Are there polluted rivers, lakes, or soils in the United States? Have you ever heard anything about that?

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Straight-Chair-3516@reddit

Honestly any military base is probably turbo fucked. Even reserve centers have PFAS. We quite literally can't drink the water at mine and im sure its the same for many others.

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Sunshineboy777@reddit

My area is pretty polluted. The industry came, used up the labor and resources, and left the citizens poor and in a polluted landscape.

It's really sad. Now, all the retail businesses are dying left and right. No one can afford to move. I have no idea what will happen.

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Alarming_Bar7107@reddit

We have a pfas problem where I am. Forever chemicals in the water and ground

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The US has made enormous progress on pollution since the 70s, but there are still issues. For example, the air quality in Clairton, Pennsylvania (near Pittsburgh) continues to be bad due to pollution from the coke works.

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PacSan300@reddit

LA is another famous example of progress on air pollution. Look at pictures from the city from the 70s and even 90s, and compare to today.

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After_Network_6401@reddit

I don’t have to look at pictures: I can remember.

I can recall flying into LA at the end of the 80’s and seeing the tops of the highest buildings poking out of a sea of yellow-brown smog that backed up all the way into the valley. You literally couldn’t see the ground.

At ground level, it would feel like a sunny day until you looked towards the horizon and then you could see a sort of brownish smear that ran all the way around the sky.

Not every day was like that, but LA used get terrible smog.

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2bad-2care@reddit

They say the smog is the reason LA has such beautiful sunsets.

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prezzpac@reddit

That’s what they say, huh? What a bunch of fuckin’ bullshit.

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Pelvis-Wrestly@reddit

Possibly my favorite line of all time

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postaboutit@reddit

Freaking love that scene. "I'm from Miami, you wanna show me the ocean?"

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LivermushEater@reddit

I remember flying into LA in the 80s and being able to smell the place before landing.

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Imightbeafanofthis@reddit

Back in 1977, the only city with worse air pollution than Los Angeles was Tehran, Iran. My family was from Los Angeles. They moved to Iran to work as expats, and my brother (a french horn player) got a job in... Tehran. It was like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

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postaboutit@reddit

"If you want a breath of fresh air you had to find a car with out of state plates and slash their tires" -Joan Rivers

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velociraptorfarmer@reddit

The Upper Mississippi is another one. Bald Eagles were brought to the brink of extinction in the lower 48 due to the pesticide DDT being dumped in the water. It was banned, and they're absolutely everywhere along the river nowadays.

The river still has issues, mainly with high mercury and lead levels, along with PCBs being present in sediments and various long-living fish in the river.

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Imaginary-Round2422@reddit

100%. Now, Bald Eagles are so common here in the heart of the Twin Cities that they even occasional are road kill. Heading into Downtown Saint Paul along Warner road from the east, you might see a dozen in a mile.

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Southern_Disk_7835@reddit

Yes. But Beijing has a smog problem thst makes L.A. look like Planet Druidia.

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West-Engine7612@reddit

Funny, she doesn't look druish..

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sharpshooter999@reddit

1 2 3 4.....that's the combination to my luggage!

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Turdsindakitchensink@reddit

When’s your intel on this, I was there 7 years ago and it was fine, better than HK or others in the area

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sadrice@reddit

They used to be horrible, but have massively improved according to reports. I don’t know the accuracy but numbers look decent these days. They made massive reforms, costly ones, I suppose that is one of the benefits of authoritarianism. No arguing about whether we should do something.

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iampatmanbeyond@reddit

Their smog problem is the reason LA still has so much air pollution. It crosses the pacific on air currents then hits the mountains and gets stuck in California

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CRO553R@reddit

Perhaps MegaMaid could suck out the pollution?

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Magerimoje@reddit

I remember the daily smog reports in major cities. Some days, the haze was so bad the skyline disappeared.

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paranoid_70@reddit

I remember as a kid growing up in the 70s, my chest would hurt if we played too long outside on really smoggy days

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NicolasNaranja@reddit

In ‘94 I had a long layover in LA and got out of the airport to eat. It was like breathing car exhaust. I was last in LA in December 2023 and it was much better.

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Hour-Watch8988@reddit

Air pollution still kills like 10,000 Angelenos a year though

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cyvaquero@reddit

I (Gen X) remember going to Pittsburgh in the late 70s (my pap had moved to McKeesport after WWII for work where my mom grew up before moving back to Centre County), it was a dirty city. The Pittsburgh waterfront today is a complete reversal of what it once was like.

Back in Bald Eagle valley in Centre/Clinton county there was a creek that was completely dead due to mine runoff, today it is very much alive with several Bald Eagle nests.

The fact that Bald Eagles are not only present in PA today but thriving is a huge testament to how much formerly industrial PA has cleaned up (although not a small amount of it is due to those industries moving off-shore.

Living out west the loudest anti-EPA voices I tend to hear come from people who were fed the line that EPA equals bad without having ever lived in areas where unregulated industrialization damaged the environment to the point of being dangerous to people.

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aracauna@reddit

Cancer rates in certain parts of Rome, GA are higher than normal due to pollution from a GE plant that closed decades ago. They keep a security guard staffed so they don't have to do the clean up they'd have to do if they officially closed the plant.

But we're a long way from the Cayuhoga River in Cleveland catching on fire due to the rampant dumping of flammable chemicals into the river. They even have fish in the river again, but you should probably avoid eating them.

Air is significantly cleaner than it was in the 70s. People forget that the EPA was started for a reason because it actually made a difference.

Sadly, the same is true of vaccines. Because they worked so well people forgot why they were needed to start with.

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mysecondaccountanon@reddit

Living in Pittsburgh when the wind blows northwards is always so fun on the eyes, throat, nose, lungs, etc. People wonder why southwest PA near that area has such high asthma rates, I wonder why.

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Appropriate-Win3525@reddit

I live south of Clairton along the Mon. With all the other mills closed, I rarely encounter air pollution. It all travels up river and away from me.

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MagentaMist@reddit

US Steel, I mean Nippon, needs to modernize CCW or close it. But it's the largest coke plant in the country so they're not closing it any time soon.

In the northwest we also have to deal with the cracker plant, which has been a train wreck since Day 1.

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Intrepid_Ad1715@reddit

With the amount of deregulation this administration is currently and planning on doing, it will only get worse.

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oosirnaym@reddit

Michigan is dealing with ground pollution of pfas from Dow chemical plants. Seattle has pollution in their waterways from Boeing.

We definitely still deal with it a ton.

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Eat--The--Rich--@reddit

The biggest issue is that corporations are applied small fees instead of any kind of fine or jail time when they get caught.

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remes1234@reddit

I live in michigan, and we have serious pollution issues in rivers. But it is 100x better than it was in the 70s. We have made huge strides. I live near Detroit and the Detroit, Rouge, Huron, Grand and Kalamazoo rivers have issues. But people swim in some of them, and there are recovering populations of fish and other animals. The work goes on cleaning them up.

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sadrice@reddit

That is incredibly flattering that you think that of us. Yes it is true that we were some of the pioneers of environmentalism. Rachel Carson was an American, we were some of the first to make a rigorous national parks system, and I believe ours are still some of the best (despite the orange idiot’s attempts to sabotage that), and we introduced protection laws for vulnerable species, like the migratory bird act, fairly early.

That is because we were and are some of the worst offenders. We noticed the effects and damage we were causing because it was so extreme. We made the passenger pigeon, a ridiculously large population bird, extinct in a short time because they are easy to shoot. We knocked over giant sequoias despite knowing they are terrible lumber and will shatter on felling, because you can sell the shards as grape stakes and matches.

We made fucking matches out if some of the largest organisms on earth, thousands of years old. I am profoundly offended, and I want a Time Machine just so I can go punch those guys.

We did the tetraethyl lead in gas thing. We have Flint Michigan and its water supply issues that have I think have been mostly fixed.

We have the Centralia mine fire, a fire we can’t put out underground that has been burning since 1962.

We have done “mountain removal mining”, which is exactly what it sounds like. In the California gold rush we used hydraulic mining, essentially fire hoses to destroy hillsides, and we used a lot of mercury. The San Francisco Bay is contaminated with mercury and other things and eating fish caught there is something you shouldn’t do every day.

We nearly destroyed our sardine population from overfishing out of Monterey before we stopped.

My geology professor said that we have dammed every meaningful river at some point in California. This has badly threatened our salmon population, and we have been doing dam removal and increased flow to help, despite republicans saying we are wasting water and river should reach the sea, all of the water is ours.

We have over pumped Californias Central Valley, some of the best farmland on earth with a large river and huge aquifer underneath, but when you pump all the water out this happens. The 1965 number is where ground level used to be before we pumped the water out from underneath it. Farmers have had to abandon some crops, reduce almost orchards, etc, have had their pumping limited, though it is hard to limit them draining the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers because they have old rights granted. They blame everyone but themselves when it is their faults

So yeah, very flattering that you think that of us, but incorrect.

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Awesomest_Possumest@reddit

Duke power dumped coal ash into the dan river in Virginia for.....a very long time. I had a friend who lived in Eden, NC, which is on the Dan, about seven or eight years ago? When it all came to light. They immediately had to stop using any tap water. For anything. Drinking, cooking, bathing I believe. It was all contaminated.

I don't know if it is still all contaminated. Duke was ordered to clean it up and handed a fine that was a slap on the wrist, and in response, raised everyone's electric rates.

So yeah, corporations still pollute the shit out of our country with basically no repercussions.

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ngshafer@reddit

There are a lot of polluted waterways in America! One of the reasons we have such strong environmental protections now is because of the disasters that have happened in the past.

Hanford is an infamous example. It's not as bad now, because they've done a decent job of cleaning it up, I think. When I was a kid in the 80s, Hanford was big news, because I live pretty close to it, by American terms (about 100 miles). If I recall correctly, the radioactive waste wasn't actually dumped directly into the river, it was buried near the river ... unfortunately, it was buried quickly, the containment wasn't as good as it should have been, and it leaked into the groundwater, from there into the river.

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Migraine_Megan@reddit

Also worth noting the Hanford site is about 580 sq miles. The accidents there do affect a larger area, but it's not like Chernobyl where it's right next to a major city. I know from living elsewhere people don't even know what WA is like east of the Cascades. It's vast, arid farmland and high desert. Very few population centers.

I am very interested in their new tech to turn radioactive waste into glass for safe disposal. I wouldn't be surprised if someone turns that glass into art, that would be very WA.

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fatmanwa@reddit

Correct, the wastes were not "dumped" in the river. But (and I am pulling this from distant memory) contaminated cooling water and air particles were let go into the environment. The whole Downwinders lawsuit brought that to light.

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Vandal_A@reddit

The Potomac was declared clean enough to potentially swim in around DC a few years ago (for the first time in generations). ... nobody is taking the chance and trying it

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Skatingraccoon@reddit

All over the fucking place. Look up EPA Superfund Sites. Look up Flint, Michigan. There's tons of pollution and new pollution being discovered every day.

During the early decades of the Hanford Site's operations the EPA wasn't even a thing. And there were far fewer rules about what you were allowed to do. As far as the water being released, it did not contain Plutonium, that's not how water cooling and plutonium production works. It did contain radioactive isotopes. Generally any water that passed through the reactor would have been held for long enough that the majority of radioactivity would have subsided.

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Rrrrandle@reddit

Flint's water issue wasn't a pollution problem. They switched sources to a naturally corrosive water source, and then also didn't treat the water properly with anti-corrosive agents, so the lead in the pipes leached into the water.

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BrighhtFuture@reddit (OP)

Oh okay then. Thanks for the correction! I was trying to translate the speech of an old soviet engineer from YouTube, so I might made a mistake😅

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temmoku@reddit

The statement that it did not contain plutonium is incorrect because there were failures of the fuel rods so then the cooling water was in direct contact with the fuel. Plutonium is not very soluble in water, though, so it mostly ended up in the sediments

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Skatingraccoon@reddit

Also I might have misread your post. Yes, producing plutonium produces some radioactivity but for the cooling water passing through it's not that serious as long as you give it time to chill out a little.

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GonnaMakeBiscuits@reddit

I grew up on the Columbia river downstream of Hanford. I never heard of waste being actively dumped in the river but I know that the storage sites have contaminated the ground water which seeps into the Columbia.

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SaintJimmy1@reddit

My state recommends you to not eat more than one fish per month if it came out of our water. If you’re pregnant or plan on ever being pregnant, they recommend you don’t eat fish from our water at all.

