Caught in the middle

The Hopeful Journeys school lies just below the contaminated Varian site. Now it's tangled up in a dispute between MassDEP and the property owner.

If you’re driving along Tozer Road toward North Beverly, you can glance to the right and see the former Varian site, the place that has been in the news over the last five years due to ongoing contamination problems.

Below the site, on the other side of a stone wall, sits the Hopeful Journeys Educational Center, a school for students from ages 3 to 22 with autism and other disabilities.

The juxtaposition of a special education school and a contaminated industrial site looming in the background raises a natural question. But in five years of writing about Varian, it’s one I’ve never addressed. Until now.

Is the contamination at Varian affecting the school? Everyone involved — MassDEP, Varian and the property owner — says no. But now MassDEP is raising the prospect that another hazardous chemical, one not associated with the Varian site, needs attention.

On March 17, MassDEP sent a “notice of noncompliance” to the owner of 28 Tozer Road, the building that houses Hopeful Journeys. The agency ordered the property owner, Ernest Santin, to undertake a detailed assessment of a hazardous chemical that it says was released at the property.

The notice, full of bureaucratic jargon that makes it difficult to understand, sounds kind of ominous. It refers to tests taken a decade ago that found a contaminant in the indoor air and soil that was higher than the limits allowed for a school. At the time the building was vacant and Hopeful Journeys had yet to move in.

But, MassDEP said in its notice, “When the building at 28 Tozer Road became occupied by a school, these conditions would have constituted a Condition of Substantial Release Migration.”

MassDEP said this particular chemical — trans-1,2,-dichloroethylene, which is included on a list of “high priority chemicals” to study by the Environmental Protection Agency — is not coming from the Varian property, so it’s Santin’s responsibility to keep an eye on it.

So why is MassDEP only now ordering Santin to assess the situation, under threat of fines or criminal prosecution? And the biggest question of all, of course, is what it all means for the students and teachers inside the building?

I asked MassDEP about the safety of the school. A spokesperson said there have been no reported health problems, and that a “sub-slab pressurization system” was installed under the building to prevent chemicals from getting inside.

Santin referred me to Luke Fabbri, the president of Geological Field Services whom Santin hired a decade ago to keep an eye on the contamination. On Sunday, Fabbri sent me a report showing that tests of the indoor air at the school conducted just this past January showed there was no risk. He also sent emails from Varian (in 2024) and MassDEP (in 2020) saying pretty much the same thing.

Fabbri said MassDEP is only bringing up this issue now because it is upset that Santin won’t allow Varian access to his property to build an underground barrier along Tozer Road. The barrier is intended to stop or slow the flow of chemicals from the Varian site to the neighborhood on the other side of Tozer. It is one of several new measures that Varian is taking to clean up its former property at 150 Sohier Road after decades of ineffective measures.

Fabbri said the project would be extremely disruptive to Hopeful Journeys. Varian wants to use the school parking lot to stage heavy equipment, and there would be weeks of drilling just outside the building while students are in school, he said.

“The Santins said, 'We’ve allowed these people on our property numerous times since we owned the building in 2015. But we don’t want to have three-plus months of drilling in front of our school when there are other actions they could take.’”

Fabbri went so far as to accuse MassDEP of “bullying” their way onto people’s property.

But what about the chemical found on the property? Fabbri said it was discovered way back in 2015 when the Santins bought the building and were having it checked for chemicals. Fabbri said the trans-DCE, as it is called, was coming from a degreaser, a piece of equipment that was used by the previous tenant of the building, an electonics manufacturer. Fabbri said the degreaser was removed before the school moved in.

Fabbri said his company tested the indoor air and soil at Hopeful Journeys in January and that no trans-DCE was detected. He said that confirms that the degreaser was the source of the chemical, and that there was no “release” of the chemical, as MassDEP contends.

All of this might be considered just an inside-baseball kind of fight between a state agency and a property owner. But it’s not just any property. It’s home to a school for kids with autism.

Not that anybody reads these filings, which are public information on a MassDEP website, or understands them if they do, but if I were a parent of a kid at Hopeful Journeys and read that the state said there had been an ominous-sounding “Substantial Release Migration” on the property, I wouldn’t be very happy.

