Environmental Memoir: 'The Lagoon'

Sediment has filled half of "The Lagoon" in Marlborough, Mass. For decades, oil-tainted water has flowed from the man-made pond's dam and spillway (lower right) into the Sudbury Reservoir. /Google Earth image

"We call that 'The Lagoon,'" the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority hydrologist told me.

She was the first state official I interviewed about Maple Street, and she had studied water quality in the nearby Sudbury Reservoir, The man-made lake is dammed at its southern shores in Framingham and stretches north into Marlborough, where several small streams help fill the reservoir. One of the tributaries, which meanders south along Maple and River streets then feeds The Lagoon, has a lengthy history of environmental damage.

MWRA researchers had known about The Lagoon for years, the state scientist told me. A week later, the senior water authority official in charge of monitoring the Sudbury Reservoir told me the water was not potable. He said the Sudbury Reservoir would require environmental remediation efforts and new treatment facilities to be of much use in an emergency such as loss of access to the far larger and far cleaner Quabbin Reservoir.

The Sudbury Reservoir is one of the largest emergency reserve sources of water for the Greater Boston area. For several decades, a small stream that meanders along a mile-long portion of Maple Street in Marlborough has been washing oil-tainted water into The Lagoon, a football-field-sized pond located at the corner of Maple and Walker streets. The Lagoon, which is unlined, is equipped with a concrete dam and spillway.

Beginning in the early 20th century, oil spills had plagued the densely developed drag of commercial properties along Maple Street, one of the main southern entryways into Marlborough, including a lengthy history of rail access. Two of the small business owners in the Maple Street contamination hot-zone told me there had been several railway oil spills very close (or on) their properties over the years. They were both resigned, but angry, about the oil spill damage to their land and property values.

In late spring 1996, I joined the reporting staff of the Framingham-based Middlesex News and spent the first couple weeks in the newspaper's Marlborough bureau. I was more-or-less on my own to find stories. In my first week on the Marlborough beat, I drove to the Worcester office of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection to conduct a records check on contamination sites in Marlborough.

The Maple Street environmental damage hot-zone in Marlborough, Mass., including The Lagoon (lower right) /Google Earth image

The list of DEP-monitored sites in Marlborough included about 10 properties along Maple Street, which caught my eye and prompted an afternoon walk up and down the road as soon as I drove back into town.

Along a quarter-mile stretch of Maple Street, every other small business property had either sustained petroleum-based contamination, including multiple oil and gasoline spills. One DEP-monitored site at the northern tip of the environmental-damage hot zone had been used a century ago to convert coal to a thick, molasses-like form of fuel oil. Records indicated early cleanup efforts removed a vein of dark black waste product from the coal conversion site. The vein of hard tar was found about eight feet below the ground's surface very close to the gully cut by the stream that feeds The Lagoon.

At an old gasoline station next to the coal conversion site, about a ton of contaminated soil had been stored in a pile near the edge of the stream gully. At least half of the tainted soil had mysteriously disappeared, according to DEP records, The guy in the station definitely did not want to talk about it. My best guess as I walked away from the station was the soil pile had either eroded into the stream or been raided for "midnight dumping" disposal at another location.

Cancer Report

Above, trees and light brush bound The Lagoon in Marlborough. The parking lot to the west of The Lagoon is behind a Maple Street business. Homes line the streets to the north and east of The Lagoon. Below, The Lagoon (upper left) drains into the Sudbury Reservoir. /Google Earth images

Environmental Memoir: Nasty Norwalk water

Map showing location of contamination Source Remediation Area 1 (SRA1) at Kellogg-Deering Well Field Superfund site in Norwalk, Conn. "The Complex" at SRA1 includes an aeration-based extraction system that was designed to help treat tainted groundwater. /EPA image

The second venue for my environmental-damage education was on the Connecticut Gold Coast in filthy rich Fairfield County.

In the summer of 1986, I served as CCAG's fundraising canvas director in Norwalk, which is located in the heart of The Constitution State's most affluent region near New York City. Soon after converting half of the basement in South Norwalk's Methodist Church into CCAG canvas office space, I visited the Kellogg-Deering Well Field Superfund site, which is in one of Norwalk's mostly tony northern neighborhoods.