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the_real_JFK_killer@reddit

There are rivers that have caught on fire due to pollution.

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Perdendosi@reddit

... But not on the last 50 years.

The Clean Water Act did wonders to... Clean up our water.

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Betty_Boss@reddit

Parts of the Clean Water Act are being gutted.

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photonynikon@reddit

Thanks DRUMP

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MyUsername2459@reddit

Republicans have been working to undermine it for decades. He's the current face of it, and particularly zealous about it. . .but anti-environmentalism has been a big part of Republicanism for over 40 years. Reagan really got started on that, framing environmental regulations as things that harmed businesses. It was the same rhetoric he used in ending metric conversion, talking about how it would hurt businesses and thus must end.

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ballrus_walsack@reddit

Crazy because Nixon started the EPA just a decade before Reagan.

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LowFat_Brainstew@reddit

It really makes you wonder how bad the pollution was Nixon championed it.

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MyUsername2459@reddit

Bad enough the Cuyahoga River caught fire.

It was bad enough that people literally couldn't ignore it.

A decade later it was so successful in cleaning things up that Reagan began to peddle this act that everything is clean and good, so we don't need rules about things being clean.

Like so many other things, like vaccines, they were so successful that we had pushback after they worked with people saying we don't need them because there's no apparent need.

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ballrus_walsack@reddit

Like racism doesn’t exist any more too! /s

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PacSan300@reddit

Absolutely zero surprise consideration how this administration is like…

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El_Polio_Loco@reddit

Because, like so many things, it gets exploited to go beyond intentions.

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Perdendosi@reddit

Yes, but talking about its successes is a way to remind us to keep it.

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Betty_Boss@reddit

I hope so.

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OneLessDay517@reddit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Dan_River_coal_ash_spill

And yet Duke Energy CONTINUES to dodge its responsibility to clean up its coal ash.

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Ok_Dog_4059@reddit

We still have lakes and rivers closed to swimming because of the fecal bacteria pollution. While it is much better it isn't still a problem.

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ricardopa@reddit

Birds are also sources of e-coli, not just human poop

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Odd-Respond-4267@reddit

"good swimm'n" - rfk jr.

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dystopiadattopia@reddit

Famously the Cuyahoga

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TSA-Eliot@reddit

Famously the Cuyahoga

Randy Newman - Burn On

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Dish_Boggett@reddit

Great tune.

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Wildcat_twister12@reddit

“Cleveland, city of light, city of magic. Cleveland, city of light, you're calling me. Cleveland, even now I can remember. 'Cause the Cuyahoga River Goes smokin' through my dreams. BURN ON BIG RIVER, BURN ON”

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Total-Problem2175@reddit

There is even a beer from Cleveland named Burning River Pale Ale.

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Dear-Ad1618@reddit

Randy? That you?

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lgm22@reddit

Can you say Love Canal, Niagara Falls

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Stachemaster86@reddit

Hastily made Cleveland Tourism Ad this is the second one and a classic like the first!

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bramblefish@reddit

1969, a wee bit ago, prior to environmental legislation. Name something in the last 20 years.

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Pattern_Is_Movement@reddit

Famously the.... insert name of almost every major city in the US with a river

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Meat_your_maker@reddit

There’s a beer called burning river named after it

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RHS1959@reddit

Sadly not anymore. Great Lakes Brewery in Cleveland discontinued it in 2023. I’m waging a social media campaign to bring it back. Join my quest— log in to GLB on your favorite platform and make your burning 🔥desire known!

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Any-Investment5692@reddit

The river is much cleaner now. Fish have returned and you can swim in it now.

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Eric848448@reddit

The Wabash too.

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KoedKevin@reddit

This was Cleveland and an oil barge rammed a bridge and spilled oil into the water. It wasn't pollution as generally defined.

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itsatrapp71@reddit

The mighty Cuyahoga river running through Cleveland. So famous that Randy Newman wrote a song about it catching fire.

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offbrandcheerio@reddit

This is what led to the creation and passage of the National Environmental Protection Act. The Cuyahoga isn’t nearly as bad anymore. We do still have impaired streams though.

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Difficult_Source8136@reddit

Give it a few years once these EPA cuts kick in. Better enjoy the Cuyahoga while it lasts.

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Kyle81020@reddit

This is such a dumb trope. If you spill hydrocarbons (fuel) in the water they float. If you light the fuel it burns. The river itself doesn’t burn.

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ballrus_walsack@reddit

IKR like burning rivers are even a big problem. The waters not burning it’s the floating hydrocarbons. NBD.

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HegemonNYC@reddit

Which spurred environmental acts that cleaned it up.

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OtherlandGirl@reddit

I almost peed myself laughing at OP’s question

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JenniferJuniper6@reddit

Not recently, though. At least not that I’ve heard of.

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dgillz@reddit

Yes, the Cuyahoga, in 1964. We have come light years since then.

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ants_taste_great@reddit

They made a beer about it from Great Lakes Brewery, it's called Burning River, and it's from the Cuyahoga river that flows into Lake Erie catching fire a dozen+ times around the late 60s early 70s. Caused from pollution from the steel mills and railroads that run next to it.

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Randomized9442@reddit

Here is the Superfund list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites

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wormbreath@reddit

Yes. Look at all the super fund sites alone

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Raiders2112@reddit

I used be in land surveying and had to head to a few Super Fund sites. One that comes to mind is an old landfill where they dumped radioactive material in a certain location. We had to do the boundary survey, then survey the contaminated area to locate it and create new setbacks. It was not a fun feeling being anywhere near the place.

My hair hasn't fallen out to this day, so I guess I'm OK, but what were those people thinking back then?

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213737isPrime@reddit

"Not my problem"

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TheBimpo@reddit

And this is just the worst of it.

OP, are you under some assumption that we have a pure water supply and some magic grasp on how to protect soils from industrial sites?

It would be harder to find places that are not polluted.

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Traditional-Job-411@reddit

Butte MT and separately Libby MT.

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Splugarth@reddit

I suggest you look up the history of Love Canal. Or look up “superfund site”. The US has a rich history of dumping toxic substances.

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AllAreStarStuff@reddit

There’s a superfund site in my city. They just built a neighborhood over it. I used to wonder why that particular patch of land remained undeveloped. Now I wonder if the new residents know the history of where they live

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Gone213@reddit

People dont realize how close they live to superfund sites. They're pretty much in every square mile of the US.

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Character_School_671@reddit

There are 1349 superfund sites in the US, which is 3,796,742 square miles.

That is not one in every square mile, by many orders of magnitude. NE industrial USA =/= E Oregon or Wyoming.

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Splugarth@reddit

Interestingly, a lot of people live near superfund sites. 7% of the US population lives within 1 mile and 23% live within 3 miles. So, it’s a bigger deal than one might imagine from the immense amount of space available to us in the US.

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fshagan@reddit

Not every square mile is populated either. Take a look at the 1340 Superfund sites at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites

I have one in my town, a mile away.

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bigchilla777@reddit

i grew up 4 houses down from one of them

thank god we all thought the water tasted too bad to drink

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Character_School_671@reddit

And I don't have one in my rural not town, also a mile away.

I'm sorry you are close to one. But they're not everywhere. Most square miles in the US have someone living in them. They don't have superfund sites, even within many more miles.

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BB-56_Washington@reddit

Yep. There's 3 in my small city, including the naval base I work at.

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SenatorBeers@reddit

It’s been quite some time since I’ve driven through, but last time I did it was sad. Imagine Fallout.

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christine-bitg@reddit

Just keep in mind that a local government agency got greedy and sold the land where those hazardous wates were placed.

The chemical company told them to never build on that site. But did that stop them? No...

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pemungkah@reddit

Yes, I found out I was living over an old Superfund site in Palo Alto after I moved away.

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feryoooday@reddit

Berkeley Pit as well

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Washpedantic@reddit

For the longest time I always heard that word as super fun site and didn't know what it actually was until I read about the love canal.

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nasadowsk@reddit

I mean, "love cabal" kinda sounds dirty, too...

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CitizenTrent@reddit

I listened to a podcast American History Tellers on Wondry I thinkkkk.. it was about the love canal and very interesting

Im in MI and hate what we do to our wonderful fresh water :(

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strangemedia6@reddit

Iirc, Love Canal is the reason that the superfund site program exists. Fucked to story but also interesting.

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northman46@reddit

And the government was dumping along with the rest

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Rarewear_fan@reddit

I don’t know about anything super recently but there have been cases of this. A famous one was lawsuits against DuPont Corporation dumping hazardous chemicals in the waters around West Virginia. The movie Dark Waters from 2019 is a dramatized account of the investigation and lawsuits.

Again I don’t know of anything recently but companies in the US are not immune from hiding immoral activities in the environment and seeing how long they can get away with it.

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stinkyman360@reddit

It's still a problem. KY department of fish and wildlife basically says the fish in the Ohio River are only safe to eat if you limit it to once every 2 months or so

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mo_mentumm@reddit

That’s if you’re in a sensitive population. General guidance is once per month.

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More-Journalist6332@reddit

PFAS is the new cool way to poison people and expect municipalities to clean it up.

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PuddleCrank@reddit

This depends on if your state cares about you or not, Industrial PFAS water filters exist but are costly because of high demand, so they only get installed when mandated by the government. Now you might say, my water's good the mayor never sends me a letter telling me there's carcinogens in the water supply, but is he mandated to check by the state?

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Fancy-Restaurant4136@reddit

Also the book and film A Civil action about pollution by W R Grace inc and a lawsuit to compensate the victims for their medical needs

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northman46@reddit

GE and the Hudson River, 3M and pfas in Minnesota more recently.

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Away-Cicada@reddit

We had such horrible problems with pollution that there are MULTIPLE songs about the Cuyahoga River Fire. And they're all referencing different instances of the river catching fire.

Still can't nor would I try to fish or swim in either the Hudson or the Schuylkill.

There are even man-made lakes and reservoirs that have problems with people dumping their trash in 'em (Lake Perris I miss what you used to be).

Also. Dow is still skirting responsibility for polluting the soil near their plants with PFAS. There are several more instances like this, and it's one of my biggest problems with this fuckass administration taking away the powers of the EPA.

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Vyckerz@reddit

In the 1980s in Massachusetts I grew up next to a town where there was one of the most famous cases of industrial pollution in the US which caused a cancer cluster. There was a movie made about the lawsuits over it called "A Civil Action" starring John Travolta

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bahhumbug24@reddit

There were, in the 90s, farm fields in central Michigan that couldn't be used for anything because they were contaminated with polybrominated biphenyl fire retardants that had mistakenly been mixed into animal feed in the (1970s?). (Look up the Fire Master / Nutri Master confusion) I was in uni with a child from one of the most affected families, so had more of an insiders view than most people.

The Great Lakes region in general has long been polluted; it's at the heart of probably the biggest industrial super-area in the country, and there are measurable levels of polyhalogenated aromatic hydrocarbons in the sediments and in both terrestrial and aquatic organisms in the lakes and rivers around them.

Back in the late 80s or early 90s, there was some epidemiological work done that (going by ancient memory here) seemed to show that infants and children born to people who fished off the bridges around Detroit, and ate what they caught because free calories, had lower head circumference than other children whose families did not eat contaminated fish. Head circumference is a surrogate for appropriate neural development.

There are areas of surface and/or groundwater contamination from mines, just about anywhere there are or were mines.

There was a lot of controversy in the late 80s or so about contaminants on Long Island, and I think also out on Cape Cod.

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danbyer@reddit

For an entertaining angle, try A Civil Action (1998) and Erin Brockovich (2000)

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tbodillia@reddit

Plenty. The EPA exists because rivers used to catch fire. A river, a flowing body of water, used to catch fire.

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randompantsfoto@reddit

EPA superfund sites are literally everywhere. It’s a lot better than it was in the 70s (when they actually started paying attention and started remediating it), but there are vast tracts of this country where cancer clusters, birth defects, and other fallout from mass, unchecked industrialization running rampant are the norm—especially around former industrial/manufacturing powerhouse cities.

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Particular_Night_360@reddit

Look up the gulf Mexico dead zone.

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scj1091@reddit

The Salton Sea aka Lake Cahuilla in inland Southern California. It was accidentally man made by a large leak from an irrigation canal that allowed Colorado river water to flow into the valley and fill up the lake. Over time it was so polluted with toxic agricultural runoff and increasing salinity that all the fish and birds died. Then farmers began using water more efficiently and most runoff ceased. As the lake increasingly dries up, the various natural and man-made harmful substances in it are blown away with dust causing significant health impacts to nearby humans and animals.

