More than 30 years have passed, but memories of the first time I knocked on doors along Lazy Lane will always be as fresh as they are frightening.
Southington's environmental disaster, which I witnessed festering as a young and inexperienced man in the early 1980s soon after two locations in the Connecticut town were declared Environmental Protection Agency Superfund sites, began before I was born. The Herculean EPA-led cleanup remains a work in progress after the passing of more than three decades and the first generations of environmental casualties.
Southington is ground zero for two of my life's most twisted ironies. The birthplace of my awakening to the deadly consequences of environmental damage has a tiny sliver of my family's fingerprints on the killing machines. And 10 years after a cynical newspaper reporter unfairly cast CCAG's educationally oriented community organizing as monetarily motivated, I started a now two-decade-long journalism career.
A top source of toxic waste contamination in the town, which is home to more than 43,000 residents, is the EPA-erased Solvent Recovery Service of New England (SRS) facility at the foot of a hill below dozens of homes on gently twisting Lazy Lane. From 1957 to 1967, one of the prime sources of the toxic waste dumped in two unlined, Olympic-swimming-pool-sized lagoons at SRS was East Hartford-based Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, the company where my father worked for three decades and provided a living for his family.
The Quinnipiac River runs through the center of Southington. In the northern neighborhoods, the river flows south near SRS, then downstream to the center of the town, not far from the Old Southingon Landfill Superfund Site. Both sites are in the river's watershed, according to a December 2012 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department report.
In the summers of 1984 and 1985, when I stood on the front doorsteps of the modest middle-class houses on Lazy Lane as a fundraiser and community organizer for the Hartford-based Connecticut Citizen Action Group (CCAG), the pain and sorrow of untimely death could be seen on every face that peered back at me through the screen-door windows and across the dark New England-red backyard picnic tables.
I will never forget the thin, outstretched arm of one longtime Lazy Lane homeowner as she pointed to each of the neighboring properties on either side of her lawn and across the street. "They have all lost someone to cancer," she told me of leukemia cases and other environmentally related maladies that had claimed many lives before her eyes.
Several Lazy Lane residents shared their memories of large dump trucks climbing up the hill and passing by their houses. Sheets of flapping canvas covered the deadly cargo of toxic-waste-tainted soil that had been scooped up at SRS as the lumbering vehicles rolled toward Southington's other Superfund site, an 11-acre municipal landfill in the center of town surrounded by residential neighborhoods and small businesses.
I will never forget the weathered face of the 40-something owner of an automotive shop on the edge of the Old Southington Landfill. His anger was visible and audible as he explained that the air in every space inside his one-story structure was contaminated with a collection of carcinogenic chemicals that included alarming levels of methane and benzene. He told me about the EPA investigators who had been walking through the neighborhood in their baggy hazmat suits. The government scientists wanted him to abandon his property. He was grimly determined to never leave his nightmarish investment in The American Dream.
The Quinnipiac River watershed includes a small pond a short distance south from the former town dump, where I canvassed another neighborhood for CCAG.
I will never forget the shock that gripped the face of the well-groomed 40-something doctor as he peered at the topographical map clasped my clipboard, the scene illuminated by the wrought iron-style lamp that lit his field-stone and concrete doorsteps. "That little pond is where I have been taking my little girls to go swimming," he told me.
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