9.27.99
The '70s: Poisoned to the heart

By CELESTE TARRICONE
Journal Staff Writer

COVENTRY On Sept. 30, 1977, Bradford Gorham was driving down Route 102 in rural Western Coventry with his wife, Sandy, when he saw the cascading flares above the tree line.

``It was spectacular, like a huge fireworks display,'' said the former state representative.

He watched the iridescent orange and yellow plumes of fire spurting into the sky before turning into the mushrooming, foul-smelling black clouds that would be visible from Providence to Newport for days.

Journal files ICEBERGÕS TIP: State investigators survey chemical barrels on Warren PicilloÕs Coventry pig farm, in a photo taken less than three weeks after the site erupted in flames. Ultimately, 16,000 barrels of hazardous waste were found buried there.

A few miles away, Robert Guastini could see the cloud from his home in the Coventry village of Rice City, off Route 14.

Neither of the men knew that he was witnessing the eruption of one of Rhode Island's -- and New England's -- worst illegal hazardous-waste dumps.

The rainbow of colored sparks that sprayed across the sky was caused by a frightening spectrum of deadly carcinogens and volatile organic compounds that were buried in huge quantities beneath the ground at Warren V. Picillo's pig farm, on Piggy Hill Lane.

That chemical explosion blazed a trail to one of the state's most tragic environmental disasters -- which, years later, earned the dubious distinction of becoming Rhode Island's first Superfund site.

AT THE TIME of the fire, Guastini lived several miles from Picillo's farm. But when he heard the explosion was caused by chemicals, he started to worry anyway, because he had nearly closed on a house on Perry Hill Road, only about a mile from the site.

Guastini called the state Department of Environmental Management the next day and was assured that there were no health concerns; there were only 11 barrels of chemicals on the property, probably not very harmful, he was told.

A couple of months later, Guastini moved his wife and five children (a sixth son would arrive a few years later) to their new home at 861 Perry Hill Rd.

But by the summer of 1978, Guastini's passing worries had turned into full-blown fear.

When inspectors from the DEM and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency started to investigate the site, it quickly became apparent that the 11-barrel estimate wasn't even close.

As chemists and engineers poked deeper into the three trenches where the chemicals had been buried, the barrel count steadily rose, then skyrocketed.

``You'd go down to the Summit General Store, and the community was abuzz,'' Guastini said. ``They kept finding more barrels -- 300, then 500, then more.''

By the time the excavation was complete, workers would find nearly 16,000 barrels containing some of the most dangerous chemicals ever produced by private industry.

``I said, `Oh my God,' '' said Guastini. ``You start to think, what happens to your family, your property, maybe your health. What happens if the [contaminated] water gets to your well? All your life investment is gone.''

PICILLO, WHO now lives in Florida, had started the illegal dumping operation at his farm a few years before, charging only about a dollar a barrel, Gorham said.

The farmer had long been a nuisance to his neighbors. In 1969, Picillo served several months in state prison for running an illegal gambling operation on his property.

His pigs frequently escaped from his property and ravaged his neighbors' backyards, and trucks rumbled through the neighborhood to and from his farm at all hours of the day and night.

The neighbors never suspected that those vehicles were carrying barrels of deadly waste produced by manufacturing companies in New Jersey and Connecticut.

The companies had contracted with commercial haulers to dispose of their waste.

Those haulers, looking to pocket some extra profits, paid Picillo to take the waste off their hands instead going to a licensed facility -- for a much lower price than the manufacturers had paid them.

``It was an absolute shock,'' said Jonathan Farnum, who lives on Harkney Hill Road, three-quarters of a mile from the farm. ``It was such a criminal, rotten thing.''

Farnum ran for state senator -- and won -- in 1980, in part because he wanted to be in a better position to lobby the state to clean up the dump.

IN EARLY 1978, many of Picillo's neighbors still didn't know the extent of the disaster the pig farmer had created, but they had a sense that an already bad situation was going to get much worse.

``The unknown was what really killed you,'' Guastini said.

Many of them thought about moving, but they soon realized that their property values had taken a nosedive.

So a group of them met one night at the Gentleman's Farmer restaurant, on Route 3, and formed the organization Save Our Water (SOW -- in recognition of Picillo's pigs).