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SabresBills69@reddit

Love cabal comes to mind.

Many rivers in industrial areas have been declared hazard zone snd got extra fed money for clean up

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seanpuppy@reddit

The Chicago river used to be so polluted that at certain points near the live stock yards, it was said that during periods of low rain a chicken could walk across the river. As the city grew, more and more sewage would get dumped into the river, which would feed into Lake Michigan, which was the source of our drinking water.

This problem was so severe, that we managed to permanently reverse the Chicago river, which still runs in reverse to this day. These days its only slightly toxic, you definitely would want to go get a tetanus shot if you fell in, but this year they had the first chicago river swim race in something like 100 years.

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Yggdrasil-@reddit

I've taken the architecture boat tour 3 or 4 times in chicago, and every time the docent mentions that thencitf has a goal of making river fully swimmable in a decade. First it was 2025, then 2030, but surely by 2035...

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seanpuppy@reddit

Its definitely a subjective line in the said... but it will be swimable in the truest sense eventually.

Im reading a book about the Chicago river, and when they first tried to reverse it, it would not stay reversed all year round. Now adays its truly flowing "down hill" so theres a consistent flow of fresh water diluting all the shit.

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diligent_twerker@reddit

Agreed. So much money put into the river walk areas for it not to get better. They've done a great job from where it was.

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seanpuppy@reddit

The river walk work has nothing to do with the cleanliness of the river itself, so I have no idea what you are talking about when you say its a waste.

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diligent_twerker@reddit

Who said it was a waste? The Riverwalk is beautiful and you best believe they're keeping it clean because of all of the investment. I'm assuming you misread my comment.

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DrowningPuppies@reddit

Idk what the definition of "fully swimmable" is, but this year had a river swim event. Was the first one in about a century, so perhaps what you're referring to?

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CobandCoffee@reddit

There's parts of the river that still bubble from 100+ year old animal carcasses slowly decaying at the bottom.

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loseunclecuntly@reddit

Two major pollution sites that first come to my mind are Times Beach, Missouri (dioxin) and Love Canal in Niagara, New York (a whole toxic mixture of chemicals).

The Great Flood of 1993 along the Mississippi/Missouri rivers. Large amounts of herbicides were washed into the water affecting land covered by flood waters.

Centrailia, Pennsylvania has a huge underground coal fire burning since 1962. Due to fire burning in the coal seams and releasing toxic gases the town was abandoned. Still burning to this day.

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kbell58@reddit

There’s Centralia PA - a town that sits on an underground coal fire that has been burning since 1962 and it’s estimated to burn for 200 years more. It’s hellish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania

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jimmywhereareya@reddit

Trump repealed all your environmental protections so that the people who bought him can go in and drill baby, drill

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madbull73@reddit

I live not far from Onondaga lake. Not long ago it was listed as the most polluted lake in America.

https://www.seasidesustainability.org/post/onondaga-lake-what-we-can-learn-from-the-most-polluted-lake-in-america

https://www.animalsaroundtheglobe.com/the-most-polluted-lake-in-the-u-s-just-had-a-surprising-comeback-1-317544/

I remember a story not long ago about a berm giving way and millions of gallons of liquid manure flooding a local river and killing fish etc.

We get lots of pollution, and our current regime is trying to roll back our environmental protections.

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jpb1111@reddit

Having grown up near the lake I look back feeling like there was a void in my life due to the inability to enjoy it, aside from the "French Fort". Bittersweet, but glad it's cleaned up.

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mattpeloquin@reddit

Come to Flint for the basketball, stay (and die) from the water

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OneLessDay517@reddit

The U.S. is considered one of the few countries that really take environmental protection seriously.

Hahahahahahahaha. Oh, wait. You were serious?

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Master_Pattern_138@reddit

Read the book, "Nuclear Madness" by physician Helen Caldicott that documents the environmental/health destruction from start to finish from nuclear power, including the military. Mining in the midst of Reservations, playgrounds built on radioactive tailings (Colorado, Oakland, CA), barrels of waste in SF Bay...I was 13 when Three Mile Island melted down in Harrisburg, PA. There are loads of examples. My generation grew up with acid rain, also.

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Euphoric_Peanut1492@reddit

Bridgeton Landfill in Missouri and Picher, Oklahoma come to mind immediately

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pissrael_Thicneck@reddit

Isn't the river in NJ the most polluted river in the world??

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acoreilly87@reddit

The Passaic? First one that came to mind, but there are probably other contenders

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pissrael_Thicneck@reddit

Yea this one, I know it ranks very high in the world if not the top.

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Nondescript_585_Guy@reddit

I thought it was the Ganges in India, but apparently that dubious honor is held by the Citarum River in Indonesia.

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KW5625@reddit

Some. Rural rivers can have fertilizers, pesticides, and livestock runoff while major cities can have rivers with some floating trash, parking lot runoff, raw sewage overflows, and industrial runoff that would all make the river unsafe to swim in... but we are not talking India level dangerous.

Most US river water is safe to drink after fitration to remove natural parasites, germs, and suspended solids

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IainwithanI@reddit

The Mississippi River sends massive amounts of pollutants into the Gulf of Mexico, creating an extremely large area of pollution.

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altoniel@reddit

I hate to be so negative, but most rivers in the US are significantly contaminated. It just doesn't get reported on enough. At least 50% of rivers and lakes can't be used for drinking water, fishing, and/ or recreation per the CWA. Some studies have found environmental contamination in as much as 98% of the waterways we get drinking water from.

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emptybeetoo@reddit

Iowa has statewide issues with ag runoff and nitrates in water, which likely contributes to Iowa having the second highest cancer rate in the nation. Des Moines (Iowa’s largest city) had watering bans last summer because nitrates were so high they overwhelmed the treatment facility.

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WinnerAwkward480@reddit

Don't forget about Acid Rain. And there's so many Superfund Sites that will never be livable for possibly centuries- if at all ever . Lots of closed Military Bases , where solvents were used in the manufacture of certain parts . Once it was no longer an effective cleaner , they were told to dump it along the fence lines to kill vegetation. As they needed clear line of sight for security reasons

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IainwithanI@reddit

Coal ash is still a problem in Alabama, and I expect elsewhere. Waukegan, Illinois’ waterfront is dangerously polluted, although that’s (very slowly) being cleaned up. I believe parts of the former Fort McClellan, again in Alabama, are still off limits due to chemical weapon pollution.

We’ve made great strides, but we are still creating new brownfields.

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Basic_Visual6221@reddit

Just Google Flint Water. As a Philly kid, we wouldn't dare to swim in the rivers here.

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eml_raleigh@reddit

There are lots of waste sites in the U.S.

- The stabilization of the 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste at the Hanford Site is still ongoing. Handling the disposal of nuclear waste in the U.S. was not regulated until 1982.
- PCB contamination in Morrisville, NC - cleanup finished around 2000
- Savannah River site (nuke) - it's a Superfund site https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.Healthenv&id=0403485 marine bas
- Kepone in the James River in Virginia - it settled to bottom of the river and was eventually covered by silt deposits - this is from memory, may not be accurate
- illegal dumping of waste over years at Aberdeen Proving Ground resulted in a law (or policy, I forget which) which makes the manager of a federal employee who does dumping the person who will go to jail for it - also from memory
- Feb 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill (it inspired Earth Day and much subsequent work to address pollution)
- oil spill after explosion at Deepwater Horizon sea oil platform in April 2010 - the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry
- There are a number of sites in the U.S. that were once factories which used lead, and left lead in the soil before the 1970s. These sites are not always tracked and monitored, and schools and homes have been built on them.
- Camp Lejeune Marine Corps base water contamination

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BrighhtFuture@reddit (OP)

Thank you so much for your feedback! Appreciate it🥺

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Zephyr_Dragon49@reddit

I work in hazmat remediation. I promise we do have nasty stuff but we started cleaning it up decades ago. We have the RCRA act which gives our environmental protection agency authority over all hazmat from the moment its created until total destruction (cradle to grave). We have the CERCLA act which gives the federal government authority to assign liability and respond to haz spills. The best part of this act was that the government could make whoever contaminated an area go back and clean it up even if the contamination was legal when they did it. This act is also a tax on petrochemical facilities and the money is used for superfund activities. We also have the SARA act which increased regulation and government involvement in finding permanent remediation methods for hazmat and got more money for the CERCLA superfund

Its not perfect but its something. My company is huge too. We incinerate hundreds of tons quarterly just on our site alone. It can be anything that isn't radioactive. I don't know what we do with radioactivity, I just know that our location cant do it. Just like that train that spilled in East Palestine, Ohio, we get multiple trains with hundreds of thousands of pounds of hazmat per week. Imagine all that shit getting poured in the rivers or dumped in landfills like it use to.

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Mrs_Noelle15@reddit

I don't know how severe it is now, but it absolutely was a massive issue in the past for some parts of the US

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handcraftedcandy@reddit

Lake Erie once caught fire it was so polluted. Things are better than they were but there is still room for improvement. There are very few lakes rivers and ponds in NY I would trust to eat any fish caught out of them.

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MWSin@reddit

The Environmental Protection Agency exists because the Cuyahoga River kept catching fire.

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Nova17Delta@reddit

Didn't Cleveland's river catch on fire once?

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Cesia_Barry@reddit

The Cuyahoga River in Ohio was so polluted that it caught fire in several times in the 1960s, with the biggest blaze occurring in 1969. There’s an REM song about it

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ELMUNECODETACOMA@reddit

Possibly more famously, the Randy Newman song "Burn On" which played over the titles to the movie "Major League"

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Agua_Frecuentemente@reddit

And a Pretenders song

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DameWhen@reddit

Texas does take environmental pollution very seriously (historically). There are some very poluted cities on the coast-- I'm referring to places like Galveston and Houston.

Overall though, even the most polluted cities in Texas that I've visited are still far below the level of pollution you would expect to see outside of the US.

Those places are polluted by our metric as Texans. On anyone else's radar, I believe it wouldn't even be a blip.

Due to decades of work-- from established organizations and environmental laws-- that labor to protect green parts of the state, prevent littering, and reverse pollution, Texas can remain clean and beautiful.

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altoniel@reddit

Texas is one of the least environmentally regulated states in my experience. They'll throw money at projects that increase public perception of environmental protection, but getting a permit to go fuck up an ecosystem is laughably easy compared to most states. The coastlines are reasonably protected, but that's mostly because the of federal government.

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Raiders2112@reddit

Go look up abandoned oil wells in Texas. They don't have the funds to clean them up due to their numbers. They're called orphan wells and they leach hazardous chemicals into the ground water. It's a huge problem as it's impossible to force those who drilled them to pay up and cap them when they go bankrupt and no longer exist.

Texas can look clean and beautiful, but that's only on the surface. Those wells are not just a Texas problem either.

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DameWhen@reddit

Very true.

Even so, everything is relative.

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BigDaddyTheBeefcake@reddit

Flint drinking water is pure and pristine. Ignore all the evidence to the contrary

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pakrat1967@reddit

Depends on what you consider polluted. Plenty of rivers are used for sewage treatment. The water before the treatment plant is filthy. The water after the plant is relatively cleaner. There may or may not be additional treatment of the water before it mixes with portable water sources.

The French Broad River in western NC is popular for water activities. It is also notorious for heavy contamination, even before Hurricane Helene.

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Upbeat_Ad8686@reddit

The Republic of Texas has entered the chat

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Bookworm1254@reddit

We take environmental protection more or less seriously (depends on the party in power) because for too many years, we didn’t take it seriously enough. That’s how we had such delights as pea soup smogs in Los Angeles, acid rain, and Lake Erie catching on fire. The Environmental Protection Agency came into being in the 70’s, and gradually things got better. We still have a long way to go, though. Witness how many people think climate change is a hoax.

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Striking_Elk_6136@reddit

There’s a radioactive forest in Dawsonville, Georgia. Originally the site was used to developed a nuclear powered aircraft, and when that didn’t work out they irradiated the forest to see what effect a nuclear war might have on trees.

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ELMUNECODETACOMA@reddit

My city had open smelters that made the air so bad that even in the age of smog we were famous for it (because the city's name rhymes with "aroma").

Even though they're all closed down the past 20 years or so there are still warnings in certain neighborhoods not to let young children play in the dirt because so much groundwater containing the likes of arsenic leached through the soil for so long it will take many more years to rinse away, if ever.