To me that’s a big flaw with the state’s waste site cleanup program, or at least the public outreach part of it. Varian submitted literally tens of thousands of pages of documents to the website over the years about its cleanup, but people either didn’t read them or couldn’t understand them. It wasn’t until I wrote a story for The Salem News in 2020 that people realized the problem wasn’t getting any better, and that chemicals were still flowing into the nearby neighborhood. Since then, under pressure from residents and local officials, Varian has embarked on a multi-million new plan to clean up the site.

When I saw the recent notice about the Hopeful Journeys site, I was relucant to even write a story. A headline saying “State orders assessment of hazardous chemical at school for autism” is not very helpful. It’s sounds too alarming. But that’s what’s happening.

Fabbri also sent me a letter that he sent to Jill Larsen, the founder and executive director of Hopeful Journeys, reassuring her that the school is safe for students and teachers. Larsen did not return my messages, but Fabbri said the school is “very concerned about the misinformation that the letter (from MassDEP) represents.”

“You have a population of people who are dealing with children with autism and it must be extremely stressful,” he said. “The Santins have gone out of their way to be protective of their occupants. They are truly upset about all of this.”

In response to Santin’s refusal to allow access to his property, MassDEP has revoked 28 Tozer’s “downgradient property status,” which the state had granted in 2016 and which meant that Varian was responsible for addressing any chemicals that flowed to the property. As for the order for Santin to assess the trans-DCE on his property, MassDEP laid out a strict timeline that includes five different deadlines between now and 2027.

The real impact of the whole dispute is that the Tozer Road barrier, which was a big part of Varian’s new plans to clean up its site and protect the neighborhood, is not going to be built. Varian officials have likened the barrier to a catcher’s mitt in its ability to ‘catch’ chemicals that are flowing in the groundwater downhill from Varian. They said it was needed because another part of the cleanup plan, which involves super-heating the ground on the Varian site itself in order to eliminate a major source of the contamination, could stir up the chemicals and cause more of them to flow toward Tozer Road.

Kellee Boudreault, a member of the Voices of Concern North Beverly neighborhood group that formed in response to the Varian contamination, told me the fact that the barrier will not be installed is “extremely disappointing.”

Boudreault said the cleanup efforts have gained a lot of momentum over the last few years, and neighbors like the idea of a ‘catcher’s mitt’ protecting their homes and families.

“It’s unfortunate,” she said. “The barrier feels like it offers some protection for the neighbors who are feeling very unsettled.”

Santin is not the only property owner who won’t allow access to his property in order for the barrier to be installed. Mark McKenna, who owns the building next door at 30 Tozer Road that houses medical offices, told The Beverly Beat that he has denied Varian access to his property for a couple of reasons. First, he said Varian wants to use his parking lot to store its equipment during construction of the barrier, and he already doesn’t have enough parking.

And second, McKenna is worried about how the stirring up of chemicals will impact his building. As he pointed out, the barrier was to be installed in front of his building, not between his building and the Varian site, so it wouldn’t actually protect his property.

“So they’re heating up chemicals, all this nasty stuff, and sending it through my property to the barrier,” McKenna said. “To me personally, I thought it was the worst plan.”

McKenna emphasized that his building is safe. He said it passed all the tests for indoor air quality when he bought it in 2015. And just in case, he also installed a “sub-slab mitigation system” below the building to prevent chemicals from getting inside.

“The building is 100% safe,” he said.

The concern for everyone who lives or works downhill from Varian is that chemicals that are in the groundwater beneath them could vaporize and get into their homes or offices. Varian and Mass DEP have tested inside dozens of homes and buildings in the area and have said the air quality is safe. But the company did have to install a protective system in the basement of one home on Longview Drive over concerns that chemicals could be getting inside.

The chemicals are mostly trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE), which the EPA says can cause cancer. The chemicals came from cleaning solvents that were dumped on the property decades ago.

Varian said in its notice to Santin that it will now have to select a “remedial alternative” to the barrier to address the migration of hazardous materials from its site. The company said it has developed a “more robust cleanup approach” on 150 Sohier Road site in order to meet its objectives. Those plans will be presented at a public meeting scheduled for April 16 at 7 p.m. in the Beverly Middle School library.

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