Narragansett Electric Co. will pay $5 million to reimburse Massachusetts’ costs in cleaning up a hazardous waste site in Attleboro, Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly announced Thursday.
The agreement, filed in the Federal District Court in Boston, will be held for 120 days for public review and comment. Following court approval, the settlement amount, which includes the original costs plus interest, will be paid to Massachusetts, the attorney general said.
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The agreement resolves a cost recovery case initially filed on behalf of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP).
“This was a long, hard fight,” Reilly said in a statement. “I am happy to report, at long last, that we have won full repayment of our cleanup expenses, with interest.”
A century ago, the site on Mendon Road in Attleboro, was an undeveloped area at which waste generated by a coal gasification plant operated by a predecessor of Narragansett Electric had been dumped and buried. The waste buried at the site included many truckloads of “box waste,” a bright blue sludge byproduct of processes used to purify the coal gas by removing the lethal cyanide gas it contained. Box waste contains ferric ferrocyanide (FFC), a complex cyanide compound that can dissociate and release free cyanide, which is acutely toxic, in certain environmental conditions.
Years later, the site was sold, and in the 1970s and early 1980s, a portion of it was developed for residential use. Originally, the homeowners were unaware of the large quantities of FFC sludge buried just below the surface of their yards and, in one instance, just below the basement floor. But after one homeowner uncovered the mass of blue sludge when grading his yard, an investigation by state agencies led to the discovery that FFC sludge was buried at numerous locations around the neighborhood.
MassDEP cleaned up the site between 1984 and 1986 and, in 1987, sued the company in federal district court to recover its costs. The case was litigated in the district court, the federal courts of appeals in Boston and Washington, and in proceedings before the Environmental Protection Agency proceedings.
