Providence Journal file photo / Sandor Bodo
The Davis Superfund site in Smithfield.
Rhode Island will collect $750,000 -- and potentially several hundred thousand more in the future -- in a settlement with the companies held responsible for pollution at the Davis Superfund site in Smithfield.
The payments -- separate from the tens of millions of dollars companies have been forced to spend cleaning up the former dump -- represent the continuing damage to the state's natural resources, namely its groundwater, according to assistant attorney general Michael Rubin.
Wednesday's settlement, filed in U.S. District Court, is yet another chapter in the long history of the dump, whose operator, Billy Davis, accepted old tires and chemical wastes in the 1970s. The Environmental Protection Agency deemed the 10-acre property a Superfund site in 1983.