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JetScreamerBaby@reddit

Before the EPA was born, unbridled dumping was ruining most waterways, and acid rain changed the waters and soils across the entire Northeast.

There was a joke going around in the early 1970s:

Hey, did you hear the news?

Lake Erie burned down.

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ggbookworm@reddit

Oh dear, yes. Look up Time Beach, MO to get the whole story. The town had to just be abandoned. We also have what are called Superfund sites where contamination is so bad that it takes decades and billions to clean.

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KilD3vil@reddit

Brother, look up "RCRA SUPER SITES". Or New Jersey...

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altoniel@reddit

The US didn't really care about environmental protection until the 1970s.

The Clean Water Act (CWA) of 1972 that empowered the EPA and The Army Corps of Engineers to regulate how waterways within the US are used. This includes discharging waste materials, dredging, construction on or near, etc.

Another peice of legislation called CERCLA in 1980 broadened the US's capacity to protect the environment by empowering the EPA to investigate, desinate, and set requirements for cleanup for contaminated sites that pose a public health risk. These designated sites are called Superfund Sites.The Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which is responsable for dumping radioactive waste in the Columbia River, is now a superfund site.

The final big peice of legislation is NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) of 1970. It has been augmented, reformed, and added to a lot over the decades- Trump most recently recinded several parts of it through executive order. This act basically requires the government to programmatically investigate how a government project will affect the environment. This includes alot of things, from fish and wildlife, to aestitics and noise. It used to cover socioeconomic justice (basically if a project disproportionately negatively impacts one group of people), but this is the part Trump gutted to remove the socio- part of it.

To add more complexity, each State and locality has (or doesn't have) additional laws and regulations. These various laws usually mimic what NEPA and the CWA do in jurisdictions where the federal laws wouldn't apply. For example, the CWA only applies to a strict (thanks again Trump) interpretation of the law that excluded the majority of smaller waterways, lakes, and wetlands. States like Washington, Oregon, and California have regulations that allow for government oversight of those waterways the federal law doesn't allow for.

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paintingdusk13@reddit

The Passaic River in NJ has sections that are super clean and sections that are literal toxic Superfund sites. And they can't easily be cleaned because the really toxic stuff has settled and if attempts are made to remove it you'll be damaging downstream areas further.

I grew up in a 3 mile peninsula city with Newark Bay on one side, the Kill Van Kull on another New York Harbor on the other side. Although I did, legally we were not allowed to swim in them and all three while a lot better now, used to be really, really polluted bad.

And again a huge issue is while they spent time in the 80's and 90's cleaning them, companies were allowed to legally dump anything so long and so much of those pollutants are in the mud at the bottom of the waterways.

Back in the late 80's we also had syringe tide here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syringe_tide

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Competitive_Web_6658@reddit

It is not safe to drink any lake, river, or stream water in the US without sterilizing it first. They all contain Giardia, e. Coli, and/or other fun and exciting microscopic friends. There are so many industrial and agricultural chemicals in our streams and rivers that fish are dying (some chemicals are toxic, others raise the water temp or contribute to die-off of plant life). 2018/2019 EPA report.

But it used to be so much worse. When my parents were in high school (around the time the EPA passed), the part of the Mississippi River that runs through Minneapolis and St Paul Minnesota was a literal garbage dump. ~25 years later it was a regional park, and my little brother and I were swimming in it. There was still a ton of gross yellow foam, though (we used to play with it. Neither of us has cancer or superpowers yet).

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Larrythepuppet66@reddit

I live in WA, and the tap water is not considered safe to drink due to the insanely high levels of PFAS in the water. I installed a full house filter to combat it but prior to that I was using a reverse osmosis machine to make safe drinking water. We are also one of the few counties that actually test for it so I think it affects more people than others realize.

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Pretty-Ebb5339@reddit

A town in Oklahoma is contaminated due to improper dumping of nuclear waste. Look up Karen Silkwood. It’s still causing birth defects on cattle and other things. It’s supposed to be “safe” in 10 years. But there are ranches that are over the dump site.

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Buford12@reddit

I live om Ohio. In my state if you own a farm pond the Ohio department of health advises you to only eat fish from them 2 times a week. This is because of heavy metal contamination from the coal tired electric plants on the river. https://odh.ohio.gov/know-our-programs/ohio-sport-fish-consumption-advisory

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JonWood007@reddit

It literally took a river catching on fire for us to establish the EPA in the 1970s.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZopJ96wEOUw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvrAd0bM_7I

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doozle@reddit

I grew up in Gold Country in the California foothills. We were warned growing up that the streams had high Mercury content as a result of the industrial mining practices in the area.

We swam anyways.

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No_Ant_5064@reddit

The US takes pollution so seriously because of how bad it got. A lot has been cleaned up but there's just so many sites, it might be centuries before it's all cleaned up. And we do continue to pollute today, see PFAS

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aannoonnyymmoouuss99@reddit

We have it on long island. Northrop Grumman in Bethpage. They are still finding spots where waste was dumped and testing/cleaning the water.

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NeatPath42069@reddit

Large parts of Central Appalachia look like the surface of the moon. Mountain top removal, valley fill.

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Kink_Candidate7862@reddit

The Hanford nuclear site is still being cleaned up and it's going to take probably more decades. There are places along the Columbia River and Willamette River that still need to be cleaned up.

I actually worked for a company out in hillsboro, and we had our metal etched by a company in portland. They finally closed down and went broke.

Then it was found out, that they had dumped the residue out in the back of the plant in the pond and it had absorbed into the ground and we're talking 25 years of waste from acid etching.

So it became one of the super fund sites to clean up and dispose of. The owner never got prosecuted for dumping.

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tooslow_moveover@reddit

I sit on a board overseeing cleanup of contaminated soil and water an Air Force base. We’ve made major progress towards prevention of contamination and cleanup in the US, but the legacy of contamination from the last 150+ years will be with us for a long time still.

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NefariousAntiomorph@reddit

I grew up near a decently large superfund site in my hometown. It was a steel mill decades ago and the company dumped off all sorts of waste there. Then years after the site was closed there were talks of building a water park there. Thankfully I believe those talks have long since fallen through. I know all the locals treated it as a sick joke because who in their right minds would build a water park on a toxic waste dump? Fairmont, West Virginia definitely had its interesting moments.

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Livid_Accountant1241@reddit

In Iowa there are high levels of nitrates in the water from agricultural runoff. I wouldn't eat any fish from the rivers.

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SayHai2UrGrl@reddit

im not sure if there's a pond, lake, stream, reservoir, beach or bay within 50 miles of me that I'd willingly get into, much less drink from, and my area has been making sustained effort to clean up our waterways since like, the 70s i think.

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SayHai2UrGrl@reddit

pollution isn't the only problem.

the natural balance of many of these ecosystems has been very badly disturbed, so microbes and insects can get dangerously out of control to

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pandapower63@reddit

The Carson river in Carson City, Nevada is a superfund site. Nevada is one of the most toxic states in the United States.
Our tapwater has 33 different contaminants. Arsenic is 1468 times the limit -we’ve got barium chloroforms uranium lead. The nitrates are way up high -all kinds of words that are really really long that I don’t know how to say, but we’ve got them !

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SillyPuttyGizmo@reddit

Times Beach

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri

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RealAssociation5281@reddit

A lot of military bases are known to have lead or other contaminants in their water.

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Weightmonster@reddit

Look up “Superfund sites”

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ahferroin7@reddit

For example, I once heard that during the nuclear arms race with the Soviets, some radioactive waste was dumped into the Columbia River in the great state of Washington. Is that true?

I’m fairly certain that you’re referring to the Hanford site in Washington state. Originally part of the Manhattan Project, it’s usage continued through the Cold War. Between 1944 and 1971 they used water from the Columbia river for cooling and then dumped it back in the river, but containment of the reactors and other systems was imperfect and they ended up dumping a few terabecquerels of radioactive isotopes per day into the river alongside the otherwise theoretically clean cooling water. There was also unintentional aerial release of radioactive material over time.

The whole site has since been decommissioned, and is in the process of being cleaned up as part of the Superfund program under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980.

So my question is: were these wastes handled properly during the arms race? Did anyone care about environmental protection back then, or was it mostly ignored?

No, not really, and yes, it was mostly ignored.

But the risk also wasn’t well understood at the time, both of the radioactive byproducts, and of environmental contamination in general.

Today however, the aforementioned CERCLA Superfund program is being used to clean up a lot of the results of that lack of care and lack of understanding. Well known examples of Superfund sites which are well documented and may be of interest for further reading include:

Love Canal, New York (this is one of the sites that prompted the creation of the Superfund program)
The Hanford Site, Washington
The Berkeley Pit, Montana
The Pearl Harbor Military Complex, Hawaii
The Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Colorado

There over a thousand others as well, though most are only ‘well known’ to either local residents or environmentalists (for example, most residents of Southwest Ohio know about Mound Laboratories in Miamisburg).

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shoresy99@reddit

Is this post AI slop? Lots of countries take environmental protection WAY more seriously than the US. And there are tons of cases of pollution that anyone with half a brain would know about. Like Love Canal, Lake Erie, etc.

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BrighhtFuture@reddit (OP)

Sorry, I do live in a 3rd world country. The US looks like heaven from here’s prospective. All I see is beautiful nature, crystal clear water everywhere and good air quality. I haven’t heard much about pollution incidents. It might take place sometimes of course, like that oil tanker disaster near Anchorage. But overall, especially keeping in mind how big the USA is, I can strongly say that there isn’t any country in the world that big and that clean. We can’t compare the 3rd largest country and let’s say New Zealand or Norway. Do they even produce something? Does these countries have the same % of manufacturing in their GDP as the US does? That’s what I’m talking about. The US does everything. You produce lots of things. In Norway, they don’t. Also, In the US live 350 millions of people. In Norway - several millions. More people - more chance anything bad happens. It’s much harder to control and regulate environment standards in such a big country as the US. Btw in the past century or two, no one cared about environment.

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Little_Creme_5932@reddit

There are huge polluted areas in the US. However, there has been a lot of progress made since the 1970. Still, the groundwater under 100 million acres of US farmland is contaminated, for example, cuz of US farming practices.

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BeekeeperZero@reddit

Look up superfúnd sites.

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shampton1964@reddit

Your first sentence has me wondering what your source of information is, as Ameristan does only slightly better than Russia or Brazil on these things. The thesis is false.

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Eighth_Eve@reddit

Wehave impeoved a loot in my lifetime. But at the same time we have grown and spread further so, while we no longer havesmog and heavy metals in the drinking water are rare now( yes i know about flint michigan, one city big nationwide news, and mining towns that aren't big news) we have problems.

Like everywhere else poop makes it into the rivers when the storm drains overflow into the sewage lines or vis versa. And we have runoff from large scale farms. Most midwestern small lakes are full of algae booms from The fertilizer runoff. It kills fish and infects the skin of anyone who is dumb enough to swim there.

Then there is our insectides problem, we lost most of our insects, both the crop eaters and benevolent ones.

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fshagan@reddit

There are quite a few Superfund sites. 1,340 still to be cleaned up, and 457 cleaned up since the 1980s when the list started.

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AlecMac2001@reddit

“The U.S. is considered one of the few countries that really take environmental protection seriousl“

By whome?

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FairNeedleworker9722@reddit

America started caring cause for too long, no one cared. Toxic waste was buried, rivers caught on fire, acid rain fell. It has taken and is taking decades to fix the damage.

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Separate-Relative-83@reddit

I live close to a Superfund site. It was polluted by strip mining back in the day. Northern California.

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ericbythebay@reddit

Yes, plenty.

https://www.kqed.org/science/1999023/navy-took-11-months-to-alert-sf-to-airborne-plutonium-at-hunters-point-shipyard-site

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tesseractjane@reddit

My husband was born at Camp Lejune while his father was stationed there. The water is a superfund.

The town I grew up in has contaminated ground water from the uranium processing nearby.

There is an arsenal turned nature preserve that has been the subject of countless lawsuits against Shell and the US military for clean up.

Clear Creek in Colorado lost a stock of 15k fish once to a coors beer spill.

Yeah, we still have pollution.

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PlainTrain@reddit

The Environmental Protection Agency maintains a list of heavily polluted sites, called Superfund sites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites

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stackshouse@reddit

Onondaga lake would like to remind you of its mercury toxicity…..

