Word: holbrooke
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...Holbrook, Mass...
Every town ought to have a place like the Pastures. For as long as anyone in Holbrook can recall ("For ages and ages," one mother says), the children of this Boston suburb have used the expanse of vacant land as their exclusive preserve, a wild place, slightly apart. It is all-purpose terrain, perfect for many kinds of serendipity, a place where kids can build a secret fort, practice daredevil bike riding over hillocks called the Camel Humps, share the painful silences of adolescent romance or even read a book alone...
...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...