Saturday, September 15, 2007

Cleaning up its act

By Carmen Nobel
Globe Correspondent

superfund365.org

In 1980, in response to civic demand for safety, the federal government enacted the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act — a.k.a. ‘‘Superfund.’’ As described by the Environmental Protection Agency, Superfund ‘‘investigates and cleans up the most complex uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites in the country.’’ Twenty-seven years later, there are still more than 1,300 active cases on the EPA’s National Priority List. And for the next year, artist Brooke Singer is going to tell us about 365 of them. Welcome to Superfund365.

Each day, from September 2007 through August 2008, Superfund365 will highlight one active Superfund site — a new take on the term ‘‘site of the day.’’ Singer and her team of programmers use graphics and videos to make otherwise daunting data feel more accessible.
Singer, who is a professor at SUNY Purchase, hopes the website will draw attention to an issue that isn’t on many young people’s minds. ‘‘There’s a whole new generation of young adults who never even heard the word Superfund,’’ she says.

Visitors can scroll their cursors over the page to receive data such as: the toxic waste site’s location and history; a list of the toxic chemicals polluting the site; the site’s hazardous ranking as compared to other Superfund sites; how much it’s going to cost to clean it up; and, tellingly, the ethnic demographic of the people who live within the site’s ZIP code.

Superfund365 culled its list from the Center for Public Integrity’s ‘‘Most Dangerous Superfund Sites’’ list but obtains most of its data directly from the EPA and the US Census Bureau.

The yearlong project is also a visual cross-country trek. ‘‘We begin the journey in the New York City area and work our way across the country, ending the year in Hawaii [at the Pearl Harbor Naval Complex],’’ reads a message in the website’s About section. ‘‘We will need a beach vacation by then!’’

Posted by Thomasine Berg at 03:37 AM

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