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HippieJed@reddit

The Little Pigeon River was badly polluted in the 70’s and 80’s by a paper mill. It flows from the North Carolina border into Tennessee

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arcteryx17@reddit

Google "love canal"

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benkatejackwin@reddit

Campbell's just admitted to dumping water into the Ohio River 5,400 times.

https://katv.com/news/nation-world/campbells-soup-supply-company-co-clean-water-act-ohio-dumped-court-documents-environmental-agencies-napoleon-cincinnati-imposed-civil-penalty-maumee-river-lake-erie-sources-toxic-algae-wastes-federal-government-compliance-violations-suspended-solids-oil

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LiqdPT@reddit

Two words: Superfund site.

Also, when a gas station or other automotive business closes down it takes a LOT of time and money to clean it up to be used for anything else.

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subcow@reddit

Just a few minutes from my house on Long Island a creek was terribly polluted by the Dzus fastener company. That creekruns into the Great South Bay which was once where the majority of several species of clams were harvested in the US. It was a huge industry here, and it is now mostly gone.

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neoprenewedgie@reddit

I did the New York City Triathlon years ago - We started the race in waves, about 30 people at a time jumping into the Hudson River. For each wave, we had to wait until the garbage flowing down the river got far enough ahead of us that it wouldn't become a danger. I watched boards with rusty nails float by before I jumped in.

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94grampaw@reddit

Every where has pollution, its a factor of amount of pollution not if its there at all.

The us is much better than it used to be and much better than lots of other countries, but still has pollution

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2017CurtyKing@reddit

Pitcher, Ok is contaminated from the lead mines.

Kerr-McGee plutonium enrichment site is contaminated in Guthrie

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HeilStary@reddit

Yeah there are, it wont be as bad as it is in developing countries but its still there mostly from runoff after rains as opposed to actual dumping (though there maybe cases where there is illegal dumping) but the pollution is still there

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theaviationhistorian@reddit

I try to avoid wading or swimming in rivers as agricultural runoff is still a concern.

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Emotional_Match8169@reddit

Blue-green algae blooms are all over Florida. They produce toxins that make the water unusable & unswimmable. It is said that this is happening due to excess runoff from Sugarcane production fields.

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Total-Problem2175@reddit

Environmental regulations are being gutted. Even at the state level. And the other way is just to defend the EPA.

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blaspheminCapn@reddit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri

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jjack0310@reddit

Flint River. Michigan

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Sparkfinger@reddit

Lake Erie. You can smell it. They (companies!) just get away with anything. Hell, they'll legislate dumping leftover fertilizer in the water just cause it - in normal amounts present in water already - helps teeth. Yes, it helps teeth, no I don't want you to add it my water cause everyone in my household already uses toothpaste and I don't want you responsible for a 1-3% IQ decrease in my kids who don't know better yet that to suck down public water.

The best water gets filtered through earth, through a spring. I like to gather it in a secret spot and use it for hot drinks (I still boil it, it tastes heavenly). For plain water I have a sediment filter.

Sometimes I don't bother and just make pasta with faucet water.

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jaiejohnson@reddit

Love Canal, Onondaga Lake, Lake Neatahwanta (considered "perpetually toxic") pretty much anything in Upstate NY which are considered some of the most polluted and toxic in the US.

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dcgrey@reddit

We had issues that would have been on par with some of the more egregious pollution seen today in some developing with poorly enforced environmental protections. The only nearly universally admired part of Richard Nixon's legacy was successfully pushing for the creation of our Environmental Protection Agency, which includes an intrusive supervisory regime and statutory fining powers. In effect we found ways to incentivize better behavior through bureaucracy and costs.

Many communities continue to have pollution problems related to mundane things rather than malice or greed: for example it's common for cities' wastewater systems to not be able to handle heavy rains, requiring overflow discharge into local waterways -- anything that runs off a lawn, auto repair driveway, or overstuffed dumpster gets released into a natural body of water because the 100+ year old sewer system can't handle the volume.

We also have an interesting history of turning areas whose soil is too polluted for human habitation into managed natural areas. A top migratory bird stopover spot in my city is on the site of a decommissioned incinerator. You'll see something similar with decommissioned air force bombing ranges.

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jessek@reddit

The river in Cleveland was so polluted in the 70s it caught on fire.

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4MuddyPaws@reddit

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio where the Cuyahoga river caught on fire. The pollution was horrendous for decades.

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Crafty-Shape2743@reddit

Yes

Here’s the data.

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_bibliofille@reddit

Cape Fear river in North Carolina is n a s t y.

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UncomfortableBike975@reddit

I know of a couple superfund sites where there was so much contamination that the federal government had to come in and take over cleanup.

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dudsmm@reddit

90% of waterways are impaired in the State of Iowa. Pig shit and bad farming practices that the EPA doesn’t care about because the EPA has a bunch of ex agriculture industry executives within it.

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HaphazardFlitBipper@reddit

I assume everything is polluted to the point of being toxic. We take environmental regulations seriously because we're trying to fix it.

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Easyfling5@reddit

My local lake, our water source you aren’t allowed to swim in because of how much stuff is in it, trash, runoff, pollution

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ScotchyT@reddit

The environment in the US got pretty trashed in well populated areas during the industrial revolution. This started to turn around 50 to 60 years ago. But there are still heavily polluted areas and water bodies throughout the US.

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Historical_Shopping9@reddit

There's been a lot of progress ever since the 70's to clean things up when Nixon started the EPA. There's still some problems. New Jersey has the most Superfund sites in the US with CA and Pennsylvania coming in 2nd and 3rd and those are just the legal ones. I think they still find illegal dumps from decades ago when someone buys an old farm or something.

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zzzeve@reddit

Standley Lake, in Arvada Colorado, is radioactive, containing plutonium in its sediment due to its proximity to the former Rocky Flats Plant. While the lake is used as a water source, it is considered safe because the plutonium is expected to remain in the lakebed's sediment and not be stirred into the water.

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Brad_from_Wisconsin@reddit

When I was a child we could not wade or swim in the river near our home.
The EPA was established and the mills along the river were no longer allowed to dump untreated waste into the river. Today people can eat the fish that they catch from the river.
We can continue to make things better.

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kah43@reddit

There are many former industrial sites that they are still cleaning up decades latter do to lax laws in the past. Thank god for the EPA and laws that have severly reduced a lot of it.

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Francesco_dAssisi@reddit

Much of what you've heard is historical. Yes, there was a time when the pollution of our rivers was countered as national policy.

In our time the protections are ignored, unenforced, and thrown into the "gay, woke, commie, effete costal lib-tard" agenda and actively derided and removed.

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temmoku@reddit

The Hanford Site is a good news / bad news example of environmental protection. Yes, they really crapped it up. Some of it was accidental, some was intentional. But it was largely the place where the field of Health Physics to understand and protect people from the effects of radiation was developed.

Even during WWII, they were monitoring the workers in case they had been contaminated.

The most radioactive waste was put in huge steel tanks in the ground, but unfortunately many of them leaked. For a long time they denied that the leaks reached the groundwater, but we now know it did.

Other waste was put in the ground deliberately because that would keep it away from the surface environment. Some of the liquid reached the groundwater and then the Columbia River and some of the reactor cooling water went directly to the river.

The leader of radiation protection fought very hard against bad waste management but often was ignored. Still, you only need to look at the Russian nuclear sites to see it could have been much much worse

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drnewcomb@reddit

They’re all a lot of legacy sites, which are also called Super-fund sites, .

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admiralkit@reddit

On the northwest side of the Denver metropolitan area is a site known as Rocky Flats. During the Cold War it was used for building plutonium fuses. They had two major fires from plutonium oxidizing in an exothermic reaction in the air filters that resulted in plutonium spreading across the area. As well, their toxic chemicals were often just stored in steel drums that leeched into the soil. Eventually the pollution got so bad that the site was raided by the EPA and FBI, but since the contractor had been indemnified by the DOE no one ever was charged.

The site was remediated and is now an open space for wildlife and hiking. Remediation meant hauling away the worst contaminated soil and burying the rest under other dirt to contain the radioactive particles.

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Content_Preference_3@reddit

Yes. Many of them. I live by a watershed that was polluted from mine waste for many decades before anything was done about it. It looks a lot better now but you see signs about contamination in certain spots , where you can boat and paddle but shouldn’t swim or mess around with the dirt.

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Fun_Inspector_8633@reddit

Ask people living in Iowa how their water is. It’s horribly polluted due to agricultural run off.

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hideandsee@reddit

The confinement farming industry has ruined rural water in Iowa. Flint Michigan still does not have clean water.

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christine-bitg@reddit

Flint Michigan still does not have clean water.

That last part is no longer true.

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hideandsee@reddit

Well I’ll be damned. As of May of 2025, there is no longer an issue. It took them a decade. Wild.

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ShoddyJuggernaut975@reddit

Yep. The clean water act was out of necessity, not some form of noble pre-planning/prevention. One of my favorite places to fish now has a "Do Not Eat" warning due to 3M's polluting with PFAS".

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12B88M@reddit

Yes, the lakes and rivers in the US are often polluted to one degree or another. However, they are typically less polluted than the rivers and lakes in other nations. This is largely due to strict laws about pollution, littering and what can and cannot be released into waters in the US.

For example, it is illegal for raw sewage to be released into any body of water. Yet in many Asian and African countries, they do this on a daily basis.

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Unreasonably-Clutch@reddit

Oh yeah the Ohio River is super polluted by US standards.

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Thigmotropism2@reddit

…what on earth? The US is HEAVILY polluted, nearly everywhere.

It took almost 200 years for us to consider environmental protection a thing…and we’re now moving backwards

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bfa2af9d00a4d5a93@reddit

When Stanford built a new dormatory building recently, they discovered it was uninhabitable due to organic solvent fumes leaking from the surrounding soil into the basement. Several decades ago, there had been a semiconductor manufacturing plant there.

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CinderAscendant@reddit

An infamous case in Louisiana where the air was so toxic from a nearby oil recovery's emissions that a spark from a lawnmower caused the air itself to ignite, killing the people around the lawnmower.

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KoenigseggAgera@reddit

Back in the early Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, New England was full of mills and factories. I know of one area that is polluted with chemicals but I would think most of them have been polluted because no one cared in the 1800s. In the 1900s they all became abandoned as the South provided cheaper labor. Some have been remodeled and fit with businesses, others burned down or perhaps torn down…

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lapsteelguitar@reddit

There are a shit ton of polluted rivers in the US. Some are being cleaned up.

For instance..... There used to be oyster beds in NY Harbor, edible oysters. Those were destroyed some time ago.

The Hudson River used to be massively polluted. So polluted that the little organisms that bore into/eat wood pilings & docks could not survive in the waters of western Manhattan. Some of those docks were 100+ years old when they started cleaning up the Hudson. Odd thing happened: The waters became clean enough for those pests to return to the Hudson off western Manhattan, and those 100+ year old pilings are deteriorating. So now they have to rebuild them.

Back to the oysters. They are "replanting" oyster colonies in NY Harbor, to filter & clean the water. They are not edible, but they are helping to clean the waters.

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NTXStarsFan@reddit

LOL at that first sentence. The US sprays waste sludge on fields for “fertilizer” which has led to farms and ranches shutting down due to the contamination.

https://www.mainepublic.org/environment-and-outdoors/2022-02-07/complete-crisis-as-pfas-discovery-upends-life-and-livelihood-of-young-maine-farming-family

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gmanose@reddit

Google Love Canal. Also the case Erin Brockovich is known for

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SenatorBeers@reddit

Google “Love Canal”.

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Eat--The--Rich--@reddit

Lmao is that a serious question? You should watch the movie Dark Waters

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Live-Neat5426@reddit

Look at a map of the US. Any time you see a major city it's safe to assume all lakes, rivers, and soil in the area are polluted to the point of causing negative health outcomes in the local population, but not enough to where any lawsuits over it will gain any traction.

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Angsty_Potatos@reddit

I spent part of my childhood in a region where we still mine coal.

Growing up the rivers, streams, and creeks smelled like rotten eggs and were BRIGHT orange (look up acid mine drainage). Those bodies of water were ecologically dead, I believe that drainage made it so oxygen couldn't be dissolved in the water, in addition to heavy metal poisoning?

Polluted run off from farms and waste water was a thing too...

In recent years legislation has reversed the damage in a lot of these places, but more recently I've noticed things getting lax again and I'm seeing more acid mine drainage damage again

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mykepagan@reddit

My wife is a chemical/environmental engineer working for a specialty chemical company. Part of her job is monitoring and maintaining sampling wells that keep track of the decades-long remediation they must do in order to neutralize years of pollution from when her company was kegally allowed to dump production by-products into a pond behind their facility.

