Word: bairds
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...sitting around; it was hard for any self-respecting young thrill seeker to resist climbing inside and tumbling downhill. Parents seldom ventured into the area. So the town fathers and mothers did not know enough to fear that the moon glob and the barrels might have come from the Baird & McGuire factory, the plant at the Pastures' edge that produced pesticides and insecticides. Then in ( 1982 the EPA ranked the land near the top on its national list of high- priority hazardous-waste sites. The following year the town government forced the plant to close. "Two years ago I thought...
...Every few months, it seems, there is another frightening bulletin. First the EPA found the soil and water around the factory laced with arsenic, DDT and chlordane, among other contaminants. The most pressing concern was the danger to drinking water. Three town wells had been adjacent to Baird & McGuire; the last one was closed only in 1982. Running by the factory is the Cochato River, which for years flowed to Holbrook's water supply. But in 1983 the river was sluiced away from drinking water, and the most intensely contaminated ground near the factory covered with a clay...
...minority of townspeople who are upset. A water main that runs right under the site still supplies a thousand homes. Last spring the Cochato's sediment was found to include arsenic and naphthalene. Then last summer even the EPA seemed jolted: high concentrations of dioxin were discovered at Baird & McGuire...
Mark O'Donnell had been a sociable, rambunctious sort: he and his pals at the Pastures used to have epic moon-glob fights, and apparently he was always up for a roll in those big metal drums. He had also worked one teenage summer at Baird & McGuire, according to his mother. Two years after he died the EPA made Holbrook infamous. "The night it came across on the news that Baird & McGuire was the 14th worst site in the nation," says O'Donnell, "it was like lightning. I thought, 'I have an answer!' " The same answer, she thinks, explains...
...Baird & McGuire is just this side of the border with Randolph, a town that has shared water supplies with Holbrook. Esther Ross, a Randolph resident, says she got worried in 1981 when she found herself going to a lot of funerals. There is a certain Times Beach ring to her recitation. "The people who owned the house next door were stricken by cancer," she says, "and the people next door to them, and next door to them. We had a six-year-old pass away from cancer in the neighborhood, and a 20-year-old." Ross started mapping the victims...