Beside it was a mammoth wooden dollhouse, handcrafted by her father. Melanie Russell played beside this pipe for hours every day. The most potent air in the home was leaking into the basement through an imperceptible gap between a cutout in the wall and the water main pipe. Melanie Russell developed leukemia at age 3.
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Trichloroethene, a chemical used in manufacturing as a metal degreaser, is a suspected carcinogen linked to leukemia. In the Russell household in 2001, EPA indoor air quality tests detected 1,1-dichloroethene and trichloroethene, two synthetic toxic compounds. "It's sort of like an Erin Brockovich situation," said Ted Russell, who is tall and personable with a silver beard. Meanwhile, hazardous chemicals continue to leach out of the ground, and a second generation of residents is learning to live with it. Officials attribute the stalled cleanup project to the intricacies of the Superfund process. Money designated for cleanup is running out. But despite the urgency with which public health officials 16 years ago adopted these polluted properties into the program, the bulk of the waste remains unaddressed. The federal Superfund program was created in 1980 on the heels of the Love Canal disaster in Niagara Falls, N.Y., to mobilize and fund cleanup efforts at abandoned hazardous waste dumps. The worst offender, Raymark, littered not just its own site, but hundreds of nearby businesses, parks and homes. Hazardous waste has become part of the physical and emotional landscape of this proud, industrial town that once thrived on the success of the very manufacturing plants that have since shuttered and left behind wastelands. "There are no controls to ensure people are informed," said Jim Murphy, a community involvement coordinator for the EPA. In Stratford, the result of this lack of transparency is widespread buyers' remorse among homeowners who unknowingly settled in a neighborhood buried with poisonous chemicals. There are no readily available public documents that indicate which Stratford homes are part of the Superfund site.
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The state disclosure form doesn't require sellers to answer any questions specifically about hazardous waste. Yet nearly a dozen residents interviewed by the Connecticut Post who moved into homes here since the contamination was discovered, including families living in homes without devices to clear the indoor air of toxins, said they were not told their properties are part of a toxic dump site.
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Today, temporary safety measures are in place at all but 16 homes above the groundwater plume to prevent residents from breathing in contaminates. The EPA determined the source of the waste is Raymark Industries, a now-bankrupt automotive manufacturer that dumped asbestos, carcinogens and other hazardous chemicals on hundreds of properties in town during most of the 20th century. Ted and Amy Russell moved to Willow Avenue to start a family in May 1995 - almost six years before federal regulators discovered that toxic waste buried beneath the neighborhood was percolating out of the ground and trickling into residents' homes.
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When trapped within four walls, the toxins become concentrated and potentially hazardous to breathe. The gas can enter homes through plumbing gaps and cracks in the foundation. The water is not used for drinking, but it releases toxic gas that permeates the soil and disperses into the air. Buried beneath more than 100 homes in a middle-class neighborhood wedged between the Housatonic River and a stretch of Interstate 95 is a 500-acre pool of severely polluted groundwater.