So… yes. Lots of it.

My daughter is a senior at University studying civil/environmental engineering. Her internship last summer also involved servicing pollution monitoring & remediation wells. Her “MQP“ (Master Qualifying Project - essentially a senior thesis) is optimizing filters for removal of PFAS chemicals from drinking water, which is a huge problem in the USA (My Fellow Americans: most of us are drinking lots of PFAS every day)

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Raiders2112@reddit

Look up abandoned oil wells/orphan wells in the U.S. It's quite eye opening.

https://youtu.be/430XuAYowUo?si=4k3mlH81IgUgKCH-

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GSTLT@reddit

In southern Illinois there’s a federal wildlife preserve called Crab Orchard Lake. Absolutely gorgeous. It’s also a Superfund site because a munitions factory on the lake has contaminated the land and water in the area. It’s a wildlife preserve to prevent development on the poisoned land.

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No_Weakness_2135@reddit

https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.cleanup&id=0206282

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Yunzer2000@reddit

Lots of countries take environmental protection seriously and often more seriously than the USA. There are all kinds of industrial and agricultural chemical products and food additives that are banned in Europe, UK, Australia, Canada that are allowed in the USA. The rate of adoption of renewable energy and electric vehicles in Europe is far ahead of the USA.

And if you have been following the news, the US is currently dismatling much of its environmental protections.

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Unique-Coffee5087@reddit

Well the US has made a concerted effort to improve the environment here since the environmental protection Act was signed by Richard Nixon, those efforts are being made against a legacy of many many decades of environmental degradation. Also, environmental protection laws are under constant attack by the Republican Party, and often rather indifferent support by Democrats.

If you check the fish and wildlife Department websites for any state, they will have information about whether fish that have been caught in different waterways are safe to eat. I live in the state of New Mexico where all waterways are considered to be polluted and so the fish and wildlife Department has listings of how many fish one might eat that have been caught from a particular location before you will have exceeded some recommended dosage of Mercury or other chemicals.

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thewNYC@reddit

OMFG yes there is pollution here

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BrilliantDishevelled@reddit

PFAS is everywhere.

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Spacemeat666@reddit

Environmental protection was not just ignored in the past, people would actively dump toxic waste wherever the fuck they wanted because that was the norm. Waste was buried or burned behind homes, factories and businesses.

Not nuclear waste but in my region of Michigan, the Huron river and all of the bodies of water it feeds, is polluted with PFAS and god only knows what else. The fish are inedible as a result. This is the entire reason I went back to college for geology so I could work in environmental consulting to try and help with water quality issues.

There is a factory right next to my neighborhood that has repeatedly polluted the Huron, just to pay the fines and do it all over again. It’s depressing.

Better question would be, what bodies of water are not polluted.

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JBoy9028@reddit

Yes, part of my job as a civil engineer is the research into the past environmental reposts of a property and area, soil bores for contaminates, and the proper disposal of contaminated soils. For instance I had a housing development being built on an old apple orchard that had levels of arsenic in the soil. That had to be removed and retested again for clearance before development could start.

Part of the process for storm water permits involves stating the impairment status of the bodies of water downstream of your site. The epa keeps a list of known water ways and their contaminates.

https://mywaterway.epa.gov/community

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Roboticpoultry@reddit

You ever hear of Bubbly Creek?

Per Wikipedia:

“The area surrounding Bubbly Creek was originally a wetland; during the 19th century, channels were dredged to increase the rate of flow into the Chicago River and dry out the area to increase the amount of habitable land in the fast-growing city. The South Fork became an open sewer for the local stockyards, especially the Union Stock Yards. Meatpackers dumped waste, such as blood and entrails, into the nearest river.[3] The creek received so much blood and offal that it began to bubble methane and hydrogen sulfide gas from the products of decomposition.”

It was so bad Upton Sinclair even mentions it in The Jungle

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newishanne@reddit

Specific to the Cold War: the Department of Energy operates two visitors centers (one outside Cincinnati, one outside St. Louis) at facilities that built atomic weapons and are now being restored. At the St. Louis one, there is a giant pyramid that the waste is stored under.

There are other facilities that have been set aside for natural reasons because of the radioactive contamination - there is a national wildlife refuge that her comes to mind outside Denver.

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Fun_Possibility_4566@reddit

flint.

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NegotiationLow2783@reddit

Love Canal

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Current_Poster@reddit

The EPA was created under the Nixon Administration in 1970. This is how across-the-aisle of an issue it used to be considered.

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Critical-Advisor8616@reddit

Look up Pitcher Oklahoma one of the most toxic sites in the US due to lead and zinc mining.

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Crash217@reddit

Pitcher is such a wild place. It’s like driving through an apocalypse movie if you get off the little 2lane state highway and drive into the “town”.

The Arkansas River through Tulsa, Oklahoma is nasty AF due to refinery run off and various bacterial blooms that pop up occasionally due to stagnation in the lake system and agricultural run off into the river. They recently put in a surfing and whitewater rafting spot and have to keep it closed half the time because the water isn’t safe to swim in.

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Eagleriderguide@reddit

All you have to do is look to all the superfund sites, look at Centralia PA. Unfortunately some of our economic expansion caused serious damage to the environment.

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Aggravating_Fishy_98@reddit

Factories used to dump all their waste into nearby rivers etc. Down in Salem, Massachusetts, there used to be a playground in my dad’s family’s neighborhood that was built on top of buried garbage. They had to tear down that playground and clean up the garbage because the garbage was resurfacing and they were worried about the kids. They built a new playground where the old one was.

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morosco@reddit

The Nashua River, going through Fitchburg where I grew up, used to be different colors every day depending on what was being made in the factories that day.

It's a lot better now though.

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HermioneMarch@reddit

Definitely. We do have a government organization To help clean up the spills but it takes decades.

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Agua_Frecuentemente@reddit

We used to have that. It's been effectively dismantled in the past 9 months

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Reduak@reddit

Absolutely. It was 50-years ago, but the Cuyahoga River which flows through Cleveland caught on fire.

Polluted areas are called "EPS superfund sites" One of the most polluted areas is along the Savanna River along the border of Georgia and South Carolina. They have a site there where, during the Cold War, most of the plutonium for our nuclear weapons was processed, and it is highly irradiated and polluted. It's considered one of the most polluted places on earth.

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racingfan_3@reddit

I live in Nebraska which is irrigated farm country. We have a problem with polluted ground water. Farmers use plenty of chemicals on the crops which soak into the ground into the water. In the area I live people who are not getting water from the local water supplier for the city need to have filtration on their water wells. Also during WWII there was a ammunition depot outside of the community I live and there was plenty of chemicals used in building bombs that leaked into the ground water. It all affects the lakes at times mainly during the hot summer time.

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Far_Silver@reddit

The Ohio River is polluted because of the coal mines and steel mills.

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wv524@reddit

A lot of the pollution in the Ohio River comes from the many chemical plants along its banks. DuPont in the Parkersburg area is a good example. Another good example is the mercury pollution from the PPG chlorine plant in Natrium, WV.

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Far_Silver@reddit

That too.

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ghostnthegraveyard@reddit

We Americans also pollute the ocean, not just our rivers, lakes, and soils:

https://msi.ucsb.edu/news/radioactive-waste-and-ddt

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Beatboxingg@reddit

https://www.usgs.gov/centers/western-geographic-science-center/news/mapping-mercury-san-francisco-bay#:~:text=During%20the%20California%20Gold%20Rush,continues%20to%20contaminate%20waterways%20today.

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DumbAndUglyOldMan@reddit

Lots of 'em. I live in Minnesota. A lot of streams and lakes are polluted with agricultural runoff.

There are also lots of polluted soils. Wikipedia discusses Superfund sites in the U.S.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites

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slider728@reddit

St Louis has an area contaminated by radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project. Among the contaminated area is a waterway called Coldwater Creek, which is contaminated with radioactive materials.

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NotACrazyCatLadyx2@reddit

The Chicago River was so foul and polluted that laws were passed: No swimming. No fishing. The ban on kayaking was lifted recently but… don’t fall in. That is progress, I suppose.

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Yourdjentpal@reddit

Oh yes. The movie Dark Waters comes to mind. Horrific.

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OGIBLP@reddit

Tons! There’s a property smack in the middle of my town that used to be some sort of factory. They buried their hazardous materials in barrels on the property. There’s a little swamp area nearby and the frogs are mutated as hell. Extra limbs, two heads, etc.

No one wants to deal with the cost of cleanup, so there it sits. Across the street from the elementary school.

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RosyClearwater@reddit

Google “US Superfund Sites”

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Rokaryn_Mazel@reddit

We have several neighborhoods locally that have carcinogenic chemicals in the soil from industrial facilities.

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Aggravating_Kale8248@reddit

The Housatonic River in Pittsfield, MA is polluted with PCBs thanks to GE. It’s being cleaned up, but the damage is done

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RishaBree@reddit

It's not something that I put a ton of thought into until I moved to Rhode Island and suddenly started encountering No Swimming/No Water Contact warnings on what felt like a regular basis, seemingly everywhere I went.

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DancingWithAWhiteHat@reddit

The U.S. is considered one of the few countries that really take environmental protection seriously. But are there actually any cases of pollution?

We are?

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Cute-Aardvark5291@reddit

Superfund sites are not uncommon, and many are not addressed.

I live in the state of New York, which has fairly high environment standards, and there are always new places where pollution is being uncovered - though long suspected - from long closed industries and such.

Good examples out of the New York City area include the General Electric pollution of the Hudson River; the IBM pollution of its home city of Endicott, for example.

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jahozer1@reddit

It used to be really bad, but thanks to regulation, our rivers, lakes and Oceans have been clean for decades. So much so that some people have forgotten what it was like in the 70s with green dirty shore water, orange air in Pittsburgh, the Delaware river on fire, etc that they want to roll back the protections.

Same with vaccines. They forget what it was like having your friends in iron lungs and hobbling around from polio, or their baby sister dying from measles ordering scarred from chicken pox.

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Sufficient_Cod1948@reddit

The song Dirty Water was about the Charles River that goes through Boston.

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Ladybeetus@reddit

Yep. And this song is a very popular and an unofficial theme song for Boston. Even though the song is a few decades old.

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Consistent_Damage885@reddit

Yes, there is a lot of pollution, and it is on the rise again because the current administration doesn't care about that.

But, the EPA did some great work over the years.

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Jhooper20@reddit

I mean, it's not burn your skin off toxic, but the Savannah River down my way is pretty mucky from all the cargo ships coming in and out daily. Definitely don't want to go for a swim down on River Street... even if people occasionally do anyway.

Additionally, the Georgia Water Coalition also has a "Dirty Dozen" list on all the more high profile/worst offenders in the state.

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Blue387@reddit

The Gowanus Canal is a superfund site

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funky-cabbage@reddit

Sometimes, out of hundreds of thousands of oil wells/ tanks / facilities in Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, etc… a couple hundred have a “release” or spill. In states like Colorado, regulations dictate the oil and gas company associated with the piece of infrastructure that caused the release, pay for the cleanup entirely. If they go bankrupt/ close doors before this, they become property of the state and lumped into the “orphan well program “.

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Katesouthwest@reddit

Many of all of those. There is also a tremendous fire from a coal mine that has been burning underground beneath an entire town in PA for the last 50 years or so. The entire town was evacuated.

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GrowlingAtTheWorld@reddit

Look up epa superfund sites

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TerrapinMagus@reddit

Prior to environmental regulations a lot of industrial waste was just dumped into lakes. At least in my local area there are lakes that are classified as safe or unsafe to fish from, and even some of the safe lakes have a limit on how often you should eat fish from them. It takes more than 100 years for some effects to dissipate to safe levels.

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ThePickleConnoisseur@reddit

I heard no one should step foot in the Hudson

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Drivo566@reddit

Hudson River is one of the largest superfund sites in the country - its a 200 mile superfund site thanks to GE. Its been contaminated with PCBs from transformer manufacturing.

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GrimSpirit42@reddit

There are areas that are so polluted as to be uninhabitable. But luckily they are few.

The worst of these are classified as ‘Superfund sites’.

Superfund sites are polluted locations in the U.S. that require long-term cleanup of hazardous materials, designated under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980. Administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), these sites are placed on a list called the National Priorities List (NPL) to guide remediation efforts.

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sir_thatguy@reddit

There’s a few.

