A Tale of Two Polluters The Transcript provides today's lesson in irony.**

First we have the tragic plight of Leo Senecal:

Mr. Senecal, trying to save the city a few bucks back in 1998, illegally dumped three barrels containing 150 gallons of oil into an unlined landfill. He was director of public works at the time. After he was caught, he was publicly humiliated, fined $9,000 for the cleanup of 125 pounds of contaminated soil, demoted and suspended without pay for six months.

Now overzealous enforcers want to stick it to Mr. Senecal further by sticking to the letter of a 1996 law that states convicted felons must lose their municipal pensions. In Mr. Senecal's case, that would amount to $36,000 per year.

And then we have the owners of Sprague's abandoned Brown Street mills:

NORTH ADAMS — The last vestiges of the Sprague Electric Co. on Brown Street will soon be a memory — all of the large brick buildings in the former mill complex are scheduled for demolition this summer.

...
Great American Financial Resources — formerly known as American Annuity Group Inc., the successor of Sprague Electric — had plans to demolish the buildings after the facility was vacated by Commonwealth Sprague's Component Division in late 2001 when the manufacturing jobs moved to Mexico. The mills have remained empty for the past six years

...
The company has been cleaning the Brown Street property under the supervision of the state DEP for over a decade. In 1995, the company was required to clean and remove soil contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) from an old outfall channel at the plant. The ground around the plant, including an old dump on Fairgrounds Avenue and the former Avon Street, were also contaminated by trichloroethylene (TCE), a toxic chemical degreaser used at the Brown Street plant.

Exposure over time can lead to health problems such as nausea, liver, kidney or lung cancer, skin rashes, eye problems, kidney disease, heart problems, deafness and birth defects. The contamination eventually spread into the groundwater in the area surrounding the plant. The DEP is still monitoring the toxic plume, which has made its way west down to Harding Avenue.

"For the most part, the remediation is done," Gruber said. "We still have remediation issues that are being addressed with the groundwater."

OK, the company contaminated the ground, laid-off the workers, moved the jobs to Mexico and then has the gall to say:

He did not disclose the cost of the demolition, but said it was a "substantial investment."

If that quote is in proper context (and knowing Jen's work, it most likely is) I feel the need to punch someone from AFR in the nose.

So, here we have a solid working class civil servant with four decades of public service who may have his retirement years ruined by overzealous enforcement of a draconian pollution law juxtaposed against a large corporate entity that has screwed this community environmentally and financially. And their spokesperson, Mr. Gruber, calls the creation of another vacant lot sitting atop a "toxic plume" a "substantial investment."

Shakespeare once had a character joke - "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

Personally, I say start with the MBAs.

**By which I mean the real thing, not the Alanis Morrisette version. "Rain on your wedding day" is *not* ironic. For that matter, the majority of her examples were not ironic, which, given that the song asks the question, "Isn't it ironic?" and the answer is obviously "NO!", then, perhaps, there is some unintended irony. But enough of my parts-of-speech screed. Ms. Morrisette owes every English Teacher who taught in the '90s a big apology. (and hopefully my former teachers will forgive that egregious example of a run-on sentence!)  ¶ 8:51 PM