I parked my car on Slocum Street and could see the flag-pole-high aerator on the other side of the railroad tracks, about a football field's length away.from where I was peering across the empty crew cabin of my crappy-cream-colored Pontiac Sunbird through the passenger window. Unlike the aerator that SRS workers used to evaporate highly contaminated water in Southington, Conn., the Superfund site aerators in Norwark were inside silos. Rather than using an aerator to release deadly toxins into the air, as was the case at SRS in Southington, the aerators in Norwalk helped extract tainted ground water from the poisoned aquifer below for treatment. In a five-year review report filed with the EPA in September 2012, officials at Superfund-site contractor Tetra Tech Nus in Pasadena, Calif., say the aeration effort is falling short of drawing enough groundwater to make significant progress in restoring the aquifer to drinking-water level.

Containing the aeration of the Kellogg-Deering Well Field's contaminated groundwater inside silos limits release of toxins into the air, and the review report found the Slocum Street Aerator safe for human health. But as I gazed the shiny structure a strong place-kick away from my car, I knew the baker's dozen homes on Slocum Street were less than a quarter of the houses packed into tenth-acre plots in the tightly packed subdivision off Main Avenue. I knew that Main Ave, obscured behind the line of maple trees that provided the Slocum Street Aerator with a pastoral backdrop, was lined with houses.

/EPA image

Environmental Memoir: SRS EPA cleanup stats

An Environmental Protection Agency-led cleanup "cooked" tons of toxic-waste tainted soil at the Solvent Recovery Service of New England Superfund site in Southington, Conn. The cooking treatment included vacuum-equipped machinery to collect carcinogens that were among the deadliest byproducts of the underground heating process. /Image via srsnesite.com

SRS Superfund site: By the numbers

• Address: 10 Lazy Lane, Southington, Conn.
• Proposed as Superfund site in December 1982. Listed as Superfund site in September 1983.
• "Cooking" and treating 56,670 cubic yards of toxic-waste tainted soil completed in February 2015. Lagoon area cooked: 1.7 acres
• From 1995 to 2013, a groundwater collection system at the Superfund site removed 16,000 pounds of hazardous materials
• May 2014 report: In Situ Thermal Remediation: Remedial Action Work Plan and Project Operations Plan, Gardner, Massachusetts-based TerraTherm, EPA and state regulated cleanup contractor
• Southington population growth, 2000 to 2010: 8.4 percent

Southington, Connecticut /Image via Google

Environmental Memoir: Southington deathly sorrow

It is hard for me to imagine that a nature trail will one day pass through the now rotted heart of the Solvent Recovery Service of New England Superfund site in Southington, Conn. /Image via Farmington Valley Trails Council

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.

The lagoon field, the most contaminated area of the SRS Superfund site, is prepped to be "cooked" in the fall 2013. /Image via srsnesite.com

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.

The Old Southington Landfill EPA Superfund site, at the center of this surveyor map featured in a 2006 health and nvironmental report, is surrounded by residential neighborhoods and commercial properties. /Kleinfelder image

Environmental Memoir: EPA is essential

In a case of horrific local and state government negligence, the decision to shift the primary source of drinking water in Flint, Mich., from the Detroit water supply to the highly acidic Flint River is spotlighting a nationwide water-infrastructure nightmare. /Image via www.dogonews.com

Environmental damage destroys life.

When I was a boy, every street and roadside in America was lined with garbage. The wild turkey, Revolutionary-era icon Ben Franklin's candidate for national bird, was nearly extinct in my home state and across the rest of New England.

Now, it is rare to see motorists toss bags of fast-food waste out their windows, and I see flocks of wild turkeys along the roadsides and highways of New Hampshire on nearly a daily basis.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the nation's top nature watchdog that was created nearly a half century ago with the support of a Republican president, and key safeguard laws such as the Clean Water Act are largely responsible for turning the tide in an epic American struggle that continues to this day.

The environmental-damage memoir that I will be writing and sharing in stages over the final handful of days leading to the 2016 N.H. Presidential Primary is inspired by the Republican candidates' misguided and self-serving attacks on essential protections that stand between The People and poisons.

