EPA begins clearing Cranston site

CRANSTON — The U.S Environmental Protection Agency has begun the process of cleaning
up a Libera Street site contaminated by a defunct electroplating company and possibly
earlier jewelry manufacturers that occupied a building on the site until 1984.
Rhode Island Technical Plating was ordered by the EPA March 29 to clean up acids,
caustics, cyanides, oxidizers, waste sludges and poisons from the site it had
occupied until early this year. The company was placed in receivership April 19.
The site is in a mixed residential, commercial and industrial neighborhood. The
EPA ordered the chemicals removed because they constituted a potential hazard.
An EPA emergency services contractor IT Corporation, Inc. began the cleanup July
17 and it is continuing.