9.27.99
Dumping disasters: Town realized something had to be done

By MELANIE LEFKOWITZ
Journal Staff Writer

It was the summer of '77, and something was going on in Smithfield.

Residents of Tarkiln Road were beginning to notice enormous tanker trucks mysteriously snaking past their homes each day. The company names on the sides of these trucks were masked, taped over with cardboard.

Downwind, on Log Road, something else was happening. People were experiencing odd symptoms. One man said he suffered nosebleeds, which he later attributed to chemical fumes. He tended beehives, and his bees were dying.

``You had to begin to wonder what was happening,'' said Town Councilman Richard A. Poirier. ``Some people assume that because they're in the country no one notices them. They assume country people are stupid.

Journal files TRASHED: The Burrillville town dump, shown in a 1971 photograph.

``Let me tell you, country people have their eyes and ears open to what's happening in their neighborhood.''

Residents approached Poirier, then a member of the Conservation Commission, with their concerns. Poirier contacted another member of the commission, a pilot. They arranged to fly over William Davis's dump, where the trucks were headed, to find out the truth for themselves.

What they saw from the air astounded them.

``It looked like a big caterpillar spewing out black, oily sludge,'' Poirier said. ``It was devastating to see the extent of the chemical dumping.''

Poirier took aerial photographs that would help the neighbors win a temporary restraining order and, later, a nuisance lawsuit, to stop the dumping.

The trucks, it turned out, carried industrial waste from New Jersey. Factories and waste sites closing in the mid-Atlantic states were transporting their hazardous materials here, said Claude Cote, deputy director of legal services for the Department of Environmental Management.

The laws to regulate chemical disposal at the time were being enforced more stringently in other areas, he said.

``A lot of that waste was coming up to this area, where it had not come up historically,'' said Cote. ``What was happening in that period was, sites in New Jersey were getting shut down, so incredible volumes of waste started rolling into the state of Rhode Island.''

Davis's dump, known today as the Davis Liquid Waste Superfund Site, was the locus of one of several situations erupting around Rhode Island and around the country in the late 1970s.

The August 1977 blast at Picillo's Pig Farm in Coventry, where about 10,000 drums of hazardous waste were found when the fields burned after an explosion, dovetailed with such national events as the discovery of the Valley of the Drums in Tennessee and the beginning of what would become Love Canal in New York state.

These disasters were happening more and more frequently, and they were creating -- and heightening -- a collective realization: Something had to be done.

``People understood that there could be a significant threat to the groundwater if you could see a farmer's field catch fire and burn,'' said Cote. ``People understood that harm could happen.''

For Poirier, this awareness was the key. When he approached the council about the chemicals at Davis's dump, some members were sympathetic. But he said it did not seem that the group as a whole would take any action.

The aerial photographs were proof. They helped the concerned residents attract the support of the Rhode Island Conservation Law Foundation. The foundation's lawyer took the case, as a nuisance action representing the citizens.

Defense against such invasions, Poirier said, took more innovation and more effort in the days before pollutants' names were household words.

``The links between public health hazards and exposure to these substances were coming out, little by little. How long did it take for people to come around to the idea that smoking wasn't good for you? I remember seeing doctors on television, smoking cigarettes. First the fact has to be established. Then people have to pick it up,'' said Poirier.

``Today it's more difficult to dump; the public is more in tune; the federal regulations are more stringent; the penalties are stiffer and enforcement is more thorough. It's a whole different ball game now.''

At the same time that the state was experiencing a series of unprecedented environmental disasters, officials here and across the country were grappling with another issue: garbage.

Communities were growing, landfills were filling and open dumps were visibly festering. Suddenly, waste disposal was everybody's problem.

``People started recognizing that solid waste and what became hazardous waste were becoming problems to dispose of on one hand, and creating social concerns on the other,'' said Cote. ``There was pressure on the national level to do something about it.''

The Resource Conservation Recovery Act was passed in 1976. This induced the states to conduct an ``open dump inventory'' -- to start accounting for, and controlling, dump sites.

``These dumps were anywhere and everywhere, and no one was paying any attention,'' said Cote. ``These were not sanitary landfills. They were open dumps. They were havens for mosquitoes, rats, disease. They would smell bad in the summertime and when they came close to being full, they would miraculously burn to the ground.''

