LAWRENCE - After receiving written demands from state and federal environmental officials to shut down a tractor training school and lock the front gate of an abandoned junkyard on Marston Street, a North Andover company finally complied this week with an order the city issued a month ago.
Both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Environmental Protection told First Lawrence Financial that the school and any activity at the former John C. Tombarello & Sons Salvage Co. site was illegal and posed a public health threat.
First Lawrence Financial and its president, James Grifoni, a local developer and businessman, last week declined comment on the EPA order, which threatens the site's owners or operators with fines up to $32,500 a day per violation and possible jail time.
The company is registered with the state as a domestic limited liability company, which holds the bank notes to the Marston Street property.
In its letter to First Lawrence Financial, the EPA ordered the company to halt all activity until the agency has approved a cleanup plan. Soil at the site, which is across the street from Parthum School, has been contaminated for several years by polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs - which are used as lubricants and insulators in electrical transformers and are believed to cause cancer.
In a recent letter, the DEP warned First Lawrence Financial that it could lose its liability exemption granted to secured lenders under state law - and thus be held responsible for any environmental damage caused at the site if it continued to defy the order.
Secured lenders that obey environmental rules are not considered owners or operators of a polluted site - and thus can't be held responsible. But continued defiance of the environmental orders by First Lawrence Financial would forfeit that exemption, according to the DEP.
"By allowing unrestricted access to the site via an open, unlocked and unsecured gate, by allowing the excavation and screening of contaminated soils resulting in the generation of fugitive dust, and by allowing debris and vehicles to exit the site without proper decontamination, you have acted in a manner that may have caused and may continue to cause the release of contamination at this site to become much worse than it otherwise would have been," wrote Joanne Fagan, section chief of Brownfields/Permits for the DEP.
The EPA and DEP intervened at the request of City Council President Patrick Blanchette after First Lawrence Financial refused to obey a cease and desist order issued by the city's Department of Inspectional Services.
"I think them locking the gate is a small victory for the city," Blanchette said yesterday.
"I'm sorry that I had to work so hard to get him to understand the severity of the matter, but for now the gates are closed and the work is being halted," he said.
