“This was my dream. This was what I wanted to do with my life,” says Gail Corvello of the child-care center she opened 13 years ago. She says the state “is wrong” to make residents wait for relief.

The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires

TIVERTON — Gail Corvello figured that if she and her neighbors held out for about five years, they would be able to get out from under the nightmare of the soil contamination in the Bay Street neighborhood that has had a stranglehold on their lives since 2002.

She was wrong.

On Friday, Corvello will say an emotional goodbye to the last of innumerable children she has nurtured in her home-based child-care center on Bay Street over the last 13 years.

Corvello, 51, and her husband John, 58, a school custodian, are on the brink of financial ruin at a time in their lives when they had envisioned the realization of their dreams.

“My heart is breaking over this whole thing,” Corvello said yesterday.

As president of the grass-roots organization ENACT (Environmental Neighborhood Awareness Committee of Tiverton), Corvello has come to represent the public face of some 250 North Tiverton residents directly affected by the toxic waste, discovered in 2002.

Blue-tinged soil, laced with cyanide, arsenic, lead and contaminants was identified as waste left by the burning of coal to produce gas at the former Fall River Gas Co. decades ago.

The DEM has assigned responsibility for the remediation to the gas company’s successor, Southern Union, which has fought the designation every step of the way since Corvello and about 75 of her neighbors sued the Texas-based utility two years ago.

The path chosen by DEM, in which homeowners must wait for relief until the state pursues the legal case to its conclusion, “is wrong,” Corvello said.

Governor Carcieri and DEM officials have said the state does not have the money — as much as $55 million — to pay for the remediation up front.

But, Corvello said, “the tunnel in Boston was made safe first before people worried who was going to pay for it,” an allusion to falling concrete from Boston’s Big Dig project that killed a woman last year.

And “fish are made safe first in the Bay” before the state sends out the bill for an oil spill, Corvello said.

But in Tiverton, she said, the people have to wait. One woman has already lost her house in a foreclosure sale, she said, and another family has had problems using the equity in its home to pay for extraordinary medical expenses.

“Even if there’s a settlement in two to three years,” Corvello said yesterday, “it will be many years beyond that before there is closure.”

She compared the Bay Street situation, which involves 100 properties clustered on 50 acres, to similar contamination discovered on one man’s land on Cory’s Lane in 1987.

“It took 20 years to get the shovels in the road,” Corvello said.

A DEM spokeswoman said yesterday that remediation work on Cory’s Lane was completed three weeks ago by New England Gas, a subsidiary of Southern Union.

As in the Bay Street neighborhood, the DEM had assigned responsibility for the Cory’s Lane waste to the utility, saying the contamination originated in the burning of coal at the former Fall River Gas Co.

Corvello said she didn’t believe the Bay Street contamination “will ever be resolved in a time frame that will allow me to work with children,” Corvello said.

“This was my dream,” she said. “This was what I wanted to do with my life.”

Thirteen years ago, Corvello said, she quit a “great job, with great pay” at a data processing company to start the child-care center.

At the time, the Corvellos were financially stable. They had a relatively new house, and an 11-year-old daughter, still young enough to give them time to save for her college education.

Now both Corvello and her daughter, Becky, 23, have auto-immune connective tissue disorder. They suffer from severe joint pain and must take steroids and pain killers. Last spring, illness forced Becky to drop out of graduate school at the University of Rhode Island, where she had been studying molecular biology.

Since June, the number of children at Cozy Corner has dropped from six to two.

Some of the children might have moved on anyway with the start of the new school year, but none have taken their place.

Yesterday morning, Corvello’s first phone call was to ask whether she and her husband can borrow against their life insurance policies.

They’ve cashed in their retirement savings, losing 30 percent of the net value, and making settlements with creditors.

Hopefully, Corvello said, she and her husband will receive an ECHO loan to pay off five credit cards. The state established ECHO (Environmentally Compromised Homeowner) loans last year, with the Bay Street residents in mind, to help homeowners whose property values were compromised by soil contamination.

At age 51, Corvello, who once trained people to use computer software, is looking for a job in a market geared to people half her age.

Her husband was working two jobs until he got hurt and was out for 10 weeks, she said.

When he was well enough, Corvello said, she convinced him to “choose one job or the other.”

She told him, “I’d rather have you and not be able to pay the bills rather than being able to pay the bills and not have you.”

gmacris@projo.com