Miss Cellania
Toxic Towns: 6 Cases of Polluted Places
by Miss Cellania - April 22, 2010 - 9:21 AM
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Every once in a while, an environmental disaster makes big news, but the effects remain years after the headlines have faded. Here are six stories of what human activity did to mess up Mother Nature.

1. Mossville, Louisiana

Mossville, Louisiana is a predominantly African-American community on the shores of Lake Charles. It is in Calcasieu Parish, home to 53 industrial facilities, mostly petrochemical plants. These facilities release nine million pounds of toxic chemicals into the environment each year (the manufacturers say 2.5 million pounds) Residents have three times the national average amount of dioxin in their bodies, which the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry does not consider a health risk. Residents say the tests are misleading, as people from all over Calcasieu Parish were tested and Mossville residents should be tested separately. The EPA has Mossville under consideration for Superfund designation.

2. Butte, Montana

Copper mining in Montana went on for a hundred years before the Anaconda Mining Company began taking ore by the method of mountaintop removal in the 1950s. They shut down operations in 1983, leaving behind a huge hole that became known as the Berkeley Pit, where heavy metals and toxic chemicals collected from the mines. The Superfund site is estimated to contain 40 million gallons of polluted runoff. No fish or plants or even insects live there, but in 1995, a microscopic extremophile called Euglena mutabilis was found to flourish in the toxic sludge. Research on the protozoan may lead us to new ways of cleaning up polluted sites. Image by Flickr user SkyTruth.

3. Picher, Oklahoma

The ground under Picher is honeycombed with lead and zinc mine shafts and tunnels. The area provided metal for bullets and other uses in the first half of the 20th century. The industry left huge piles of chat, or leftover rock containing dangerous heavy metals such as lead, zinc, and cadmium all over the community. These metals and other chemicals permeate the air as dust that settles on everything, including the lungs of the residents. Picher is the location of the Tar Creek Superfund Site. Disagreements between the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) who originally sold tribal land to mining companies, has stalled cleanup efforts. The mining companies are not contributing to the cleanup, as many of them have gone out of business or declared bankruptcy. Meanwhile, while the population is dwindling, some residents continue to live and raise families in Picher. Image by Flickr user peggydavis66.

4. Love Canal, New York

In the late 19th century, Love Canal was proposed as a planned community, a “utopian metropolis”. But the developer only got as far as digging a large pit before giving up due to lack of people who actually wanted to live there. In 1920, Niagara Falls bought the pit and used it for a chemical dump. The US army disposed of waste from chemical warfare experiments in Love Canal’s pit. Hooker Chemical acquired the property in 1947 and continued chemical disposal. By the 1950s, it was filled with 21,000 tons of toxic waste. Hooker Chemical covered it with clay and soil and declared it sealed. They sold it back to the city of Niagara Falls, which built a neighborhood on top. Residents noticed strange smells and odd illnesses, as well as a shockingly high rate of miscarriages and birth defects. It wasn’t until 1978 that the extent of the area’s toxicity was revealed when an investigation by the local newspaper led to federal attention. Tests showed inhabitants of Love Canal had chromosomal damage caused by environmental pollution. Over a thousand families were relocated, and the Superfund program was born out of the incident.

5. Times Beach, Missouri

Before 1985, a little over 2,000 people lived in Times Beach, a community just 17 miles from St. Louis. To keep dust down on the dirt roads, the town hired Russell Bliss to spray oil on them. From 1972 to 1976, Bliss treated the roads, using waste oil that he had obtained from Northeastern Pharmaceutical and Chemical Company, a company that manufactured Agent Orange. An investigation into Bliss’ practices elsewhere led to testing of the soil in Times Beach in 1982. The roads had been paved over by then, but the EPA found dioxin levels in the soil that were 300 times the level considered safe at the time. Other toxins were also found. In 1985, the town was evacuated and disincorporated. Tons of soil were incinerated over the next few years, and the site is now the home of Route 66 State Park.

6. Silverton, Colorado

Silverton lies in San Juan County, an area once dotted with gold and silver mines. Water flows from the remains of the mines, carrying heavy metals out and into streams. Local volunteers have made great strides in cleaning up the polluted streams with artificial wetlands and barricades in some mines, but ran into a roadblock in The Clean Water Act. Provisions in the law would make the volunteers, by their acts, responsible for bringing the streams completely up to federal standards. The alternative is to do nothing and let water running from the mines return to their previous pollution levels. The passage of a Good Samaritan bill that would protect those who did not cause the initial pollution from liability while cleaning it up would put the volunteers back in business. Image by Wikimedia contributor Tewy.

