Workers get ready to begin removing soil Monday at the Bay Street site where cyanide contamination was found more than seven years ago.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

TIVERTON — Shortly after 8 on Monday morning, Gail Corvello got a knock on her door, one that has been seven years in coming.

Opposite Corvello’s home at 190 Bay St., a huge backhoe was about to break ground on the cleanup of the largest and most complex soil contamination case in recent Rhode Island history.

Courtney D. Moore, senior engineer for EnviroLogic LLC of New Hampshire, walked across the street to get Corvello so she could document the first scoop.

“I said, ‘Wait for me.’ I gave everybody a hug,” Corvello recalled.

Two hours later, Corvello was downloading the photos she had taken of the groundbreaking onto her laptop and showing them to neighbors who had gathered to reflect on their ordeal — which began seven years and three weeks ago when sewer workers on Bay Street brought up soil tinged a bright blue — a marker of cyanide.

For seven years, the property owners have been unable to sell or refinance their homes or to use their yards in any way, not even to plant a vegetable garden.

Four years ago, about 100 working-class residents of the Bay Street neighborhood sued corporate giant Southern Union in federal court, winning an $11.5-million settlement that was settled last week.

The agreement called for the residents — not the town or the state — to spend up to $3 million on the cleanup.

With four years of litigation finally over, Corvello and other plaintiffs say they feel free to express the emotions that have accompanied their ordeal, particularly in the last 15 months when the deal almost fell through more than once.

All in all, “This was probably the best we were going to do,” Corvello said Monday.

The environmental crews will remove the top two feet of contaminated soil within a 10-foot diameter of soil borings that have shown evidence of hazardous substances exceeding state limits for residential properties. Any contamination remaining below two feet will be capped with an impermeable orange barrier.

Property owners will accept environmental land-use restrictions as part of their deeds, preventing them from disturbing the capped material unless there are pressing needs — such as the replacement of septic systems — and additional environmental precautions would be taken.

Originally, Corvello said, she insisted on the removal of every speck of contamination — not only cyanide, but lead, arsenic and polyaromatic hydrocarbons, petroleum byproducts that are probable carcinogens.

But she said she realized that “no judge would award a cleanup that cost more than the property was worth.”

She said she is willing to accept a land-use restriction to “keep moving forward.”

“It’s now,” said Janice Carroll, not 6 or 10 years from now.

“There’s a resignation,” said Tim Watters, but the agreement also brings peace of mind.

In winning the settlement, and hiring an environmental contractor, the residents and their lawyers — a team led by Mark W. Roberts and Neil T. Leifer of Boston, as well as Robert J. McConnell of Providence — achieved what the state could not

While the state Department of Environmental Management fast-tracked the permit process for the cleanup, Corvello said, the agency’s enforcement arm was totally ineffectual in protecting the public.

In 2003, the DEM named Southern Union responsible for the contamination, which was traced to the manufacture of gas from coal at the former Fall River Gas Co., which the Texas-based utility purchased nine years ago. In the years since, Southern Union involved the DEM in administrative litigation that cost the state about $1 million and went nowhere.

Corvello said state laws and regulations must change so that environmental cleanups become a top priority — and officials chase the polluters afterward.

The DEM, Corvello said, protects Rhode Island’s fish better than it does its people.

Corvello said there was “a little extra change” left from the settlement for each of the 100 plaintiffs after they set aside $3 million for the cleanup and paid their legal bills — an undisclosed amount. It is intended as compensation for the value they have lost in their properties.

In April 2008, Southern Union agreed to settle the case for $12 million if the DEM and the town would hold the utility harmless against future litigation, according to court records.

But talks between the town and Southern Union dragged on so long that the utility reduced its offer by $500,000, Corvello said. And then the town wanted $500,000 of the remaining $11.5 million to sign off on the deal. At the last minute, the town insisted on an extra $50,000, Corvello said.

If the plaintiffs hadn’t agreed to the $550,000, the entire deal could have fallen through, she said.

Town Solicitor Andrew Teitz said the money will cover the cost of repairing the pavement disturbed by the installation of sewers under Bay Street — the project that was disrupted by the discovery of the cyanide-tinged soil in 2002.

But Corvello said she believes the plaintiffs have been used as pawns by a Town Council that never took their plight to heart.

One member of the Town Council, whom she declined to name, told her that “we are the blight of Tiverton,” she said.

On the contrary, Corvello said, “we are hard-working people who do the best with what we have.”

gmacris@projo.com