#toxic waste dumps

[0zzysaurus]

Who wants to go on a cross country trip with me here are all the places we are visiting

[mjhartwork]

dumping valley

[thefloatingstone]

Is there any way to watch Attack on Titan and be able to mentally divorce the product as you're watching it from its dogshit creator and his HORRENDOUS opinions or is his vitriolic racism, jingoism, imperialism and hatred specifically but not exclusively to Korea so baked into the narrative of the story it's impossible to watch and pretend that shit isn't literally the main narrative?

[divorcedfiddleford]

alex hirsch owes me money for all the times he's published a book that made it impossible for me to engage online with one of my favorite cartoons of all time

[catboynutsack]

if the military is doing some bullshit with radioactive shit with no transparency and causing panic in Jersey AGAIN I'm gonna lose my shit

[thatgingerloser]

what a joke.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this Chicago Tribune story:

In a letter filed in federal court, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency said the proposed expansion of a toxic waste dump on the Southeast Side would go against state law. It’s the latest development in a lengthy battle over the future of a 45-acre disposal site on the Lake Michigan shoreline.

“This is a major win for our community, to have both the Illinois attorney general and the Illinois EPA say that the expansion of this toxic landfill will not be (approved),” said Amalia NietoGomez, executive director of social justice nonprofit Alliance of the Southeast.

Since 1984, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been dumping toxic sediment dredged from the Calumet River into the now-full containment site, which contains mercury, arsenic and polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs. After reaching capacity or after 10 years, whichever came first, the property was to be returned to the Chicago Park District to restore as a park for the largely Black and Latino community.

Four decades later, the property hasn’t been turned over to the community, and the Army Corps wants to raise the dump 25 feet, piling an additional 1 million cubic yards of toxic sediment over another 20 years. In 2023, the Alliance of the Southeast and Friends of the Parks sued the Army Corps to stop the expansion.

So far, the Illinois EPA has denied the federal agency all of the state water quality permits it would need to proceed. The state’s Attorney General Kwame Raoul has also staunchly opposed the proposed project; in 2024 he filed an amicus brief in support of turning the dump into a public park.

More recently on Jan. 16, Raoul filed — alongside a supplemental brief with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois — a letter that the state’s environmental agency had sent to the Army Corps the previous day. In that letter, the Illinois EPA said the Army Corps’ proposal is contrary to some environmental regulations, including an Illinois law that prohibits the construction of new landfills or the expansion of existing landfills in Cook County.

[kiillercaleb]

☢️🦠𝕃𝕀𝕋𝕋𝕃𝔼 ℝ𝕆𝕋𝕋𝔼ℕ ℙ𝕌𝕋ℝ𝕀𝔻 𝕋ℍ𝕀ℕ𝔾❕☣️

[andyridgeley]

i can't wait until terry silver emerges completely nude from a bath of toxic waste in the middle of the sekai taikai

[t4lon]

i saw a very eye-opening post about this but as someone who supports people's rights to identify as whatever because gender and sexuality are social constructs, i do think we need to address the fact that if you think it's ok for trans men or other trans/nb male-identifying people to identify as lesbians, it needs to also be ok for cis men to do the same or you are still being bio or gender essentialist

but like that is Not a can of worms some folks are ready to open and im a little worried it may push people back into just saying Words Mean Things rather than confront their ideas of what men are, or who is allowed to be attracted to women in a "lesbian" or "sapphic" way

bc any definition that excludes Solely Cis Men is gonna have questionable implications about gender. seriously

[ausetkmt]

A New Orleans neighborhood confronts the racist legacy of a toxic stretch of highway

Hunter's Field Playground sits beneath the Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans on July 18, 2023. Opened nine years ago, the playground is one of the monitoring sites of a new EPA study on the health impacts of the expressway.

Drew Hawkins/Gulf States Newsroom

Aside from a few discarded hypodermic needles on the ground, the Hunter's Field Playground in New Orleans looks almost untouched. It's been open more than nine years, but the brightly-painted red and yellow slides and monkey bars are still sleek and shiny, and the padded rubber ground tiles still feel springy underfoot.

