Fairhaven's history has been intimately tied to Atlas Tack for more than a century. Henry Huttleston Rogers, a well-known robber baron who made millions as a vice president of Standard Oil, bought Atlas Tack and brought it to Fairhaven in 1901. Town history celebrates the factory as a gift. Rogers grew up in Fairhaven; he paved Fairhaven's roads and built its schools, the library and the impressive Unitarian church, a Gothic landmark. Atlas Tack, the theory goes, was built to ensure that the members of Rogers' beloved community would always have a place to work.

The owners who took over Atlas Tack after Rogers died in 1909 stayed true to his intentions. Even after Great Northern Industries bought Atlas Tack in the mid-'60s, local residents could usually find work producing shoe eyelets and other metal at the factory. Sometime in the '40s, wastewater laced with chemicals from electroplating, acid-washing, painting and other activities began to be discharged into a lagoon down by the marsh. There was occasional chatter about the greenish-yellow liquid; but throughout the '60s and early '70s, even as public knowledge of toxins began to rise, no one found the courage to ask questions about the sludge.

"The town used to accept it because a lot of people worked there," says Irving Macomber, 74, a Fairhaven resident since birth who remembers playing near the lagoon in the '50s. "They didn't want to say anything because they didn't want to lose their jobs."

State officials, however, had a hard time staying silent. In the '70s, for example, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Quality Engineering (DEQE) tried to enforce a law mandating that polluted water be treated before being dumped. Great Northern Industries, responsible for the routine discharge at Atlas Tack of wastewater containing cyanide, arsenic, cadmium and other poisonous heavy metals, simply stonewalled the effort.

"They've been very difficult from day one," says Paul Craffey, the agency's (now called the Department of Environmental Protection) chief project manager for Superfund sites in southern Massachusetts. "The national pollution elimination system requires pre-treatment of wastewater before putting it into the town sewer, but they fought that for years. They had been putting untreated water -- throughout the '60s and '70s -- into the lagoon and it took them a long time to comply."

Four calls to Great Northern Industries seeking comment on the company's business practices were not returned. The company's former lawyer, Kevin O'Connor, also refused to comment and two of the company's environmental consultants failed to respond as well.

Craffey, in his roles as a state and EPA official, has been working with and studying Atlas Tack for more than a decade. He says that Great Northern finally started following the pre-treatment rules in the late '70s. But by this time, most of the serious damage had been done. The untreated wastewater had already been discharged from troughs in the buildings, through leaky pipes, out into the unlined lagoon. And according to an Oct. 19, 1982, state report that was sent to Atlas Tack, laboratory analysis of sludge samples in the area "indicate that the contents of the Atlas Tack lagoon ... exhibit a potential harm to the environment resulting from improper storage and disposal." Animals and people -- anyone and anything that comes into contact with the area, state officials argued -- would run an increased risk of health problems, cancer included.

Other documents from the early '80s -- made public through court records -- show that state officials didn't just warn Atlas Tack of the site's dangers; they also demanded that the company clean up the mess. The company, however, did nothing. Atlas Tack failed to respond to a series of notices in 1982 and 1983, including one showing that groundwater was potentially being poisoned by the lagoon.

In 1984, the state decided to sue Atlas Tack for violations of Massachusetts' pollution laws. R.L. Lewis, president of Atlas Tack at the time, initially agreed to clean up the area. But after signing a consent decree, the company quickly "fell behind in its compliance" according to a story in the March 2000 edition of White Collar Crime Reporter. So the state moved in, assuming control of the area in 1985, and selecting a contractor who finished cleaning up the lagoon.

The state billed Atlas Tack for the work, but the company refused to pay. Claiming that the cleanup costs were too high, Atlas Tack instead sued the state, the contractor and even its own insurer, who refused to pay for the cleanup because it had never been notified of the initial settlement. Atlas lost every case; Craffey says the lagoon cleanup cost the state between $500,000 and $1 million. Atlas Tack, at the behest of court officials, eventually paid most of the bill.

But the state's legal costs were never recouped and Atlas Tack has paid far less than it owes. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done. The dilapidated buildings, an identified fire hazard, need to be demolished; the land below and around them remains dangerously poisoned to this day. More than 200 EPA soil samples taken over the past decade show that about half of the marsh area is contaminated with dangerous levels of metals and cyanide, "causing an ecologic risk to the wildlife," according to EPA reports. Everyone who comes into contact with the area -- the kids who visit the site for kicks, scavengers Estrella has seen stealing bricks, visitors who eat shellfish pulled from the area -- is being exposed to toxic chemicals. Atlas Tack, though made aware of these dangers, refuses to offer assistance.

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