Glocester had numerous environmental concerns that surfaced in the 1970s: The Davis Liquid Waste Superfund Site is right on its border, and the Davis Glocester-Smithfield Regional Landfill, which accepted waste from Glocester, Smithfield, Warwick and Providence between 1974 and 1976, straddles both towns.

Because of numerous violations, the state in 1978 declined to renew the license of the regional landfill, which became a Superfund site in 1986.

With the problems at the regional landfill, something needed to be done with Glocester's garbage, said Council President Edward Burlingame, then the town moderator and a member of the budget board.

At the time, the council was negotiating with William Davis for an ``annex dump.'' This was approved privately, without public hearings or public comment.

``That created a whole raft of problems for the town,'' said Burlingame, ``and the Solid Waste Management Corporation had the potential to back a regional landfill, which had the people way up in arms.''

While townspeople were battling the state, they worried about the safety of their own land and water. The dump was located near Nine Foot Brook, which worked its way into Waterman Lake. The town is part of the Scituate Reservoir Watershed, and there was always the fear that the state's whole water supply could be contaminated.

``We don't have a municipal water supply in Glocester, and many of us for years have been very concerned about the quality of the water,'' Burlingame said. ``We saw the potential danger of the fluids coming down into the watershed from the landfill. There was a tremendous fear.''

A handful of town leaders were furiously trying to come up with a solution to the solid-waste problem, Burlingame said. Out of three options -- a landfill, contracting a private hauler, and a transfer station -- they chose a transfer station.

They wrote a grant application, and won about $200,000 in federal financing to build the current facility on Chestnut Hill Road, effectively avoiding landfill issues in the years to come.

Burlingame remembers the 1970s as an ``awakening period,'' during which citizens suddenly opened their eyes to the environmental hazards cropping up everywhere -- from Antarctica to, literally, their own backyards.

``The way I look at it, people became more environmentally conscious in the seventies,'' he said. ``Greenpeace began to get active. We were out of the war. People's attention had to go somewhere, and the environment suddenly became everybody's issue.

``They suddenly realized we don't have an unending supply of everything. The prices of energy had gone up tremendously. When this evidence began to surface, people said, `Wait a minute. We've got to do something.' ''

Superfund was not created as an Environmental Protection Agency designation until 1980, but the practices that would create nearly all of these trouble spots were germinating in the 1970s.

Northwestern Rhode Island has its share: the Glocester-Smithfield Regional Landfill, which is in the process of being removed from the National Priorities List; the Davis Liquid Waste Superfund Site; the one-acre Superfund site located on what is now the Central Landfill.

Between December 1976 and May 1979, about 1.5 million gallons of chemical waste were disposed of at the Silvestri Bros. dump in Johnston, according to Beth Bailey, spokeswoman for Rhode Island Resource Recovery, which operates the Central Landfill.

After the Resource Recovery Conservation Act was passed in 1976, the states were instructed to come up with their own legislation to deal with dumps, said Cote of the DEM.

In Rhode Island, the first set of regulations was written in 1975 and 1976, said Cote.

``It was maybe three pages long,'' he said. ``It says, pretty much, if you're operating a dump, you have to register with the Department of Health. After you register, here are the minimum operating standards: Don't catch fire, don't stink and use daily cover.''

But in a year, those regulations were enhanced and broadened. Combined with growing worries about contaminated groundwater and the danger to public health, the regulations made it more and more difficult for municipalities to operate or finance their own dumps and landfills.

``If you look at where the historic town dump is in almost every town, go find some land that has little value for residential development. That's junk land because it's low, and it's wet,'' said Cote. ``As minimum standards, you needed a five-foot separation between the dump and the groundwater. You had to keep it away from swamps and bogs. It was impossible to have a landfill where you didn't have a problem.''

The Solid Waste Management Corporation began negotiating to buy the Silvestri Bros. dump, the largest landfill in Rhode Island, as a state repository in December 1978. When the purchase went through two years later, the state began to clean it up.

There was opposition in Johnston to the Central Landfill in the 1980s and 1990s, with the formation of organizations such as Dump the Dump and People Protecting People. At the time, however, it was a necessary solution for a worsening dilemma.

``Economies of scale and economies of operations,'' Cote explained. ``All the little communities couldn't pay and operate dumps appropriately. They needed a statewide plan for long-term disposal of trash. They needed a whole new concept.''