This list barely scratches the surface of the many toxic towns in the US. Then there are those sites in which the damage and/or danger has yet to be discovered. You can check to see where the federal Superfund sites are near you.

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Comments (30)

  1. For some reason, that Love Canal one is disturbing me the most…

    This topic is making me want to watch Erin Brokovich.

    posted by Elissa on 4-22-2010 at 9:48 am

  2. I live in Syracuse (roughly 2 1/2 hours east of Love Canal) and it’s still an eerie place to drive through. To think that kids used to play in the chemical puddles because they sparked pretty colors.

    posted by Michelle on 4-22-2010 at 9:53 am

  3. Times Beach is not too far from where I live. Its now home to hundreds of tame dear. I remember being fascinated by the empty town when I was kid before they turned it into a park. I get the same fascination by Ransom Riggs post’s of Strange Geographies.

    posted by mdely on 4-22-2010 at 9:58 am

  4. I live an hour or so south of Picher, Ok. They have pretty much forced everyone out of the town now, shut down the schools, etc. It’s became a ghost town.

    How anyone could live with that odor was always beyond me. The rotten egg smell was enough to keep me from wanting to drive though.

    posted by emcphers on 4-22-2010 at 10:57 am

  5. There’s also Toms River, NJ. Part of the town’s water supply was tainted with chemicals from a factory (I think it was a dye-making plant.) It resulted in a cancer cluster and 2 lawsuits that I know of – one was a multi-plantiff case comprised all of children who’d contracted leukemia, the second was a class-action suit by people in the affected area of town. I was part of the latter suit, and have a huge scar from the 4 pound tumor I had removed.

    posted by cb3 on 4-22-2010 at 10:57 am

  6. What about Hermiston, Oregon? It has 50 years worth of Nuclear waste buried under it!

    posted by Kate on 4-22-2010 at 11:43 am

  7. There’s also Delray, a small community on the south side of Detroit.

    “The neighborhood also borders the Detroit Wastewater Treatment plant, where everyone’s toilet contents go to be incinerated, creating a God-awful stink that hangs heavy in the air with all the other industrial odors from the riverfront industries.

    As if that wasn’t enough, filthy Zug Island sits just across the Rouge River, belching more pollutants into the air. The entire area is basically close to being unfit for human habitation. The city says as much, having declared long ago that the future of Delray is industrial. No major new housing is planned, and the housing that remains will continue to crumble until the land is cleared of homes and industry can fully take over.”

    http://www.detroitblog.org/?p=253

    posted by Gina on 4-22-2010 at 12:21 pm

  8. Love Canal wasn’t just surrounded by a neighborhood; the school was built almost directly above the “capped” dump. The whole area is still a bit creepy. Abandoned homes, playgrounds built next to other toxic dumps – and the runoff flows over the Falls.

    posted by Sarah on 4-22-2010 at 12:24 pm

  9. Nice article! But what about the Chernobyl/Pripyat Nuclear Powerplant disater, which is the most famous and worst nuclear environmental disaster in history?

    posted by Dan on 4-22-2010 at 12:37 pm

  10. How about the Valley of the Drums, the first superfund site? Its supposed to be clean but people still sneak in there to dump paint and such, the jerks.
    Also, here’s to the TNT area of Pt. Pleasant, WV!

    posted by Kris on 4-22-2010 at 1:00 pm

  11. The thing about Love Canal is Hooker didn”t bury chemicals only in that location. There was another dump site, around a neighborhood known as “Belden Center” in the town of Niagara. A lot of people are sick as a result, and nothing has been done.

    posted by Lisa on 4-22-2010 at 1:22 pm

  12. The Brio Superfund site is actually in my hometown.

    posted by Troy H. on 4-22-2010 at 1:48 pm

  13. There’s also the mine fire at Centralia, PA.

    posted by Andrew on 4-22-2010 at 2:07 pm

  14. Treece, KS across the street from Picher has all the same mines, chat piles and dust but is stuck in limbo. Unable to get the Superfund monies that is given to a town less then 100 ft away.

    posted by James on 4-22-2010 at 3:10 pm

  15. Actually, I think what you refer to as “Mossville” is actually a town called Moss Bluff. My parents live in Lake Charles… and we use water filters like you wouldn’t believe. ;)

    posted by Mel on 4-22-2010 at 3:22 pm

  16. My extended family had clubhouses on the shores of the Meramec River in Times Beach. It always seemed to idyllic, yet I remember my Aunt Kate showing us the brown water that came out of their faucets: “This is why we bring all our own water with us when we come here,” she told me. A wise idea if we now consider what else was probably in there…!

