Any student who has taken any introductory geology (especially at the College of Charleston) have heard of and have studied the environmental impacts of our society over the last several thousand years. However, in reference to American legislation and the regulation of locations which are deemed by the federal government to be places of extreme pollution and environmental risk, we have also studied these “Superfund Sites” as location which were so polluted that the federal government had to intervene. Perhaps the most popular and tragic of these instances is the Love Canal story, which a lower income neighborhood was developed directly over a recent toxic waste dump. One interesting aspect about these locations which I have realized is that they do not exist only in some far-off neighborhood 30 years ago, or in movies like Erin Brockovich; there are two Superfund sites within 2 miles of our downtown.
http://www.toxicsites.us/
The link above provides an interactive national map of all the current Superfund sites in the United States. Each dot the map represents a location with various information including a history, threat index number (1-100 sale) and a list of toxins which are/were present there. Both locations (The area better know as the bridge to nowhere, and the Macalloy Superfund site rank at a cautionary 50 and are located both around and between residential neighborhoods in the area between Charleston and North Charleston. I found this information to be both alarming and eye opening, and led me to find more site like this in areas I have lived in in the past.
Thank you so much for sharing this, Nick! We will actually have a guest speaker who will talk a little bit about the Superfund sites that are located in the Neck area, which, incidentally also happens to be an area which predominately has lower-income minority populations.
It really terrible that pollution has reached such a point and that communities can be so easily affected. I actually have a friend who grew up in similar conditions because factory waste was being dumped into local sources of water.
I actually wasn’t aware that pollution has gotten so far out of hand that we have government controlled toxic sites. By the looks of that website, we have a lot of them! I can’t believe pollution has become this bad.