The members included doctors, lawyers, physicists and geologists, and they quickly began pooling their resources to find out more about what Picillo had been burying on his property and how much damage it could do to theirs.

They knew that the dump site was close to two aquifers, and they were concerned that the chemicals were moving towards them. And they had no idea what the effect of the contamination would have on the wells that provided their drinking water.

While some group members studied the farm's topography, others lobbied government officials -- from Representative Gorham to Gov. J. Joseph Garrahy to Sen. John H. Chafee -- for help.

At first, the state tried to force Picillo to oversee the site's clean-up and pay for it, winning a Superior Court lawsuit against him. But it soon became obvious that he wasn't going to follow through.

By the summer of 1978, the state had pulled together a small amount of money to start cleaning up the dump and had initiated a lawsuit against seven companies whose materials were found there, seeking damages to finance the clean-up.

As the barrel count rose to 16,000, so did the estimated cost of the project, from $500,000, to $3 million, to $11 million. (To date, the EPA and the responsible parties have spent well over $20 million and may have to spend as much as $25 million more to finish the job.)

When DEM and EPA technicians arrived at the site to start working, they quickly realized that they were dealing with a hazardous-waste repository like none they had seen before.

Neither the state nor the federal government had ever cleaned up such a dangerous site, and they had no idea what kinds of chemicals were actually packaged in those barrels.

``We had to be very cautious,'' said John Leo, a hazardous-waste engineer for the DEM who was part of the first team of scientists that tested the materials.

The engineers and chemists assigned to the project had to create the excavation procedures as they went along, Leo said.

They started with a long string of tests of the soil and ground water and the nearby residential wells. When they started investigating what was being stored in the barrels, they found what Gorham described as a ``house of horrors of chemicals.''

The list of toxins read like a ``who's who'' of hazardous materials: polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs, known carcinogens), volatile organic compounds, explosives, acids, poisons and experimental pesticides that ``either didn't work or killed every living thing exposed to them,'' Leo said.

``We realized we were going to be spending a lot of money,'' he added.

When technicians from the DEM and EPA finally began digging up the thousands of barrels, the grassy hill in the northern corner of the farm was quickly transformed into industrial wasteland.

Men in white rubber suits and air packs dug up crushed metal barrels oozing colorful toxic liquids. In some of the trenches, huge quantities of liquid waste was taken out of the drums and dumped directly into the ground.

``It was like being on the moon,'' Farnum said. ``You went into this bombed-out area that smells. There were pools of water that were discolored, and there was sludge. It had really been wrecked.''

By 1979, they were ready to begin hauling away the unearthed drums. In 1983, the last of the barrels left the site, and the DEM and the EPA set to work removing more than half a million cubic yards of soil saturated with PCBs. That phase of the clean-up lasted until 1988.

During the summer of 1979, just as the first phase of the clean-up was beginning, a Superior Court judge ordered seven companies whose wastes were discovered at the site to pay for part of the project.

The Picillo dump was the first hazardous-waste site in the country to require wholesale removal of tainted soil. At first, the state was unable to find a disposal facility to take all of the waste, Leo said, and eventually had to split it among three facilities in the South.

Each day, more than 60 loaded trucks left the site.

It would take a decade to remove all of the waste and the soil it contaminated, and for the DEM and the EPA to recoup the millions of dollars spent on the clean-up.

In 1983, the state attorney general's office filed suit in U.S. District Court against 35 additional companies whose wastes were found at the site.

All but five of those companies settled, for a total of $5.4 million, before the case went to trial in 1987.

In 1989, the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that those remaining five companies had to pay a total of $1.1 million.

By the mid-1980s, with the clean-up well along, SOW disbanded, although several neighbors, including Guastini, still kept abreast of the situation.

Even today, the clean-up is only half-finished. The EPA and the companies whose hazardous waste was dumped at the farm are still working to restore the land.

A huge water-treatment plant, now nearing completion on the site, will pump out the water from from the trenches and from a 35-acre plume of ground water, purify it and return it to the ground -- a phase that will take about 20 years, said Michael Gitten, the project coordinator.

MANY OF THE PEOPLE who saw that black cloud back in 1977 still wonder if anyone will ever really know how much damage Warren Picillo's illegal dump actually did.

``Even today, I still question it,'' Guastini said. ``There have been many people who have lived around the Picillo dump who have died of cancer. Whether it's coincidental, I don't know.''