In June 1952, toxic chemicals including oil burn in the Cuyahoga River in downtown Cleveland. The river caught fire several times, including a blaze in 1969 that stoked cries for environmental protection such as the founding of the U.S. Environmental Agency in 1970. /Image via perviouspro.net

Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump have all blasted the EPA. These turkeys would turn back the clock to the bad old days of deadly environmental damage in the 20th century.

Among the top contenders heading into Tuesday's first-in-the-nation primary, John Kasich is the closest candidate the Republican Party has to an environmentalist. The Ohio governor acknowledges the moral obligation to preserve the environment for future generations and accepts the existence of global warming. But he opposes the Obama administration's plan to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, which would include limiting Ohio's noxious coal-fired electricity generation.

Even with the EPA, Clean Water Act and other environmental protections, atrocities against nature remain a daily occurrence in America.

From the lead-tainted water disaster in poverty stricken Flint, Mich., to the historic natural gas leak in the affluent Porter Ranch neighborhood of Los Angeles, no American is safe from the unfettered devils of environmental damage.

I have seen the damage done.

Infrared imagery shows a natural gas leak at Southern California Gas Company's runaway well in the Porter Ranch neighborhood of Los Angeles. The natural gas leak, which has been compared in intensity to a volcanic eruption, began in October 2015 and continued spewing toxic chemicals into February 2016. /Image via losangeles.cbslocal.com

Truth about troops, PTSD and responsibility

Spc. Christopher Journeau took his own life in 2010 about six months after leaving the U.S. Army. The Iraq War veteran, who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) linked to his combat-zone service, was 23 when he died alone and broken in his New Hampshire apartment. /Family photo

The suffering of our country's combat veterans is not fodder for scoring political points or deceiving the public.

Recently, an American politician made comments directed to a national audience designed to deceive the public about who bears responsibility for her son's struggles with the psychological impact of his service in the U.S. military.

Here is the truth about troops who suffer the effects of PTSD: The commander-in-chief and the branches of the armed services guard the front lines in the battle against this treatable psychological condition, but every family member and friend of a veteran needs to be on guard, too.

I learned this truth in a way that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

I learned this truth sitting face-to-face with a stranger in her home for two hours as she shared in agonizing detail the story of her soldier son's PTSD-fueled spiral into desperation and suicide. After his death, this mom did everything she could to investigate the Army's response to her son's mental health problems, and she has been working with military and government officials in New Hampshire to try to spare other families from enduring her family's torment.

This mom, who I deeply admire for her courage in the face of adversity, does not hold anyone in the Army chain of command solely responsible for her son's death. This mom is incapable of looking for any individual  to blame for the loss of her son because her share of the responsibility for Christopher Journeau's death will haunt her for the rest of her life.

This mom could not see that Chris was fighting a life-and-death struggle with PTSD in his final months. She did not know enough about the symptoms of PTSD to see the warning signs that Chris exhibited in her home after his honorable discharge from the Army. She was not prepared to help her son fight the most daunting battle of his all-too-short life.

This mom, who was transformed from a stranger to an unforgettable figure in my life after sharing Chris' story with me, will never forgive herself and never look for someone else to blame for what happened to her son.

Journalist death toll rises in 2015

Last year, 69 journalists were killed with the motive linked to the performance of their professional duties. Another 25 journalists lost their lives in killings with unconfirmed motives. /Committee to Protect Journalists

The number of journalists killed in the line of duty ticked upward last year, rising from 61 dead in 2014 to 69 lost.

In 2015, the bravery required to work as a journalist in countries engulfed in war or riddled with corruption is evident in the statistics:

• In the 47 journalist murders last year, no one has been brought to justice in 83% of the cases
• In the murder cases, 60% of journalists were threatened prior to their killings, 21% were taken captive before they were killed, and 15% were tortured
• Politics was by far the most dangerous beat to cover in 2015, accounting for part or all of the motivation behind 68% of journalist killings
• Political groups (52%), military officials (16%) and government officials (12%) were the leading suspects in orchestrating journalist killings

A free press is a bulwark of democracy, and journalists continue to man the front lines in the struggles against tyranny around the world.

