A Journey Through Superfund Sites

I grew up in South Carolina in a small town named Moncks Corner. We do have some monks in our corner, but the town is dreadfully named after a slave owner named Thomas Monck, hence the different spelling. When I talk to people about my childhood I can’t help but paint a picturesque scene: beautiful live oak trees covered in gray Spanish moss, swamps with tall, elegant birds and hidden alligators, air that’s so thick with humidity that you feel like you can swim through it, and a constant calming hum from the cicadas and crickets. And then there’s the small stream that runs through our backyard. We’d catch crayfish, minnows, and frogs, and would spend many a summer’s evening wading through its muddy corners looking for new creatures. Some of those corners, however, we’d take care to avoid.

An orange, cloudy substance would coagulate in certain pockets of our stream. It was an eerie, sickly kind of orange, and we would make up stories about what it’d do to your skin if you touched it. I remember a friend of mine, Mikel, who was new to the neighborhood. I was with him as he carelessly stepped through it. I’d had bad eczema on my feet at the time, and I saw a golden opportunity to tell a mean lie. I told Mikel that the orange gunk was extremely toxic, and that my feet were evidence of what happens when you’re not careful. And soon, I told him, his feet would look like mine, and after that we’d share the same fate: our mysterious disease would corrode our skin to the bone.

Many years have passed since then, and I’m happy to say that our feet are intact. Recently I’ve been thinking about that cloudy gunk, and so I took the time to do some research. My mind went to the worst-case scenario. I looked up images of superfund sites and saw mine-polluted waters and slurry and wastewater ponds. I thought my unnatural orange slime was surely something similar, but luckily for us it’s not. It’s called “floc,” a naturally occurring byproduct of iron-oxidizing bacteria. Floc accumulates in streams when water becomes stagnant and when soil contains iron deposits. But earlier, when I was looking up information about superfund sites, it got me thinking: how close have I been to these sites? If they didn’t pollute my backyard, did they affect my town? I found a map of the US littered with red splotches denoting superfund site locations, so I set out to look into superfund sites close to everywhere I’ve lived. This is a journey through those places.

It turns out that we had a site in the middle of our small town. It’s called the Farmers Supply Junkyard. It was archived by the EPA in 2003. I can’t find much information about it, so I’m still left curious. This is less than a mile from my high school. Across the street from the site sits a park with a playground. I remember a sweaty summer evening playing on the merry-go-round and nearly throwing up from dizziness. I remember an oyster-eating competition that was hosted at that park, and apparently everyone had gotten sick (and thrown up) because the oysters were bad. I remember the cheap, plastic tennis courts that are there, and the times I spent playing against my dad, desperate to impress him, desperate to not hit the ball over the fence and embarrass him.

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One of my first jobs out of college was in Milford, Ohio. I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but the town’s aquifer is listed as an active superfund site. Volatile organic compounds had poisoned the town’s water supply and the EPA is actively sorting things out as of 2022. I downloaded their report from 2021 and while they mention the likely source and its location, it’s not clear what business or what situation caused the contamination, but it’s possible that a dry-cleaning company’s cleaning chemicals were involved.

At the time I didn’t live in Milford and instead commuted from Cincinnati. When I looked into superfund sites around Cincinnati I found a location called the Fernald Feed Materials Production Center. It’s located 20 miles from Cincinnati and was last active in the early 90’s. The factory produced uranium fuel cores for use in nuclear weapons and nuclear energy systems and released millions of pounds of uranium dust into the atmosphere. Millions. The dust and other waste poisoned the groundwater at the location, and groundwater doesn’t stay in one place: it circulates through the larger ecosystem.

It’s common knowledge that the United States has the most nuclear weapons in the world, but what’s less obvious is the cost these weapons have had on our land and our people. (This cost is extensive, especially to the Shoshone people.) When I was growing up in South Carolina, my youth recreational soccer team would often travel to nearby towns to play games. One of such destinations was the Naval Weapons Station Charleston. This military base was formerly one of the largest warehouses of naval ordinance on the east coast. Submarines could easily swoop in to load up on a stockpile of weapons, and the rumor amongst neighbors was that this ordinance included the largest ready-to-use stockpile of nuclear weapons in the country. (And maybe the world.) My research hasn’t definitively proved this, as I’m sure the US military isn’t exactly keen on the locations of nuclear weapons being public knowledge.

Despite that, the whereabouts of one fateful nuclear weapon is public knowledge. It’s buried just off the coast of the South Carolina-Georgia border. An incident occurred in 1958 called the Tybee Island mid-air collision. A plane carrying an H-bomb collided with another plane and the bomb fell into the coastal waters, undetonated, and was never recovered. As is common with most military mishaps, there still remains contradicting accounts of whether or not the bomb could have exploded. It’s also not clear if the bomb could still detonate today, but either way, the radioactive materials inside of it are still a danger. I’m honestly shocked there isn’t a summer blockbuster (or straight to DVD film) starring Nicolas Cage, a down-on-his-luck treasure hunter that’s recruited by the CIA to recover the bomb before a communist/extremist sleeper cell finds and detonates it. Surely it’d have a heroic and happy ending.

In the same year of the Tybee collision, but a month later, another nuclear bomb fell just outside of Florence, SC. (A buddy of mine just built a house in Florence.) The Mars Bluff B-47 nuclear weapon loss incident is strikingly different from the Tybee Island blunder in that this bomb fucking exploded. Luckily it wasn’t a nuclear explosion, but rather a “conventional” TNT detonation that was still significant enough to leave a 70-ft crater. (The mechanics of why/how a nuclear bomb can detonate without a nuclear explosion isn't something I'm qualified to explain.)

