Gail Corvello watches as three of her four daycare charges run down to the artificial grass to play in her backyard on Bay Street in Tiverton.

The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy

TIVERTON — Imagine living in a place where you can’t plant a flower, dig a garden, sell your house or let your children play outside, where hidden toxins darken the soil and a summer breeze carries the fear of airborne particles infiltrating your lungs.

This is Gail Corvello’s nightmare, and it unfolds every day in a neighborhood that looks like any other to an outsider, with tidy homes and lawns sloping down to Mount Hope Bay.

Yesterday morning, Corvello stood outside her Bay Street house, which doubles as a daycare center, and ushered four young children, ages 2 through 5, outside into the brilliant sunshine.

The first sign that something was amiss was the carpet of artificial grass that covers her backyard, an oasis of playground equipment and children’s ride-on toys. She sends a boy out first for a “safety check,” to patrol the area for any loose branches or other hazards, and reminds the children to play safe, saying, “Bad choices get bad results.”

It was nearly five years ago that construction crews installing a sewer line on Bay Street dug up the telltale blue soil that would change the lives of Corvello and some 250 people in this working-class slice of North Tiverton, just beyond the Fall River line.

Five years since the pile of dirt dumped across the street created an oily smell that made Corvello wonder if the heater on her swimming pool was leaking. Five years since the work crews wearing rubber boots and rubber gloves arrived with backhoes and began digging up people’s yards, and the scientists and regulators and lawyers got involved, and life became a lot more complicated.

“The children and I used to plant what we thought was an organic garden over there,” says Corvello, pointing to a patch of natural grass next to the play area. “Broccoli, spinach, tomatoes, zucchini, you name it. And they would eat it. We want them to have the healthiest start they can possibly have — only to find out that just being here could be unhealthy.”

Today, Corvello plans to make the 30-mile drive to Providence and the Rhode Island State House to testify for what she considers her neighborhood’s salvation — legislation increasing the fines on polluters, which she hopes will finally force the company she holds responsible, Southern Union, to make her and her neighbors’ homes safe again.

After the discovery of the blue soil in the summer of 2002, the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management traced the contamination to the burning of coal to produce gas in the early 1900s at the former Fall River Gas Co. An 87-year-old resident of the neighborhood, Joseph Souza, testified in a deposition earlier this year that he worked for a local contractor in the 1940s, cleaning out waste from the gas plant and dumping it in what later became the Bay Street neighborhood.

Tests have found unsafe levels of cyanide, arsenic, lead and carcinogens in the soil around Corvello’s house and other land in the 50-acre area.

Fall River Gas was a subsidiary of the New England Gas Co., which was in turn bought in 2000 by Southern Union, a large utility company based in Houston, Texas. After doing some testing in the neighborhood, Southern Union has denied responsibility and is fighting what regulators call a “scorched-earth” legal battle with the DEM and Tiverton residents, who have sued in federal court.

Meanwhile, DEM legislation raising the fines on Southern Union for failing to clean up the area, from $1,000 to $50,000 a day, has stalled, amid questions about the DEM’s hiring of an expensive Washington law firm to help fight Southern Union. The Providence Journal reported last week that the firm, Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan, has billed the state $448,000 from last fall through February, at rates of up to $680 an hour. The DEM has proposed spending another $3.5 million for the firm over the next year.

W. Michael Sullivan, the DEM director, defends the firm’s hiring, saying that the state needs to counter the heavy legal firepower of Southern Union — and that a victory is important to protect Rhode Island’s environmental interests in Tiverton and other places that suffer from similar contamination. But Senate Finance Chairman Stephen D. Alves, D-West Warwick, has called a hearing for today to examine the DEM’s legal bills, and how the agency proposes to pay them in these tight budget times. (The legislation would also allow the DEM to recover its legal expenses, should it prevail.)

The delay distresses Corvello, a leader in the neighborhood’s fight against Southern Union.

“I thought that what DEM was doing was a positive thing,” said Corvello. “But now we’re being reduced to a budget item. Nobody is seeing the real pain, the human face of suffering here.”

Corvello and her neighbors have endured five years of frustration, and with the legal battle likely to drag on for several more years, there is still no cleanup plan, she says. The town has imposed a moratorium on any digging or gardening in the neighborhood.

“We’re like the quiet cricket in the Eric Carle children’s book. We rub our wings together and nobody hears us,” said Corvello. “The first step in the process should be making us safe. But it’s the last step — after all the court fights and appeals.”

Corvello, 51, moved to Bay Street in 1980, with her husband, John, and later opened a daycare center, Cozy Corner. Their only daughter, Becky, now 23, used to play with the other children in a wooded lot next door and sit for hours in a dirt hole so deep that the children would have to help one another climb out.

Last month, Becky had to drop out of graduate school at the University of Rhode Island, where she studied molecular biology, because of illness. She and her mother have auto-immune connective tissue disorder, and must take steroids and pain killers. Becky sees a doctor in Newton, Mass., who treats her to clean the high concentrations of metals and toxins from her blood.

Corvello wonders about other people in the neighborhood with similar maladies, or other issues — anxiety disorders, bipolar disease, seizure disorders.

“Do we know why we’re sick? No. Do we fear that our own property is making us sick? Sure we do. Fear of the unknown is one of the biggest fears in life.”

She knows that proving a connection between the contamination and health woes is long, difficult and tedious. Still, state health officials have not done any screening of residents, Corvello says, though they have put the neighbors in touch with a Harvard University doctor who wants to study the neighborhood’s health.

“Clean it up now, so it can’t hurt anyone else,” says Corvello.

Residents cannot sell or refinance their houses, because the banks won’t loan money. Last summer, Governor Carcieri came to Corvello’s backyard to sign a new law making it easier for residents to get home-equity loans, but the process is still not easy, says Corvello.

Corvello’s daycare business is dying, and she worries about paying her mortgage. Two more children left on Friday, leaving four. She has cashed out her 401(k), her daughter’s student loans have piled up and her 57-year-old husband works two jobs, driving a vending-machine delivery route and serving as a school custodian in Fall River.

An elderly neighbor is being foreclosed on. Another woman wanted to sell her house to her son, but because he couldn’t get a bank loan, she deeded it to him. Now, she is having trouble qualifying for Medicaid because officials believe she transferred the property to conceal assets, says Corvello.

Corvello announces that it is time for the children to come inside. They wipe their feet on the outside mat first, then the inside mat, then sit as Corvello tosses each of them a warm washcloth to wipe off their hands.

“This has been such a nightmare,” said Corvello. “This is a working-class neighborhood. We work all day. This is hard for us.”

Neighbor Robert Ferreira, 46, whose 4-year-old grandson has learned not to touch the “poison rocks” along the Bay, adds: “Our resolve is wearing thin. But we’ve gone this far. …”

“We’re tired,” agrees Corvello. “But we have to keep going. We’re stuck here. We have to make our neighborhood safe.”

mstanton@projo.com