    posted by Marty on 4-22-2010 at 4:40 pm

  17. In my small town, IBM, apparently, had dumped a whole lotta chemicals over decades. It ended up getting into the water table. I live just a few blocks from the plume, but as far as we know, our house isn’t affected, thankfully. Both Erin Brockovich and an investigator involved in delving into the whole Love Canal fiasco have been in the area to talk to residents and whatnot.

    posted by KC on 4-22-2010 at 5:20 pm

  18. Hello from Butte, MT! I can see my office bldg and house in the picture in #2!

    posted by Apoennim on 4-22-2010 at 6:26 pm

  19. None of these can compare to Delta Junction, Alaska which not only holds an “entombed” high yield uranium reactor that took and vented it’s cooling fluid from the local Shaw Creek watershed but Fort Greely was also our government’s test bed for cold weather testing of chemical weapons for decades.

    posted by roi_ratt on 4-23-2010 at 2:23 am

  20. Toms River NJ

    posted by Boz on 3-21-2011 at 1:46 am

  21. What about “Libby, Montana”

    posted by Zero on 4-23-2011 at 3:54 am

  22. @Mel. There is a Mossville, which is closer to the refineries than Moss Bluff. Having grown up in Westlake (between Mossville and Moss Bluff) we’ve never used water filters and never had any problems from it. I’ve actually had worse water from areas not surrounded by refineries.

    posted by Will on 4-23-2011 at 7:36 pm

  23. fun fact: i live in Buffalo, NY, just south of Love Canal, and we’ve got freakishly high levels of thyroid disease here. people think it’s a direct result.

    posted by jen on 4-23-2011 at 10:13 pm

  24. Fallon, NV also has seriously contaminated water which has resulted in cluster groups of leukemia and other diseases.

    posted by Annie on 4-23-2011 at 11:46 pm

  25. Been to Silverton many times as a kid, with church groups on “church-camp” trips in Durango. Such a beautiful small town, hopefully it can be cleaned and saved.

    posted by Ben on 6-14-2011 at 8:25 am

  26. Bhopal?

    posted by Steve on 9-3-2011 at 5:27 pm

  27. @ cb3 and Boz:

    What about Newark, NJ? That city holds the most dangerous mile in the US. To this day, the Passaic River from Paterson and Newark is considered a superfund site.

    From a fellow New Jerseyan from Bayonne, NJ.

    posted by John on 9-23-2011 at 3:54 pm

  28. Silverton is a lovely place to visit, especially if you take the Georgetown Loop railway tour on vintage locomotives (which is fun in itself).

    but sadly, Colorado has a LOT of Superfund sites, many of which were extremely toxic and some were located in or very near dense populations. i’m not sure if they’re considered as bad as a place like Love Canal, but they are (or were) pretty poluted. one of the worst was the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, which took a lot longer to clean up and was far more polluted than initially thought. in fact, the reason it was closed was because of a raid by the EPA and other government agencies. the list of violations is pretty staggering, although it’s far to long and detailed for me to go into. i’d highly recommend anyone who’s interested to do a Google search on the plant though.

    another big Superfund site was the Lowry Landfill, located on the former Lowry Bombing and Gunnery range. aside from old munitions, a lot of companies (DOW and DuPont being big ones) illegally dumped all sorts of nasty chemicals out there for years (it was a landfill and wasn’t supposed to be used for liquid stuff like that). anyway, they cleaned up the surface contamination, but because the groundwater was so polluted, it was left as a landfill because it was too dangerous to build houses there. luckily it’s a fair distance from most of the houses in that area, but the perimeter fences extend WELL beyond the obvious landfill area and there are hardly any new houses build within close proximity to it.

    overall, i believe Colorado has something like 23 listed Superfund sites, the majority of which haven’t been cleaned up yet. we have a long history of mining in this state, everything from gold and silver, to uranium, lead, radium and all sorts of other stuff. it’s always pissed me off that most of those mining companies had a complete disregard for the people in their communities and basically just abandoned the mines once they were finished with them. it seems rather “convenient” that a lot of them declare bankruptcy when the government finally tries to get them to clean everything up.

    posted by Cat MacKinnon on 10-6-2011 at 2:23 am

  29. Kate: Re: Hermiston, Oregon and nuclear waste, if the waste is stored safely and isn’t leaking into the environment, that wouldn’t count as pollution.

    posted by Joanna on 11-18-2011 at 12:13 pm

  30. I don’t think the picture of the collection of drums was taken at Love Canal. The Niagara Falls area was built up when the original dumping started in 1942. Not to take away from the horrific legacy of unregulated chemical dumping in the Niagara Falls area-it just does not resemble the site.

    posted by Tim Burmeier on 11-22-2011 at 12:58 pm

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