Word: holbrooke
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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 herself transformed into an environmental activist...
...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 cap. The wastes were contained. Holbrook could relax...
Half a mile away is the Grove, a neighborhood surrounding Lake Holbrook. The lake is murky; people who live around it say that sometimes it looks orange. Joanne O'Donnell has lived in the Grove since 1964. All five of the O'Donnell children spent time at the Pastures, she says, and four have had endocrine problems. One daughter had a pituitary tumor; another daughter's spleen was removed last year. Mark, her eldest son, at 27 came down with "some virulent, crazy pneumonia that nobody could figure out." Then a large tumor was found on his pancreas...
...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's disease. It might...
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...