Superfund Sites Wiki

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another_throwaway_24@reddit

You can't dig in the dirt just a few miles from my house because of Plutonium contamination...

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Victor_Stein@reddit

The Delaware river was gross for a long time until a lot of the chemical plants shut down and moved over seas.

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hobokobo1028@reddit

Luisiana has an area called “cancer alley”

Wikipedia

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Foxfyre25@reddit

Google "superfund sites" the years leading up to current environmental reforms were WILD.

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Smart_Engine_3331@reddit

The Cuyahoga river in Cleveland is infamous for having caught on fire due to pollution. Environmental laws have gotten better.

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hawkeyegrad96@reddit

All of Iowas water

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Plastic_Table_8232@reddit

They are concerned about pollution in affluent areas. The Ohio valley is Americas dumping ground for pfas. They are more concerned about the perception than anything else.

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Versa_Tyle@reddit

CA is pretty proactive about environmental protection, but anywhere there's been people there will (or has been) be an impact (in my opinion).

Here's a geotracker map app that the Gov uses to track Underground Storage Tank incidents and cleanups in CA. Note, these are current AND historical incidents.

https://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/map/?CMD=runreport&myaddress=Sacramento

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ShitWaterExpress@reddit

Beyond the waste from corporations, just ask yourself what you dispose of and extrapolate that.

Medication, batteries, detergents. It’s all going somewhere.

Some pollutants cannot be removed from the water table.

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TrueStoriesIpromise@reddit

Check out the Butte Montana copper pit mine; I think it might be one of the largest superfund sites. Easily visible on Google maps.

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buried_lede@reddit

We started taking it really seriously in the 1970s onward with the passage of environmental protection laws. and we set aside federal funds for cleanup up. We indexed the worst sites with priority, federally, but it’s not an exclusive list. You can googie that though — “Superfund Sites”

The rivers especially became the sewers of the Industrial Revolution. Industrial sites often dominated river banks for a source of industrial-use water, hydro power and to dump waste. As a result many major rivers by the 1970s were seriously toxic.

It’s amazing to see the difference now. Many of the same rivers are swimmable and the waterfronts have been transformed.

Clean Air laws had similar impact

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HomesteadGranny1959@reddit

I live in MI where the car industry has been 100 years. My town, 60min from Detroit, did a lot of automotive parts that then went to Detroit. Our city is riddled with empty lots being monitored by the EPA. It will take decades before the property can be used again.

It’s also a farming community. I worked for the USDA, and monitoring water & manure management. The Amish were our biggest headache, because they’re allowed to pollute farmland with poor practices in the name of “religious freedom.”

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kilertree@reddit

The Flint Water crisis because the State of Michigan forces Flint to use Flint River as a water source the state agency didn't properly test the water for human consumption to make sure the water was treated properly.

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JuneHawk20@reddit

Look up Gowanus Canal, which is also a superfund site.

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Please_Go_Away43@reddit

see "superfund sites"

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tearsonurcheek@reddit

Soil? Here's one of many. I remember visiting my uncle there back in the 70s/80s.

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MessyDragon75@reddit

It's somewhat better now, but you should have seen the beach in Galveston TX about 11 years ago. 🤢🤢🤮

And companies can buy environmental "credits" to be able to polute more. Those living in certain areas have a significantly higher likelihood for cancer, asthma, and other problems. It's just that those tend to be poorer areas. Because F the poor. For example S Houston Texas, and west of Denver CO. And then the air quality. Flying over Los Angeles or any other major city is just saddening.

And of course EPA regulations are being rolled back by our current Idiot In Charge. So 10 years from now....

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dirtyfoot_chonkey@reddit

Worst lake I've seen personally was Lake West Point, which is southwest of Atlanta, Georgia. The Chattahoochee River runs straight through Atlanta, then quite a few miles into this lake. I used to fish bass tournaments and was shocked how gross that lake was. All the garbage the river picks up in Atlanta ends up in that lake. There was so much garbage on shore. So many tires and plastic bottles. One spot looked so promising like a junk drawer, we parked the boat and got out to look for goodies. We found a couple of kayak paddles that we kept in the boat lol. Better than the little wooden oar we had for emergencies. I won big fish at that tournament, but never wanted to go back.

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bemenaker@reddit

We have the EPA because of how polluted EVERYTHING was in the 1960s and 70s. My dad would talk about how you knew what colors of wrapping paper were being made that day at the paper mill by the color of the water and foam floating on the water.

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FormalConcern4862@reddit

Yes. The beach near me is often victim to sewage spills and pollution from the port and oil rigs. The port sponsors some clean up and sponsors community events to try and make up to the people living near it

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epppennn@reddit

There are still parts of the Chicago river by the old stock yards where the water consistently bubbles due to all the carcasses that were dumped in there years ago.

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shaitanthegreat@reddit

My kids went kayaking on the Chicago River at Bubbly Creek. I had quite the kick telling them alllllll about why that place had its name. They had no clue at all about where they were and what that part of the city used to look like ;)

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agate_@reddit

The US has a long history of environmental pollution, but the worst of it is history. Between 1960 and 2000 we set up lots of laws to protect our air and water. And they work: in the US the skies are blue and the public water is almost always drinkable.

There are still major problems, including release of greenhouse gases and safe disposal of nuclear waste, that we haven’t solved yet.

And the Hanford site that you mentioned does have a radioactive waste problem that we’re spending billions of dollars to deal with… but it was never as bad as the worst Soviet sites.

https://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/AboutHanfordCleanup

But overall things are a million times better than they were in the 1960s. I say this not to brag about my country, but to make the point that environmental laws work, and are necessary.. Which is a message that people in every country need to hear.

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ophaus@reddit

All over the place. It's not as bad as it used to be, but there are still plenty of places I wouldn't want my kids swimming.

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Ms_Jane9627@reddit

Not sure why you think the US is one of the few countries that takes the pollution of waterways seriously. Corporate profit’s reign supreme here health and welfare of citizens be damned not to mention the religious fundamentalists that use bible verses to say that no matter what humans do they cannot harm the environment because they have been granted dominion over the earth.

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UTtransplant@reddit

Iowa has the highest rate of cancer in the US. It also has lakes and rivers heavily polluted with pesticides and herbicides. Our governor ignores the direct correlation between the cancers and the rivers, and encourages even looser regulations on chemicals. Our rivers are not as polluted with human waste was some other countries, but the chemicals are awful.

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General_Ad_6617@reddit

For decades, factories dumped waste in many of our bodies of water. And plenty of industrial waste on land.

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msmicroracer@reddit

Water is not safe in several us cities

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mtcwby@reddit

There are definitely polluted places but there's some emphasis on cleaning them up and stiff fines for current pollution. Our local national laboratories are sitting on what was a naval air station. There's a filtering system setup for groundwater pollution that isn't related to the lab. The pollution came from the engine cleaners used during WW2 when the Navy had it.

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ZoomZoom_Driver@reddit

I nWA, we have leaking radioactive tanks filled with nuclear materials from US nuke bomb making. They knew back in the 60s these tanks would leak, and still used it. The leaking radioactive materials seeps into the land and into the columbia river that separates WA from Or.

This is at a place called the Hanford Superfund.

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iowaman79@reddit

I live in a state that deals with this, mostly due to agricultural runoff. Fertilizers and other chemicals get into the waterways, a lot of which are primary sources of drinking water, so there’s a constant back and forth fight between the upstream farmers and downstream cities.

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Twodamngoon@reddit

There is a creek on the Illinois side of St.Louis that got its name when a dog tried to cross it. Burning Dog Creek.

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shammy_dammy@reddit

Yes, a lot of them. Just look at Picher OK.

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djspacebunny@reddit

I grew up next to Dupont Chambers Works with radioactive parking lots, 1100 acres of contaminated land, which still discharges "treated" wastewater back into the Delaware River. They invented Teflon and nylon there, along with so many synthetic dyes (which are now banned), refridgerants, lubricants, and whatever other secret nasty shit their labs were working on. I've been fighting them my whole life. We just secured a $855 million settlement over the summer which isn't nearly enough to remediate this clusterfuck. All of us are very sick.

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ParadoxicalFrog@reddit

It used to be very bad. There were big crackdowns starting in the 80s, and a lot of the worst offenders were cleaned up. However, there's still a long way to go. I wouldn't trust the water near any industrial site. There's still a major pollution scandal every few years. Most recently it was an important military base (Camp Lejeune, the place where Marines go to get basic training) that turned out to be sitting on contaminated soil for decades.

Currently, the Environmental Protection Agency is slowly being gutted by the present administration. I suspect there will be more major incidents in the near future as regulations are cut.

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ZLUCremisi@reddit

Polluted rivers- New York City, Chicago, ect. Major water have pollution from waste.

Lakes- clearlake in California has an huge problem as alergie blooms happen regularly thanks to fertilizers entering the lake.

Soil- nearly any military base, mostly former and definitely some current have soil contamination problems.

Plus our EPA was made because rivers were so polluted they caught on fire.

But now pollution is back onnthe rise as current government is against the regulations that reduce or stop pollution.

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Betty_Boss@reddit

The former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility near Denver, Colorado. They decommissioned it, tore everything down, and they say they cleaned it up. Then they built a couple huge subdivisions right next to it.

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XFilesVixen@reddit

I live by 3M in Minnesota, USA. They have polluted our ground water and there are increased cancer cases, google it!

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CynicalOptimistSF@reddit

Just recently, a former US Navy site in San Francisco was found to have worrying levels of plutonium contamination. Source: The Guardian https://share.google/yRfOVwMUhVRT3uRte

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JohnnyBrillcream@reddit

Super Fund Sites

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photonynikon@reddit

Flint, Michigan...Google it

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Thund3rCh1k3n@reddit

They do an iron man in DC every year, and every year, they cancel the swim portion because they test the river, and it fails.

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lfxlPassionz@reddit

I'm a Michigander. My state is surrounded by the great lakes and here you are never more than 6 miles from a body of water.

We take our bodies of water really seriously but we still have a constant battle with pollution. You have to look up the safety of a specific beach, river or whatever place you are going to see if it's safe that day for swimming or fishing.

We are constantly fighting companies that are stealing our water or trying to pollute it. Sometimes we win and sometimes we lose.

Trump has removed a lot of protections we had in this area so it is getting harder to keep our precious water clean.

We do still get a lot of compliments from others that our main beaches are really clean.

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Rk12989@reddit

I’m from Cleveland, Ohio. The Cuyahoga river has caught fire multiple times. In 1969 it spurred the American environmental movement. Even though it’s been decades since that happened there are still companies in the area that use “Burning River” in their names like Burning River Coffee

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Dear-Ad1618@reddit

There are a lot of polluted places in the US. I am not sure how seriously we do take our environment here. When money is involved environmental concerns often lose out. We have several places that were very seriously polluted and have become 'super fund' sites, sites where a lot of government funds have been made available for the clean up. One of them is the old nuclear materiel site at Hanford, Washington. Another is at the Duwamish river in Seattle. We are better than we used to be but there is still a lot of pollutants going into our water and air and a lot of critical habitat sites that are getting destroyed for development. It's an ongoing struggle that is losing ground under the current administration.

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wwhsd@reddit

Check out the Salton Sea in Southern California. There was a resort town being built there but all of the chemicals from agricultural run off made the water toxic and killed all of the aquatic life. Everything was abandoned. These days it looks like a set from a post-apocalyptic movie.

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hollowbolding@reddit

look up what the potomac was like in the seventies lmao

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yaboi_ahab@reddit

I think pretty much every river going through or past a city used to be overflowing with so much garbage and chemical runoff that you could set the river on fire. They're much better now, but I still don't know of any that people aren't warned not to swim in.

Major pollution from nuclear power is pretty rare because we have very few nuclear plants and good waste management for those, but some places ("Cancer Alley" for example) still have quite bad chemical and/or radioactive pollution from fossil fuels and factories

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00death@reddit

The Berkeley Pit in Butte Montana is pretty bad

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Emergency_Coyote_662@reddit

the great state of washington has plenty of polluted areas. we have oil refineries. yes, america has pollution. of course it does.

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3ndt1m3s@reddit

All over the place. My niece lives in a town in West Virginia where they can't use the water because of the chemicals in the soil. Boiling and showering aren't recommended even!

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Remarkable_Inchworm@reddit

Lots. The Hudson was loaded with nasty chemicals thanks to General Electric.

The Cuyahoga famously caught fire a few times.

They’re generally a lot cleaner that they were thanks to environmental laws that the current government is working hard to undo, which is great.

