NASHUA – Dennis Reid wouldn’t have bought his home on Cassandra Lane in 1984 if he knew then what he knows now – that he’s living next to one of New Hampshire’s most contaminated hazardous-waste sites in a neighborhood he suspects is infested with creosote.

But the worst part for Reid is not knowing for sure.

“If it’s going to kill me, it won’t matter because we’ll never know for sure,” Reid said as he planted trees along the sidewalk in front of his house. “I’m not very happy about it.”

Reid, 57, landscapes his yard meticulously because almost everything he plants dies, and he believes it has something to do with the creosote from the nearby Beazer site.

Reid’s home is less than a football field from the western perimeter of Nashua’s notorious Beazer property, and he says he has dug up creosote and railroad spikes in his backyard.

“You know it’s creosote because when you pour water on the sand, it just runs off,” Reid said.

Creosote, which is classified as a carcinogen, disallows water from permeating through the soil when it’s present in free-phase form. It also comes with a potent smell, resembling the scent of petroleum and mothballs.

For 60 years, 1924-84, the Beazer property behind Reid’s neighborhood was used to produce railroad ties. Beazer used creosote, a popular wood preservative, to prevent the ties from rotting, and dumped the byproduct in pits throughout the area.

Reid’s house, along with countless others near the Beazer property, has never been tested for the presence of creosote.

“If a resident wanted their property tested, they would have to submit an official complaint,” said Mike McClusky, the Department of Environmental Services project manager for the Beazer site. “We haven’t received anything like that.”

Long wait continues

While many Nashuans have forgotten about the contamination at the Beazer site, it has been a very real concern with Reid for decades.

Reid purchased his property on Cassandra Lane in the same year Beazer’s railroad-tie plant was forcibly closed by New Hampshire authorities after creosote was discovered leaking into the Merrimack River from a containment pond near Greeley Park.

Twenty-nine years later, he is still waiting for the area to be cleaned up.

Beazer East is working to finalize site-specific research on the contaminated brownfield before its continue with implementation of a “remedial-action plan” intended to clean up the site.

Beazer’s remedial-action plan was submitted last December. Nearly 11 months later, it still hasn’t been approved by Beazer.

Yet, McCluskey sees no need to enforce a consent agreement, penned in 2007, between Beazer and state agencies.

“They’re being cooperative,” McCluskey said.

The 30-page agreement forces Beazer to address all contaminated areas “as expeditiously and effectively as practical,” with Beazer paying for all clean-up costs. By signing the consent agreement, Beazer waived its right to legally challenge the state’s assertions that hazardous waste had been dumped illegally on the site for decades.

The agreement is legally binding and offers pathways for legal action if Beazer doesn’t comply.

In the interim, as Beazer and the DES continue their lengthy back-and-forth, spotters from the Nashua River Watershed Association continue to log issues with the Merrimack River near the Beazer site.

“We’re still reporting creosote discharges in the river,” Nashua River Watershed Association spokeswoman Kathryn Nelson said.

Nelson said she is “concerned with the time frame” of the cleanup at the Beazer site and called the process “slow and meticulous.” When The Telegraph informed Nelson about oil booms, designed to contain the leaking creosote, which had recently been spotted washed up onshore, she called the prospect “ridiculous.”

The Telegraph’s calls to Beazer, which is headquartered in Pittsburgh, went unanswered and unreturned.

Beyond the barbed wire

Reid believes that before his development was built in 1984, it might have been used for creosote dumping.

“I’ve talked to people who used to hunt here before they built the houses,” Reid said. “They saw creosote dumped in the woods.”

Reid said he wishes he had known what he was getting into when he bought his home.

“Who would want to live next to that?” Reid asked.

“We used to go for walks in the woods and come back with globs of creosote on our shoes,” Reid said. “There were even days when I could smell the creosote at my house.”

Today, Reid says things in his neighborhood are better than they were. For one, he hasn’t caught a whiff of creosote from his house in years.

