Whaling City’s mess

That’s because his church sits on land that was, for decades, part of a 101-acre burn dump in the city’s west end, a place where barrels of industrial waste were set alight, lacing the soil with a toxic mix of poisonous chemicals.

After the dump closed in the 1950s, the city built a neighborhood on that soil, including playing fields and a high school. After all, this was well before anybody knew or cared about the environment.

But even after the dangers of dumps like this became alarmingly clear elsewhere, New Bedford continued to build here. City Hall was still issuing permits up to a few years ago, allowing homeowners to excavate.

Nobody thought to test the soil until 2004, when the city proposed a middle school for the center of the dump site. The tests showed there was seriously nasty stuff in there, including PCBs, the poisonous industrial chemical banned in the 1970s.

The city went ahead with the middle school, spending tens of millions more than planned to clean up the site. It had to scour playing fields, the high school, and a few other places, too. It bored a thousand test holes all over the neighborhood, quickly carting away the soil when chemicals were found close to the surface. Yet today, PCBs have returned to the supposedly chemical-free marshland behind the middle school. A fence is planned, but right now anybody can just walk in there.

Soil tests left some residents in murky situations, showing harmful chemicals a foot or more below the surface: No imminent danger, says the Environmental Protection Agency, as long as nobody digs.

Imminent or no, would you want your kids playing on land where just planting a tree might unearth deadly contaminants?

The city is still assessing the 101-acre neighborhood to determine what to do about the contamination. So far, City Hall has bought six houses because demolition will be cheaper than cleaning the land around them. But Mayor Scott Lang isn’t moving fast enough on the rest, say some infuriated residents.

Spend a little time with De Souza, and it’s hard to disagree. City Hall issued the pastor a building permit to renovate and expand his church - as in, dig a giant hole - in December 2007. Not until he was months into his $250,000 interior renovations did soil specialists inform him there were PCBs and other dangerous chemicals below the surface on church property.

Though city officials didn’t tell him to, De Souza halted the project. “How is it City Hall gave a permit for construction?’’ he asked, sitting in his church Friday morning, speaking through a Portuguese translator. “It’s not just me and the congregation at risk; the neighborhood kids would come here and play in the dirt - the irresponsibility of it!’’

Lang said the city issued the permit before the contamination had been verified. With positive readings all over the neighborhood and the first church soil sample taken in November 2007, that beggars belief.

For more than a year, De Souza, like many local residents, has been waiting to hear if the city will buy or clean up his property. In an interview, Lang said he’s gathering information as fast as he can and trying to pull together funding to buy properties or clean them up. After pressure from the local newspaper, he is meeting with De Souza tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the pastor has told his 600 parishioners about the situation. About a third of them have stopped coming.

“I knew it was a risk of losing members, but at least I would have a clean conscience,’’ he said. “I didn’t want to be like City Hall.’’

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abraham@globe.com.