TIVERTON -- It took a short walk yesterday for a North Tiverton neighborhood to feel like a chemistry project. On one street, neighbors watched as Environmental Protection Agency workers checked levels of mercury. Three roads over, a moon rover-like vehicle extracted soil in a separate investigation for contaminants from coal gasification.
Under her patio umbrella, Pauline Carvalho grappled with questions. During two days of investigation, EPA contractor Weston Solutions Inc. found cloth and leather pieces in some soil samples from her yard at 11 A. Connell St., indications that the defunct Bristol County Hat Co. factory might be responsible for elevated mercury levels. She said she was not worried for her health, but wondered whether she would be able to sell the house if she ever wanted to. And would her property insurance bill, which has tripled, ever come down?
For now, Carvalho is glad to have what looked like helmetless spacemen exploring the property for answers. Dressed in white Tyvek suits and yellow boots, the workers hand-turned metal poles called augers two feet into the ground along a grid of digging locations. Soil collected in a sort of basket at the end was placed in bags. A high-tech blue box called a spectrometer gave EPA on-scene coordinator Thomas C. Condon and workers indications of mercury levels -- letting them choose samples to send to a Chelmsford, Mass., laboratory.
Condon said mercury, a metal in liquid form, can emit vapors that exceed levels considered safe when the weather warms up. "Exposure to mercury vapors can cause some health effects to the central nervous system," Condon said, adding that the EPA Region 1 office in Boston will evaluate laboratory results to see whether there is a need to take action.
"We were getting elevated levels," Condon said, and his contracted workers began testing neighbor Robert Ferreira's property on A. Connell Street, too.
Elevated mercury levels were among many findings by Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, a consultant hired by New England Gas Co., when VHB did neighborhood soil testing last year. The state Department of Environmental Management called in the federal EPA, which began work Wednesday and may already be finished. Condon said the information shows the mercury "most likely" came from the old hat factory, though Carvalho and some residents wondered whether decades-old gas company dumping might also have played a role.
Over on Canonicus Street, workers from Vanasse Hangen Brustlin were in the midst of the first day of their latest round of testing for suspected soil contamination. Out came the Geoprobe, a kind of super-sized golf cart with a hydraulic device on the back that digs into the earth and pull out a sheath of soil.
Southern Union, the parent company of New England Gas Co., several years ago bought the former Fall River Gas Co., which may have used the North Tiverton neighborhood as a place to dump waste from its coal gasification plant decades ago. Concerns about that spawned last year's testing, and the DEM found the need for more testing after reviewing the results.
The DEM recently gave its conditional go-ahead to two testing plans covering scores of properties in the Bay Street area. Still, the DEM, along with a consultant for the neighborhood and other interested parties, requested that additional measures be incorporated into the testing.
In a written statement yesterday, the neighborhood group ENACT called the gas company's testing plan "an inconsistent approach" that is a "huge mistake."
It remains to be seen which requests will become part of the consultant's testing. But Jeffrey P. Crawford, a principal environmental scientist for the state Department of Environmental Management who was on hand for the VHB sampling yesterday, said his sense is that the firm would probably do some additional testing based on what it finds in the field, such as digging farther if contamination indicators turn up.
Yesterday's two different investigations were not meant to be a contest, of course. But in the highly charged debate between ENACT and the gas company over testing methods, the EPA investigation quickly drew praise from leading members of ENACT.
"This is the type of investigation that I've envisioned," said Ferreira, an ENACT member. Certainly, he asserted, there were many more points on the properties being tested under the EPA method.
"This is the type of grid system that we have been lobbying for an entire year," said Gail Corvello, president of ENACT, asserting that the EPA testing was more sophisticated and can result in a fuller understanding of the lateral extent of contamination.
There did not seem to be a definitive answer to the debate yesterday. Crawford, however, took a different view, saying "it doesn't necessarily mean a grid is better than what [Vanasse Hangen Brustlin] are performing here."
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