"Because kids are smart," explains Amy Stelly, an artist and urban designer who lives just over a block away on Dumaine Street. "It's the adults who aren't. It's the adults who built the playground under the interstate."

Hunter's Field is wedged directly beneath the elevated roadbeds of the I-10 Claiborne Expressway in the city's 7th Ward.

There are no sounds of laughter or children playing. The constant cuh-clunk, cuh-clunk of the traffic passing overhead makes it difficult to hold a conversation with someone standing next to you.

"I have never seen a child play here," Stelly says.

Stelly keeps a sharp eye on this area as part of her advocacy work with the Claiborne Avenue Alliance, a group of residents and business owners dedicated to revitalizing the predominantly African-American community on either side of the looming expressway.

For as long as she can remember, Stelly has been fighting to dismantle the Claiborne Expressway. She's lived in the neighborhood her entire life and says the noise is oftentimes unbearable.

Graduate student researcher Jacquelynn Mornay, with the LSU School of Public Health, shows a noise reading taken beneath the Claiborne Expressway on July 18, 2023, in New Orleans. The decibel levels are similar to that of a motorcycle engine and could cause permanent hearing damage after prolonged exposure. Drew Hawkins/Gulf States Newsroom hide caption

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The Claiborne Expressway was built in the 1960s at a time when the construction of new interstates and highways were a symbol of progress and economic development in the U.S., and urban planning and transportation development were at the forefront of city agendas.

But that supposed progress often came at a great cost for marginalized communities — especially Black neighborhoods.

When it was built, the "Claiborne Corridor" as it's still sometimes known, tore right through the heart of Treme, one of the oldest Black neighborhoods in the country.

For more than a century before the construction of the expressway, bustling Claiborne Avenue constituted the backbone of economic and cultural life for Black New Orleans.

Then, the oak-lined avenue was home to more than 120 businesses. Today, there are only a few dozen left.

What happened to Claiborne Avenue isn't unique. Many of the highways that get us from point A to B have an unfortunate racist legacy.

Federal planners often routed highways directly through low income, Black and Brown neighborhoods, dividing communities and polluting the air.

This racist legacy extends all across the country. In Montgomery, Alabama, I-85 cut through the city's only middle-class Black neighborhood and was "designed to displace and punish the organizers of the civil rights movement," according to Rebecca Retzlaff, an associate community planning professor at Auburn University.

In Nashville, planners intentionally looped I-40 around a white community, and sent it plowing through a prominent Black neighborhood, knocking down hundreds of homes and businesses. The list goes on and on.

Recently, the federal government has stated it wants to try to address the problem. An initiative established in the Biden Administration's Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act called Reconnecting Communities seeks to do just that — reconnect neighborhoods and communities that were divided by infrastructure.

The problem is not everyone agrees on the best way to do that.

Competing visions for the Claiborne expressway

Communities, city and state agencies and organizations across the country submitted proposals seeking federal funding — including one from Stelly's group, the Claiborne Avenue Alliance. In many ways, their proposal seemed poised to succeed. It's a textbook example of the racist planning history — even the White House says so in a published statement on the program. But the Alliance's grant proposal was denied.

Instead, the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana jointly submitted a separate proposal, requesting that the federal program cover half the cost of a $95 million plan.

That plan wouldn't move the freeway out of the neighborhood, but would pay for repairs and maintenance work on the existing stretch of highway, and to try to spruce up the desolate area underneath the highway by building a public market and performance space.

Unlike the Claiborne Alliance's plan, that proposal was officially approved, but so far, the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development has only received $500,000.

The city-state proposal does include some improvements that Stelly approves of, such as removing some of the dangerous on- and off-ramps that make it difficult for pedestrians to safely walk through the neighborhoods beneath the expressway. There are also proposed projects aimed at public safety, like better lighting and pedestrian and bicycle lanes.

Stelly calls the idea of creating an entertainment space and market beneath the highway — dubbed the "Claiborne Innovation District" — misguided and ridiculous.

"It's a foolish idea because you're going to be exposed to the same thing" as the neglected playground, Stelly says. "You're going to be exposed to the same levels of noise. It's not a wise decision to build anything under here."

