack Valley Processing wants to build, McCarthy says the history of contamination hasn't diminished her fondness for the area. "It's a cute neighborhood," she says. "I don't want to be forced to move." Forcing McCarthy to do anything probably isn't easy -- the 46-year-old seems so tough as to be unbothered by the winter chill, wearing no hat or scarf with her jeans and Toronto Blue Jays coat (representing her son's Babe Ruth League team). Still, she says that if the court overturns the board's decision, she may consider leaving Ayers City. "If they keep dumping stuff like this," she says, "I may say to my husband, 'That's it.'"

Ben Geman can be reached at bgeman[a]phx.com.