Massachusetts construction company faces criminal charges for using contaminated soil on 6-10 road project
PROVIDENCE – The office of Attorney General Peter F. Neronha on Wednesday charged the Massachusetts company hired by the state to rebuild the 6-10 connector with illegally using nearly 5,000 tons of contaminated soil and stone on the $247-million road project, and lying about it after the fact.
Barletta Heavy Division and Dennis Ferreira, the former superintendent of the project for the Canton, Massachusetts-based company, are each facing two counts of illegal disposal of solid waste, one count of operating a solid waste management facility without a license, and one count of providing a false document to a public official. The defendants are set to be arraigned in Superior Court, Providence, on Feb. 1.
While some of the material containing hazardous substances came from the Pawtucket/Central Falls commuter rail station project, the bulk of it was trucked across the state line from Massachusetts.
“In the end, it comes down to this: as alleged in the information, Mr. Ferreira and Barletta Heavy Division used the 6-10 site as an environmental dumping ground,” Neronha said at a news conference Wednesday morning. “Not only for Rhode Island waste. Worse, they made Rhode Island a dumping ground for Massachusetts waste.”
In response to the filing, Barletta said it violated no criminal laws and described the charges as baseless "both legally and factually."
"Barletta intends to fight these charges vigorously and is confident that it will prevail and restore its impeccable reputation once the facts are fully and accurately presented in court," the company said in a statement.
The charges in state court follow a separate investigation by the office of U.S. Attorney Zachary A. Cunha that resulted in criminal charges being leveled against Ferreira in federal court for making false statements and in Barletta paying $1.5 million in civil penalties for its part in the scheme. Ferreira, who was fired from his job at Barletta, pleaded guilty on Dec. 14 to three counts of making a false statement in connection with a federally-funded highway project and is set to be sentenced on March 16.
The federal and state cases centered upon the use in the summer of 2020 of backfill that Barletta improperly trucked in from other projects it was working on to the 6-10 location. After workers complained that the company was disposing of hazardous materials on the site, Local 57 of the International Union of Operating Engineers, whose members drove bulldozers and other heavy machinery at the site, tested soil samples and found toxins at unacceptable levels.
The union notified the state Department of Transportation and the Department of Environmental Management of its findings. The DOT followed up with tests of its own and also found levels of contaminants, including carcinogens, above regulatory limits.
Under its contract with the state for the project that got underway in 2018, Barletta had agreed to a plan that laid out standards for soil composition and containment. The plan required the company to meet those health and safety standards with any soil it brought in to use as fill.
In violation of the agreement, Barletta brought in material from two other projects of which it was the lead contractor. The fill included untested stone from a train station project in Jamaica Plain in Boston that was later discovered to be contaminated and soil from the Pawtucket/Central Falls rail station project that the company knew contained hazardous substances.
Previous tests of the Pawtucket/Central Falls station site, which had been used as a rail yard for nearly 150 years, had confirmed the presence of arsenic, as well as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, a class of chemicals that occur in coal, crude oil and gasoline. At Ferreira’s direction, Barletta had 52 truckloads, or 1,114 tons, of material delivered from the site. Another 93 truckloads, totaling 3,460 tons, were brought in from Jamaica Plain.
According to both the state and federal criminal complaints against him, when officials confronted Ferreira about the source of the fill, he lied about its origins and provided a false certification that it had been tested and met the standards for use.
After actual tests were carried out, it took two months before Barletta notified authorities that the soil was in fact contaminated, Neronha said. In the meantime, the company continued to use the tainted fill.
Neronha said Barletta was ordered to remove the contaminated material, but misrepresented the amount that was used and disposed of only 6 truckloads, or about 130 tons, as directed, at the Central Landfill in Johnston.
In its statement, Barletta disputed the characterization of the soil and stone at issue as "solid waste" and that the deliveries of soil from the Pawtucket/Central Falls rail project and from Massachusetts were overseen solely by Ferreira "without the authorization or knowledge of Barletta."
Neronha credited Sgt. Sheila Paquette, of the DEM’s Division of Law Enforcement, who led the investigation, and staff with his office who are prosecuting the case.
He said the contaminated material is buried within the Route 6-10 project site and currently poses no public health hazard. There are no plans to try it remove it.
“From talking to the environmental experts here, the consensus is to try and dig up and remove the materials at this point would pose more of a threat to public health than simply leaving them there,” Neronha said.
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Neronha charges Mass. firm for using tainted fill in 6-10 project