“I’m happy something is being done, but the process is never-ending,” Reid said.

Reid said people in his neighborhood remain skeptical of Beazer and curious about what’s beyond the barbed-wire fence that surrounds the Beazer property.

“People go over the fence sometimes,” Reid said. “… We can’t take their word for it anymore.”

Reid also called some of Beazer’s suggestions over the years “laughable.”

In the 1990s, Beazer submitted ambitious plans in hopes of turning its 97-acre brownfield into a recreational complex, complete with baseball fields, walking trails and basketball courts.

The plans to construct a park and ballfields atop the Beazer site were scrapped when testing revealed the extent of creosote contamination on the property.

“It’s taken them 29 years to clean this place up, and they’re still not done,” Reid said as he surveyed the fence that separates Greeley Park from Beazer’s property along the Merrimack River. “The river is still ridiculously polluted.”

“At first they said there was no creosote in Greeley Park. Now, we know that’s not true.”

According to McCluskey, the consent agreement forcing Beazer to clean up the creosote only applies to Greeley Park and the Beazer property itself.

“If there was any creosote dumping outside the property that took place, we are not aware of that historically,” McCluskey said.

McClusky said his agency didn’t test nearby residences because the DES “had no reason to look there.” McClusky added that his agency used maps and historical records to determine where creosote was dumped.

McCluskey said if creosote was discovered below the homes on Cassandra Lane, it would be likely to raise eyebrows.

“We’d probably take a look at that and we’d probably ask Beazer to take a look at that, too,” McCluskey said.

But McCluskey isn’t willing to rule anything out.

“We’re talking about a site that was built long before I was born,” McCluskey said. “I couldn’t tell you for sure what they did in 1938.”

McCluskey calls Nashua’s Beazer site “one of the more complicated in the state,” and said there are likely to be “no easy answers” in addressing the cleanup.

Frustrated, forgotten

The last meeting the DES held to update Reid and his neighbors about the Beazer site was in 2011, and since then, the residents who once boiled with frustration at public hearings have been mostly silent.

“It’s more forgotten than anything,” said one local, a 39-year-old man who works on Hills Ferry Road and remembers the property from his childhood. “The river still stinks like creosote and it makes you not want to swim in that area.”

In the meantime, real-estate agents such as Tim Parrott, of Nashua-based Keller Williams Realty, continue to sell homes in the neighborhood and have no legal requirement to tell people about the hazardous property next door.

Parrott said he was unaware the Beazer property was a hazardous-waste site.

The state DES has no program to educate homeowners about the dangers of creosote or to inform new residents about the toxicity of the Beazer property, McCluskey said.

Parrott said the Beazer site didn’t factor into the listing price of 14 Syracuse Road, which is being advertised with a price tag of $219,900.

“I’m not aware of any negative impact in that neighborhood,” Parrott said.

Many who live and work in Reid’s neighborhood said they knew little about the contamination directly behind their homes. Others expressed concern about going on the record to talk about Beazer.

The federal Centers for Disease Control lists creosote as hazardous waste and says on its website, “Long-term exposure to low levels of creosote through direct contact with skin has resulted in skin cancer.”

Further, the CDC cites studies showing that children who play in creosote-contaminated soil have more skin rashes than children playing in clean soil.

There is no shortage of children in Reid’s neighborhood.

“It’s a very young neighborhood,” Reid said as children exited a school bus several houses away. “It’s always been that way. Families come and go.”

As the DES continues to wait for Beazer to approve a site-remediation plan, creosote will continue to make its sluggish succession into the Merrimack River and Reid will continue to look through the barbed-wire fence that surrounds the Beazer property with curiosity and concern.

He will continue to plant trees in front of his house, wearing only a pair of gardening gloves, and hope that whatever has been killing his shrubbery doesn’t have the same effect on him.

Bradford Randall can be reached
at 594-6557 or brandall@nashua
telegraph.com. Also, follow Randall on Twitter (@telegraph_brad).