The employer that created a town may now be killing it.

Somerville, Texas, a sleepy, one-­stoplight town 90 miles northwest of Houston, is home to a massive wood-treatment facility, which for more than 100 years churned toxic chemicals into the atmosphere while manufacturing phone poles and bridge supports. ...

It was also among the industry's worst polluters ... Somerville residents for decades were exposed to wildly elevated levels of arsenic, dioxins and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — all known cancer-causing chemicals considered highly toxic even at low doses.

Dust samples taken during the last year from several Somerville homes and school buildings reveal contamination levels higher even than those found 30 years ago in Love Canal, the notorious chemical landfill in Niagara Falls linked to high rates of cancers and birth defects ...

The tie plant as recently as the mid-1990s neglected to install any air-pollution controls on smokestacks, [and] routinely flushed chemical waste into local creeks ...

Somerville residents are contracting [stomach cancer] at a rate as much as 40 to 60 times the national average ...