On weekends I sometimes take my Airedale terrier Echo for a walk along the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail in Washington, DC. The route takes us past the periphery of the US Navy’s oldest shore establishment, the Washington Navy Yard.
Construction on the navy yard began in 1799. For its first two decades, the yard was the navy’s largest facility for building, fitting, and repairing ships. Thereafter, once the warships of the day had become too big to dock there, it remained an important military base. It also became the navy’s principal center for the design, testing, and manufacture of guns, torpedoes, shells, and other ordnance.
By World War II, the Washington Navy Yard was the world’s largest naval ordnance plant. Although weapons production at the yard had largely ceased by the early 1960s, the venerable facility retained the weapons’ legacy—of the toxic chemicals used in their production. In 1998 the US Environmental Protection Agency declared the yard a Superfund site.
Echo takes a break on the Washington Navy Yard segment of the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail. The ship is the Cold War–era destroyer USS Barry, which now serves as a display ship.
Despite what might be considered the stigma of the Superfund designation, the environmental remediation of the navy yard has progressed to the point that real-estate developers have built offices and apartment buildings nearby. The Washington Nationals’ baseball stadium, which opened in 2008, is just four blocks away.
Living near or making productive use of Superfund sites is the topic of a feature article in this month’s issue of National Geographic magazine. To set the scene, the author, Paul Voosen, opens with the story of Jun Apostol, a retired accountant.
In 1978 Apostol bought a new house in a bedroom community eight miles east of downtown Los Angeles. The house was cheap, thanks to its proximity to an active landfill. The developer’s assurances that the landfill would close and become a park were never met. In 1986 EPA designated the landfill a Superfund site. Cleanup began—and continues. As Voosen describes it:
The EPA capped the landfill with a processed-clay membrane and two feet of soil. Gases from the waste are now collected and burned; a treatment plant processes 26,000 gallons of contaminated water a day. The EPA has so far recuperated $600 million for the cleanup from various parties responsible for the waste at the site—and it does not foresee an end to its work.
Apostol traded a shorter commute and a cheaper house for the hazard of living next to a landfill. He told Voosen that he doesn’t regret his house purchase. Surprisingly perhaps, there are people who pay more for the privilege of living hazardously.
In a paper published four months ago in the journal Earth’s Future, Nathan Toké of Utah Valley University and his collaborators, Christopher Boone and Ramón Arrowsmith of Arizona State University, looked at the effects of the state of California’s Aliquist–Priolo Special Studies Zone Act.
Passed in 1972, the act aimed to reduce the severest damage caused by earthquakes. The state’s geological survey agency was directed to compile surface maps of active faults. Construction of new buildings directly over active faults was banned. Building within a fault zone was still allowed, provided a comprehensive geologic investigation demonstrated that the fault does not pose a hazard to the proposed structure. And owners of existing buildings that already stood in fault zones had to disclose that fact when they sold their property.
The act identified the zones of California that are most at risk from earthquakes. You might expect that poor people would end up living in those hazardous zones, but that’s not what happened. By increasing the cost of building within fault zones, the act priced out the poor. What’s more, when Toké, Boone, and Arrowsmith looked at remotely sensed imagery of greater Los Angeles, they found that the fault zones designated by the act had become greener than the city as a whole. In parks-poor Los Angeles those zones had become desirable. When Toké, Boone, and Arrowsmith looked at census data for the zones, they found that rich people were living there.
Apostol bought his Los Angeles house two years before the passage of the federal Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), which stipulated the mechanism for designating and cleaning up the Superfund sites. In trusting the developer, he took a risk.
You might not want to live near a Superfund site or an active earthquake fault. But thanks to CERCLA and the Aliquist–Priolo, you have a better idea of what some of the risks and tradeoffs might be.
Unusual Arctic fire activity in 2019–21 was driven by, among other factors, earlier snowmelt and varying atmospheric conditions brought about by rising temperatures.
January 06, 2023 12:00 AM
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The Week in Physics" is likely a reference to the regular updates or summaries of new physics research, such as those found in publications like Physics Today from AIP Publishing or on news aggregators like Phys.org.