Terrorists exploit US gun culture in San Bernardino

On Dec. 2, 2015, a husband-and-wife duo killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif. The couple was armed with semi-automatic assault rifles and semi-automatic handguns. /San Bernardino Police Department image

You had to see this coming.

In America, easy access to firearms provides terrorists with an easy pathway to unleashing murderous hails of gunfire in the U.S. homeland.

Wednesday's apparently ISIS-inspired mass shooting in San Bernardino shines light on a glaring terrorism vulnerability in the United States: easy access to semi-automatic firearms.

ISIS, or any other terrorist foe, does not have to invade the U.S. homeland to inflict deadly damage. Whether they are lone wolves, cells or duos, as in the case of the San Bernardino shooters, easy access to semi-automatic firearms makes mass shootings easy for terrorists to execute.

You have to see more of this coming.

America ignoring gun violence wake-up calls

Television reporter Alison Parker, 24, is gunned down while conducting an interview on Aug. 26, 2015. /Image via washingtontimes.com

Maybe this time will be different.

I doubt it.

In December 2012, the slaughter of 26 school children and educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School barely moved the needle on common sense restrictions for the possession of firearms.

Last week's slaughter of two television journalists in Virginia, which was captured on video from both the perspective of the killed and the killer, is about as close as we can get to rubbing America's collective nose in the country's gun violence problem.

Before most Americans return to sticking their collective heads in the sand, I hope at least some of them see the eye-popping U.S. gun violence statistics compiled by German Lopez for Vox:

• There have been at least 885 mass shootings since Sandy Hook.
• So far in 2015, there has been an average of nearly one mass shooting every day.
• States with more guns have more police officers who are killed in the line of duty. Every 10 percent increase in gun ownership correlates to 10 more police officers dying in homicides.
• Firearms suicides outpace firearms homicides by a wide margin. In 2013, there were 21,175 firearms suicides and 11,208 firearms suicides.
• Based on homicides by firearms per 1 million people, America is a colossal outlier among developed nations. In 2012, the American rate of homicides by firearms per 1 million people was 29.7. Switzerland posted the next-highest rate at 7.7. Australia posted the lowest rate at 1.4.

Simply put, America's love affair with guns is a cruel joke. On this issue, we are the laughingstock of the world.

Iranian nukes tip of the mushroom cloud

Image via AFP

The mega-problem with Iran's nuclear weapons program has little to do with the Iranian government and mostly to do with the astronomical risks associated with nuclear weapons technology.

Seventy years ago, humankind's greatest war unlocked the unparalleled destructive power of atomic energy. U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped end that great war in an eye-blinding flash, closing a conflict that had slaughtered and maimed tens of millions. But the invention of nuclear weapons has been like the opening of Pandora's Box, unleashing a great, uncontrollable evil on the world, with only hope standing between humanity and annihilation.

The subatomic science essential to building nuclear weapons is more complicated than rocket science. But the atom bomb theory perfected during the Manhattan Project and the practice of nuclear warfare perfected in the skies over Japan in 1945 are relatively easy to replicate in countries determined to possess The Bomb.

Iran is far from the first nation to storm the barred gates of The Nuclear Club and threaten to upset the international pecking order.

In addition to the five WWII victors -- America, China, France, Great Britain and Russia -- there are at least a half-dozen other countries that possess nuclear weapons. The relative newcomers to The Nuclear Club include arch enemies India and Pakistan, as well as North Korea, the longest-standing Stalinist state in history.

Unless the international community bans nuclear weapons, Iran will be far from the last country to develop The Bomb.

In addition to India and Pakistan in South Asia, atomic arms races are budding around the world. Iranian leaders have pointed to Israel's top-secret nuclear weapons program as justification for Tehran's atomic weapon ambitions. In response to the North Korean leadership's drive to become nuclear-armed, even atom-bomb-adverse Japan is considering whether to build and deploy nuclear weapons.

It will take a Herculean effort to close Pandora's Nuclear Box. But only a ban on the possession of nuclear weapons can save humanity from an otherwise inevitable atomic warfare nightmare.