Saturday, Jul 5, 2008
On the rare occasions that the company did what it was told -- for instance, when Atlas Tack put up the fence that's now fallen down -- the solutions rarely lasted. Calls to the company's Boston office are greeted with a mysterious "hello" rather than identification of the company, and messages are rarely, if ever, returned. "They want to be as inconspicuous and unknown as possible," says Jeffrey Osuch, executive secretary for the town of Fairhaven, a city employee since 1988. "They want to avoid being held responsible for the site."
Atlas Tack may also want to avoid the possibility of a massive tax bill. Fairhaven records show that the company hasn't paid taxes since 1990. The town is now owed more than $180,000 in back taxes and interest, according to Osuch. (Atlas Tack failed to return calls on this matter as well.)
Atlas Tack gained a new enemy in 1988, when the EPA nominated the company for Superfund status, a designation that meant its factory site was one of the country's most polluted areas. When the nomination was approved two years later, the site was given priority, with 1,200 others, for immediate cleanup, with federal funds available to the polluters to expedite the process.
Estrella's first reaction to the Superfund listing was shock. "I didn't know it was bad enough to be put on the Superfund list," she says. But then she remembered what it was like to live on the street a decade earlier, when she and her parents lived a few doors down the street from where she now lives, which runs parallel to Atlas Tack's property line. There were signs then that pointed to environmental dangers.
"Pets used to go into the site and come back blue from the chemicals," Estrella recalled. "We had one cat down the street that would regularly come back with blue paws. It looked like it was a punk rocker."
Estrella visited the site with a Great Northern representative, Osuch, and a few other town officials in the early '90s. The tour was organized by Great Northern "so we'd see that it wasn't as bad as the EPA claimed," Estrella says. But after touring the main building's plating room, the source of much of the area's waste, Estrella began to feel sick. "I came away with an upset stomach and I had a headache for 3 days," she says. "I thought it was obviously a biohazard."
State and federal officials agreed. After completing initial assessments, they pressured Atlas Tack to remove asbestos from all the buildings and to demolish the main building, which was structurally unsound. Years later, in 1998 and 1999, the company did the work -- sort of. Atlas Tack removed the asbestos in the main building and demolished it, but never hauled off all the debris. Asbestos in the other buildings was left in place, even though pipes with the carcinogenic material could easily be seen through the buildings' windows, Craffey says. The EPA had to step in again.
Even after the building was torn down, the area remained contaminated. According to the EPA Web site description, which summarizes a series of studies on the area, the on-site soil is contaminated with volatile organic compounds (VOCs), heavy metals, including lead, pesticides and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) -- poisonous materials known to cause cancer and other illnesses. Anyone or anything that comes into contact with the area could be in danger.
Atlas Tack has consistently argued that the EPA studies are flawed, that the property never should have been listed as a Superfund site in the first place. In a Feb. 19, 1999, response to the EPA's proposed remedy, the company claimed that tests used to determine that the site was contaminated only focused on the most polluted areas, and never proved that the chemicals had been flowing into the groundwater or the ocean. The proposed remedy -- demolition of the buildings, removal of polluted soil -- is nothing more than, in the words of Atlas Tack's lawyer, "a pointless attempt to stop a contaminant migration process that is not occurring at levels above EPA's cleanup goals." Citing its own experts, Atlas Tack went on to argue that "The EPA cannot proceed to implement such a plan. Doing so would be a waste of time and taxpayers' money."
Craffey disagrees. Studies conducted at the site after Atlas Tack joined the Superfund list confirmed that migration levels posed a threat to the community. Atlas Tack, he argues, is just plain wrong.
"[Atlas Tack and its consultants] did a quick sampling of the plants that found the grasses had no contamination, but look at the dirt," Craffey says. "It's contaminated. The plant is irrelevant because the animals who eat it don't wash it off. Ducks don't have teeth so they put gravel in their mouths to break up their food. They're being affected."
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