Word: epas
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...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 it was over," says Leah Abbott, one of the homemakers in Holbrook (pop. 11,140) who has found...
...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...
...into the Cochato--and leaching Lord knows where else, say the 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...
...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 why Mark's best boyhood friend now has Hodgkin...
...advantage. "They weren't scared of me." One day when Baird & McGuire was still operating, she arrived at the executive office unannounced, went in to see Cameron Baird, the head of the company, and got a firsthand look at the contamination from him. A public meeting last June with EPA officials at Holbrook High School, Abbott says, "was a real lynch mob. And I think I led it." She sounds both abashed and proud. The EPA had intended simply to present its latest findings. Instead its representatives faced the point-by- point anger of 300 people who demanded to know...