Many Americans Still Live On or Near Toxic Waste

Visual artist Brooke Singer wants to make America's invisible Superfund sites—places harboring hazardous waste—more visible to a wider public. So she recently launched ToxicSites US, a data visualization that charts 1,300 of the US's most toxic Superfund sites.

A "Superfund site" is an area that the US Environmental and Protection Agency (EPA) labels an "uncontrolled or abandoned place where hazardous waste is located, possibly affecting local ecosystems or people." The full list of sites can be seen on the National Priorities List.

When Singer first started investigating Superfund sites back in 2006, she was surprised by the gap between what she'd read, and what she saw.

"I drove out to New Jersey to a site called Quanta Resources along the Hudson river opposite the upper west side of Manhattan. I drove around in circles trying to find the site, but couldn't at first because most of these sites aren't marked out," Singer told me over the phone.

Singer had half-expected to see a barrier fencing off the area, caution signs, or people in hazmat suits patrolling the designated Superfund site. But instead, she was met with an ordinary scene: The site was next to a daycare centre along a busy street in a residential area.

The fight to rid the country of toxic waste sites was begun by the EPA in 1980 following the effects of the devastating Love Canal tragedy—a site previously used as an industrial dump by the Hooker Chemical company—which continued to ooze toxic chemicals over two decades after the company stopped dumping waste there.

Once the EPA categorizes a location as a Superfund site, they remove people from the area and clean it up so that residents can move back in again. However, according to Singer, in some cases, people have had to move back to areas that are still toxic, while for others the battle to remove toxic contaminants is still ongoing.

Singer explained that the main stumbling block for residents living in such areas is the time it takes for the location to actually be designated as a Superfund site by the EPA.

The artist's aim with ToxicSites US is threefold; to allow people to click on an area and find a Superfund site and its hazardous ranking score; to provide a platform where people living near or on the Superfund sites can voice their experiences; and to make more people across the world aware of the existence of these sites.

She supplemented the data with visual media and personal stories from people living near the sites.

Shannon Rainey, a long-time resident of the controversial Agricultural Street Landfill in New Orleans, Louisiana, who Singer interviewed for her project is, for example, one such inhabitant who has yet to benefit fully from the EPA's cleanup efforts.

In 1994, when the federal government classed Agricultural Street Landfill as one of the most contaminated Superfund sites in America, the soil on the site was found to contain over 150 chemicals, 50 of which were carcinogenic. But by that time, it was already too late. Since the dump was closed off in 1958, it had been reopened again in 1965 to rid the city of the debris created by Hurricane Betsy, and in 1969, developers plonked a school and housing development on top of the contaminated area. Rainey owns a home on top of the contaminated site.

In 2001, the site was deemed 99 percent clean. However, according to Wilma Subra, a chemist and technical advisor at the Louisiana Action Network, the EPA's cleanup was far from thorough as little effort was made to dig up the toxic soil underneath houses. This meant that when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, the toxic contaminants lurking in the soil were unleashed into the air once again.

"After the storm, everyone was moved out of the housing development and the school still remains empty," said Singer. "But around 50 families have moved back into their homes there because they weren't renters, they bought their homes and they have all of their equity tied up in those homes."

Rainey was one of the residents who were forced to move back in, and has been campaigning for the local and federal government to relocate she and other residents whose homes are now worthless.

"This is an important story that's been going on for decades. Shannon still lives there with her daughter and cites stories of her neighbours experiencing health impacts from this site," said Singer. "There are these stories where the EPA are failing […] I'm hoping that [ToxicSites US] will provide a platform for people like Shannon who are living in these conditions with issues that just won't go away."