TIVERTON -- Parents should keep their children from playing outside in North Tiverton until state officials say it is safe, said the state Department of Health.
That caution was issued because a risk-assessment agency hired by New England Gas Co. reported on Oct. 31 that although there are soil contaminants above state standards, they do not pose a health risk.
"You didn't see the Health Department saying 'Hallelujah' when that report was released," Robert Vanderslice, the department's chief of environmental health risk assessment, said on Monday. "There's a tremendous amount of information that we have to go through.
"I have a lot of questions. Many people do."
ENVIRON Health Sciences Institute, in Louisiana, was hired by the gas company after the state Department of Environmental Management in March ordered its parent company, Southern Union, to test the soil of 75 private properties.
ENVIRON'S report accompanied a report from Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, the engineering firm hired by the gas company to conduct the tests. ENVIRON'S report analyzed the Vanasse findings.
It said: "Activities such as walking and playing, gardening, ingesting home vegetables or digging a subsurface structure should not have a significant impact on human health from exposure to constituents in the soil."
The gas company's "clearance, I think, doesn't pass water with any of us," Councilwoman Louise Durfee said Monday. "Let's face it, Southern Union is looking out for their pockets."
Fall River Gas Co., which Southern Union bought three years ago, may have used the area as a dumping spot in the 1960s for hazardous waste from its coal gasification plant, said the DEM in March. The soil contamination was discovered in August 2002.