It’s still not clear why the bomb didn’t explode at full capacity. Despite that, two girls were injured from the blast and the crater still exists as a modest historical marker today. These potentially catastrophic accidents are humbly referred to as "Broken Arrows." Thirty-two of these nuclear-weapon accidents have occurred since the 1950’s. Given the secrecy of these accidents, it goes without saying that the list is expanding as more information is declassified. And if the bombs themselves don’t harm us, we’re lucky if their production doesn’t as well.

Today, several years after a 15-year cleanup process, local residents refer to Ohio’s Fernald site as the poster child of EPA cleanups. The groundwater is still contaminated, and the radioactive grounds will never be used for (human) habitation. But, because it looks like a quaint nature preserve, it’s treated as a success story. Many superfund sites don’t have this "happy" ending. Lots of them don’t have an ending; they simply fade from memory like things buried deep underground.

- - - I moved from Ohio to Denver, Colorado in 2017. And of course – yet again – we have a story about another superfund site. (It’s beginning to feel a bit repetitive, isn’t it?) This particular site was less than a mile from where I lived. It also dealt in the manufacturing of radioactive materials, but this time for medical equipment aimed toward treating cancer, and this time it luckily didn’t spew millions of pounds of radioactive dust into the air. Instead, the premises were merely contaminated. The location is called the Denver Radium Site, and the EPA has been active here for decades. Split into eleven zones, five of these still contain hazardous material. The other divisions have had their thousands of tons of contaminated material and building debris removed and buried in someone else’s backyard, likely in the southwest deep under the desert or a mountain. There’s a new apartment complex that was built in one of those cleaned-up zones, and since the asphalt was so fresh and smooth, I used to skateboard there with a buddy of mine. The EPA is still actively monitoring the Denver Radium Site’s contaminated groundwater, which expands beneath a golf course that recently hosted a music festival featuring Stevie Wonder and Kendrick Lamar. I guess these superfund sites aren’t so bad, right?

After Denver I moved to NYC. We’ve got some trash. We’ve got some rats. We’ve got an oil spill that was three times larger than Exxon Valdez. It was initially discovered in 1978 by a coast guard helicopter and there’s been decades of cleanup since. And by decades of cleanup I mean decades of half-assed cleanup alongside a handful of other accidental oil spills. Lawsuits have been filed, but the large oil companies involved are excellent at delaying and evading blame. Fast-forward a few years to 2007 and another mess is discovered in the same area, both of them near a neighborhood named Greenpoint. This newer mess, an underground collection of toxic material, is called the Meeker Avenue Plume and was made a superfund site (and added to the NPL) in 2022. Apparently it’s not critically dangerous to the hundreds of people who live nearby and above it. The most likely danger is toxic fumes that can gather in basements submerged in the contaminated soil. Discussions involving cleanup are still ongoing. This is the fourth superfund site in New York City.

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And so, my journey through superfund sites appears to be done, at least for now. I’m going to keep my ears to the ground to stay up-to-date on the superfund sites here in Brooklyn, and will hopefully come up with a clever idea to help. I guess supporting the community is a good way to start. It’s also worth saying that my description of each of these locations isn’t meant to garner sympathy. I’m lucky. My tap water has never been as bad as Flint, Michigan, or the Agent-Orange-polluted rivers in Vietnam. From my perspective, and as far as I can tell, all of this waste has been invisible and apparently hasn’t yet (critically) poisoned me.

But, then again, we are all being poisoned by the lead that’s now in our atmosphere, thanks to Thomas Midgley Junior, the chemist who invented leaded gasoline, and our organs are being filled with microplastics. I also have asthma, which seems to be tied to air pollution. Maybe we are all being poisoned, but we just don’t realize the extent? Something about a lobster in boiling water.

This pollution seems inescapable. Superfund sites have been close to nearly everywhere I’ve lived. Why do some of these sites feel invisible? Why can companies routinely destroy our ecosystems and health? (Capitalism, capitalism, capitalism!) Who should be held responsible? And why doesn’t Google Maps provide superfund site location information, let alone information for defunct or active factories and specific information about pollution? Why don’t we have signs alongside highways that enlighten travelers to the dangers present in nearly every town? Why do I have to go out of my way to learn about nuclear weapons casually lost at sea, or factories that spewed radioactive materials into the air, or oil spills that no one seems to be held responsible for?

If there’s any takeaway from this research, it’s that we need to start pointing fingers. And we need to do it in groups. Luckily, lots of the information is out there. Look up superfund sites in the towns you’ve lived. Record your discoveries. Learn about these things and share them with your friends and neighbors. After all these years, it seems like Mikel and I didn’t get our feet poisoned by the stream in our backyard, but what are the chances that we had?

This was originally written in 2022 when I was taking a class at the School for Poetic Computation, an organization dedicated to combining digital practices with poetic purposes. It has been slightly edited for inclusion on this blog, and since then I've also moved from NYC to Seattle, Washington. I might update this piece at some point to talk about the pollution here, as there is a massive polluted portion of land in Tacoma, just south of Seattle, and a handful of other active superfund sites in south Seattle. I might also write a follow-up piece to more generally reflect on this article and build upon it.