Using science to inform policy

Although her group's proposal was denied, Stelly isn't giving up. She and her organization are turning to a new strategy: cooperating with a study on the health impacts caused by the expressway. They hope the data will support them in their efforts to remove the highway from their neighborhood.

Amy Stelly, an artist, urban designer and community activist, stands beneath the Claiborne Expressway on July 18, 2023. Stelly, who lives nearby, is working with the LSU School of Public Health on an EPA study of the noise and air pollution from the highway, and still supports moving this stretch of I-10 away from the historically black community.

Drew Hawkins/Gulf States Newsroom

These microscopic particles, measuring 2.5 microns or less in diameter, are released from the tailpipes of passing vehicles, according to Dr. Adrienne Katner, a professor at the LSU School of Public Health,who is managing the EPA study. They're so small that when you inhale them they lodge deeply in the lungs. From there, they can migrate to the circulatory system, and then spread and potentially affect every system in your body.

"So the heart, the brain," says Katner. "If a woman is pregnant, it can cross the placental barrier. So it has a lot of impacts."

The study is just getting started: Katner and her researchers are now taking preliminary readings with monitors at different points along the expressway. It will likely take two to three years to complete the study and publish the data.

One of the monitoring sites is Hunter's Field Playground. Graduate researcher Jacquelynn Mornay said the noise levels were as loud as a motorcycle engine up close and could cause permanent hearing damage after an hour or so of exposure. The pollution levels recorded hover around 18 micrograms per cubic meter.

"It should be at most, at most, 12," said Beatrice Duah, another graduate student researcher. "So it is way over the limits."

In addition to the playground, there are also homes and businesses lining the area beneath the expressway. The residents and employees are exposed daily to these levels of noise and pollution. While this EPA study is just getting started, it will join a decades-long body of research about how traffic pollution affects the human body. Katner doesn't expect any surprises from this particular stretch of I-10.

"We're not inventing the science here," Katner said. "All I'm doing is showing them what we already know and then documenting it, giving them the data to then inform and influence policy. That's all I can do."

'Removal is the only cure'

Eventually, these findings could help other communities divided by infrastructure across the country, Katner says.

"A lot of cities are going through this right now and they're looking back at their highway systems," she says. "They're looking back at the impacts that it's had on a community and they're trying to figure out what to do next. I'm hoping that this project will inform them."

Stelly isn't expecting any surprising findings either. She's always known the air she and her neighbors breathe isn't safe, she says, but she's hopeful that having concrete data to support her efforts will do more convince policy makers to address the problem. That could mean taking down the dangerous on-and-off ramps — or scrapping what she considers to be the wasteful idea of putting a market and event space under the highway overpass.

Still, there's only one true solution here for Stelly, only one way to really right the wrong done to her community.

"Removal is the only cure," Stelly says. "I'm insisting on it because I'm a resident of the neighborhood and I live with this every day. But the science tells us there's no other way."

[0zzysaurus]

might as well dump the recent update from earlier here even tho I’m not entirely satisfied with it —

[jbfly46]

Toxic and nuclear waste dumped in the southeast makes everyone there retarded, and authorities will accuse you of being on drugs for suffering from the side effects.

[pissjesus]

Why am I watching grown people who seem to be mildly intelligent get into South Park in 2023. Grow up.

[sketchs-trashcan]

i wasn't even invested in this splatfest but honestly, the fact that frye had two-thirds of the votes and still lost is incredibly upsetting not to mention that shover won again

[destinymylove]

wait im still so mad abt the smash or pass post like first of all the comments are so fuckin braindead i cant even read them without taking 1d6 psychic damage but also thats not even the point of smash or pass

i show you a fucking picture and you say whether you'd smash or pass. THATS IT. THATS THE GAME. you get THREE seconds tops to think about it!! youre supposed to think with your pussy what the fuck is up with those people typing up paragraphs of (incorrect) reasons arthurs morally repugnant like you can be wrong and stupid thats okay but the fucking fact of the matter is that bradley james's face card does not ever decline and if it takes you three hundred words of reactionary pearl clutching to talk urself out of smashing arthur mf pendragon ur a loser