Environment: Living, Dangerously, with Toxic Wastes

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Abbott figures that her housewifey style has been a tactical advantage. "They weren't scared of me." One day when Baird & McGuire was still operating, she arrived at the executive office unannounced, went in to see Cameron Baird, the head of the company, and got a firsthand look at the contamination from him. A public meeting last June with EPA officials at Holbrook High School, Abbott says, "was a real lynch mob. And I think I led it." She sounds both abashed and proud. The EPA had intended simply to present its latest findings. Instead its representatives faced the point-by- point anger of 300 people who demanded to know why, three years after contamination had been discovered, Baird & McGuire had not yet been cleaned up. The Government shortly agreed to all five of PURE's demands.

Among other things, townspeople wanted a barrier around the site. In August the EPA finished a new chain link fence, topped with three strands of barbed wire and hung with warning signs. (Some days, however, its gate has stood wide open.) The source of all the trouble is a ratty compound of cinder blocks and sheet metal, pink clapboard and silver tanks. One large white building is marked only by a tiny skull-and-crossbones label on the door. A few yards outside the site one afternoon in September, four men and a woman in boots and rubbery white suits used a huge tread-mounted pump to dig out a 10-ft. plug of earth for testing by the EPA. Their gas masks hung nearby, just above the spot where a dark little stream flows from the toxic site under the fence and away into the forest. For now, the locals who are worried are waiting. They await the results of more soil and water tests, and the results of more precisely targeted health studies. Most of all, naturally, they await results at the site itself. They want a permanent cleanup, says Ross, "so that we can all go back into Sleepy Hollow and rest assured that nothing is wrong." Curiously, not even the local activists plan to move away. "Where am I going to move," asks Abbott, "that it's not going to crop up in my backyard again? Where is safe?"

Casmalia, Calif.:

Fumes and Fears

First you tear up 250 acres of California ranchland. Then you fill the holes with tons of sewage, cyanide, Nair hair-removal cream, spoiled Coca-Cola syrup, winery dregs, rocket fuel, rat carcasses, nitric acid, paint chips and fish organs. What do you get? A state-of-the-art toxic-waste-treatment facility.

The site north of Santa Barbara run by Casmalia Resources is supposed to be a model of its kind. It is equipped with monitoring wells, its own laboratory, a dozen government permits and a full-time public relations manager. "We do not view ourselves as part of the problem," says Jan Lachenmaier, the p.r. woman. "We view ourselves as part of the solution."