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fakesaucisse@reddit

Lake Union in the middle of Seattle is so polluted that my gel pedicure peeled off after an hour of paddleboarding there.

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RoryDragonsbane@reddit

Yes, but it varies by location.

Developing countries are now going through what we did about 100 years ago. We absolutely dumped all sorts of chemical and industrial waste into our water the same as other countries do now.

However, the worst of this was centralized in heavily industrial areas in the northestern portion of the US. Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, Illinois, were some of the most polluted. Unfortunately, as our economy has shifted away from industry, those same areas are now impoverished. As such, many local governments simply don't have the money to clean up all that waste.

Thankfully, federal agencies often send national dollars to clean up the areas. Lake Erie, Sanfrancisco Bay, Cuyahoga River (which was once so polluted it caught fire several times), Hudson River are some success stories. But there are still several areas, specifically anything near abandoned mines, that still require hundreds of millions of dollars in cleanup.

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MyUsername2459@reddit

The US has been pretty strict about enforcing the Clean Water Act of 1972.

The act was passed in reaction to the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire, where the very polluted Cuyahoga River at the city of Cleveland caught fire due to the large amount of industrial waste being dumped into the river. The imagery of a river so polluted it could, and did, catch fire had a major impact on American society and was important in sparking the environmental movement in the US.

The Hanford Site was a nuclear reactor site built in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, which was shut down in 1971. Like other major water pollution sites in the US, it generally predates the Clean Water Act and its strict rules about water pollution.

Before the rise of the environmental movement in the late 1960's, few people cared about pollution. . .the idea was (at the time) that the world is so big, and the waters are so vast, and atmosphere so vast, that it could easily handle anything we could possibly put into it. Little attention was paid to pollution before the rise of environmentalism around that time period, with events like the Cuyahoga River fire helping people realize that pollution was a serious issue.

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bryku@reddit

There are a lot of older sites that are still poluted from the past (superfund sites). Which is why there are so many projects in place to help clean them up. Sadly, it often costs a lot of money and takes a long time, but many of these projects have made a lot of progress over the years.

The USA is far from perfect as things do sneak by. A more recent example is flint michigan. Additionally, as we learn more and more, some chemicals that were believed to be safe are banned or restricted. Often times these areas become new poluted zones and superfund sites.

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ruidh@reddit

The drinking water in my area is polluted with PFAS from a nearby military site. My well has a filtration system installed by the state to make it safe to drink.

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planetkenner@reddit

YESYESYES. i live in Ohio near Lake Erie (one of the Great Lakes) and it is extremely polluted. the pollution we deal with the most is agricultural runoff that leads to harmful algal blooms. it is often not safe to swim in or even eat fish directly from. also, the White River in Indianapolis, Indiana is extremely polluted with trash and sewage. It is almost harder to find an area that ISNT polluted here.

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Putrid-Catch-3755@reddit

Look up picher Oklahoma

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albertnormandy@reddit

Compared to most of the world we are pretty clean. However, that is as much a testament to just how little the developing world cares about environmentalism as it is about how much we care. We do some things good, but there’s a lot more we can and should be doing. Even if we throw in the towel on fighting climate change there are other things we can do.

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mapadofu@reddit

Many lakes and rivers in New York have guidelines to limit or avoid consuming fish caught in them.

https://www.health.ny.gov/publications/2792.pdf

It’s better than it used to be, but still not exactly reassuring about our environmental quality.

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Super_Direction498@reddit

You can't eat fish out of many of the rivers in the US. The hudson is polluted for generations to come. We had species of birds nearly fo extinct from DDT use. There are high cancer rates in areas that have high PFAS content in the water. Yes, most lakes and rivers here are polluted to varying degrees.

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Chrisg69911@reddit

Yes lol. There's a stream near me that has the highest concentration of mercury in the US and a river that is known to be horribly polliuted

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chrysostomos_1@reddit

Things have gotten a lot better in my lifetime but they are far from perfect.

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Lugbor@reddit

Regulations are written in blood. Most of our environmental protections exist because something go so bad that the government couldn't turn a blind eye to it anymore.

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SEND_MOODS@reddit

I routinely receive notices not to eat fish caught in certain rivers near me.

My mom's beach house routinely has no swimming advisories due to bacteria.

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Leverkaas2516@reddit

Did anyone care about environmental protection back then, or was it mostly ignored?

Very few people in power cared before about 1960.

There's a site in my city that was a coal gas facility over a century ago. It's still contaminated. Another factory area has soils laced with heavy metals. They put up fences to keep people out, until some time in the future ehen there'll be koney to remediate. That may never happen.

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Tasty_Recognition106@reddit

Ottawa Illinois had 3 superfund sites, all related to westclox illuminated clock faces, they used radium to paint the numerals and dumped the waste in barrels in old strip mine areas. And that was only one, toxic waste has been dumped all over the country.

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Perma_frosting@reddit

Yes, there are polluted places. But there has been a strong push to clean them up for decades now. Back in the 70's or 80's there were rivers near major cities that were not safe for human contact and at least one that occasionally caught fire. We passed a lot of laws and set up new government departments like the EPA. It's far from perfect, but we mostly don't have toxic waterways near population centers.

Pollution to the level of being a health hazard means either the place will be fixed, or essentially sealed off as a superfund site until long term restoration can be done. There are over 1400 of these sites currently so the answer to 'are there polluted places in the USA' is definitely 'yes', but we've gotten a lot better about not letting it seep into groundwater or get dumped into rivers.'

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river-running@reddit

DuPont used to have a textile plant in the town I live in and from 1929-1950 they contaminated the local river with mercury. The cleanup effort has been going on for decades and it's now safe to be in the river and the wildlife has rebounded significantly, but you're still not supposed to eat the fish.

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Stfu_butthead@reddit

Here's a story illustrating change https://caltrout.org/news/caltrout-and-pge-complete-bay-area-fish-passage-project-reopening-alameda-creek-to-migrating-salmon

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posi-bleak-axis@reddit

In Iowa most of the land is corn and soy sprayed in round up all the time. Kills off all insects, fungi, native plants, all plants... It's destroyed the ecosystem. Also there is only .01 percent left of original native prairie. All to grow food we don't eat and lose money on so farmers have to get bailouts every year. Also Iowa is the number once for cancer rates in the US now! Let freedom ring

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Legitimate-Frame-953@reddit

Where I grew up in Central California you don't drink faucet water from the wells because the ground water is known to be polluted with pesticids

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MyLittleDonut@reddit

Pitcher, Oklahoma became uninhabitable due to contaminated water supply from mining.

Times Beach, Missouri was contaminated with dioxin after it got mixed in with oil that was sprayed on dirt roads to keep dust from kicking up (whether accidental or not is still debated).

Love Canal in New York was contaminated from years of chemical waste dumping.

Woburn, MA also had contaminated water from industrial work- solvents from local tanneries (this is covered by the book and subsequent movie both titled“A Civil Action”)

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cleecleekilldie@reddit

Check out the Salton Sea

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AgreeAndSubmit@reddit

https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.Cleanup&id=0902959#bkground

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Alycion@reddit

There was this island we use to go out to in the Chesapeake bay for picnics. Grab the boat, have a nice day. As an adult, it came out that someone was dumping radioactive waste on the other side of it.

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pmax2@reddit

New Jersey. Enough said

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Razoras@reddit

We have entire areas that are, sometimes uninhabitable, wastelands called "Superfund Sites"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites

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xeroxchick@reddit

So much pollution. Cancers all over. Our environmental protections are just nonexistent. Polluters would rather pay the fines than stop polluting.

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EvilMrGubGub@reddit

I've heard about polluted lakes and rivers before, yes. It's illegal to dump chemicals into waterways or areas that may contaminate ground reservoir, but because enforcement is lacking there are plenty of instances of this happening. If it's found and and traced, there are pretty stuff fines and licensing issues for the recipient.

Quite often though a waterway will be partially polluted with no direct cause, and that can continue as long as it goes unreported. Reporting it brings a government employee to test the water and such to trace contaminates, but there are a lot of people who have never nor will they ever encounter someone water testing their are.

You can request it, we've had to in the past. Turned out some of the crop chemicals were running into the water, and our farmer had to switch up how he dealt with insects. If we brought them back today, I'm betting the water is still partially polluted. After all, in my area many creeks and waterways run for miles through the land, snaking through many different areas of possible contaminates.

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few-piglet4357@reddit

The movie Erin Brockovich is based on a true story

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TheNakedTravelingMan@reddit

The city of Lynchburg Virginia, with the second oldest sewage system, is still allowed to dump raw sewage into the James river if it rains a bit too much. I think a few other cities along the james rover also do this pretty nasty. They are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to hopefully stop it someday.

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DasArtmab@reddit

Yes, primarily because there were few laws during the industrialization phase in the US. Unfortunately, it’s an error we see being repeated across the globe

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joepierson123@reddit

Yeah the entire silicon valley.

In the early days they just used to dump all the spent electronic chemicals right into the ground.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/09/silicon-valley-full-superfund-sites/598531/

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UnbiasedSportsExpert@reddit

"Does america have poor people? Everyone on fictional tvshows are rich"

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hypo-osmotic@reddit

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency manages Superfund sites, which are contaminated sites that are being investigated and cleaned up. Most (all?) states have state-specific equivalents for sites that don't quite meet the criteria for national-level concern but are still of interest to whichever state agency handles environmental cleanups. Larger cities may have their own environmental cleanup department, too.

The Hanford site in particular has been a Superfund site since the late 1980s, managed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Washington Department of Ecology. "As of 2023, 60 sq mi (160 km2) of the site's groundwater remains contaminated above federal standards, a reduction from 80 sq mi (210 km2) in the 1980s."

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RNH213PDX@reddit

Compared to whom??? The US does not have a particularly strong environmental record.

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Pretty_Eater@reddit

The DuPonts and other rich families have turned the mid-atlantic into a chemical cesspool.

Pollution is quintessential American it's just most don't want to admit it.

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ticklethycatastrophe@reddit

While overall environmental protection is good, there are still rivers that are polluted. The Fenholloway River in Florida is one - until just a few years ago, the pulp mill on it was dumping very toxic waste in (legally). You couldn’t fish or swim in it, and it was affecting the groundwater supply. It’s a leftover from the 60s when you could get an “industrial river” permit to dump nearly everything, like the Cuyahoga.

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L-L_Jimi@reddit

You shouldn‘t eat fish out of the Mississippi

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northman46@reddit

Yes, many. Look up superfund sites

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classicalySarcastic@reddit

Yes. Most of the most infamous cases (Love Canal, Valley of the Drums, Hanford, the Cuyahoga River, PCB pollution in the Hudson, etc) happened before the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were passed and the EPA was stood up. We’re a little better about it these days, but there are still rivers in serious need of cleanup. The biggest offenders these days tend to be agricultural runoff rather than industrial waste.

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Elrohwen@reddit

Just in the last couple years some major companies reached a multimillion dollar settlement for polluting people’s drinking water with PFOAs. They opened the new water supply this year.

So this is not something in the past, it’s actively on going

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MovieSock@reddit

Someone else responded encouraging you to look up "Superfund site" - that is a designation the Federal Government gives to a site that has become so polluted that they decide they need to step in and take over the cleanup (usually that's left to states or cities to clean up themselves).

There is a canal in Brooklyn, the Gowanus, that was historically the site of a lot of dumping and was named a superfund site a few years back. One of the data points that convinced the government it needed that designation was: they did some initial exploration and found these weird mats of slime all over the bottom of the canal. That kind of slime is usually a bacterial overgrowth, so they tested it to find out what it was - it was the germ that causes gonorrhea. So - the Gowanus actually had a venereal disease.

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WarsawWarHero@reddit

You can’t swim in some beaches on Lake Erie after it rains due to factory runoff in the water and e coli

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twisted_stepsister@reddit

The river in my hometown was contaminated with mercury decades ago, due to industrial pollution. It's in the riverbed and I don't expect the fish to be safe for consumption any time soon. There are plenty of fish, though. It's a great spot for sport fishing because most of them are released.

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TerriblePokemon@reddit

The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland was so polluted it was completely devoid of life for miles upstream from it's outlet into lake Erie. It famously caught fire and melted a bridge, leading to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

50 years later the river is healthy enough that beavers and river otters are a common sight upstream from Cleveland in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

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theflamingskull@reddit

We did take environmental protection seriously, but this administration has made it clear that all of those protections will be undone.

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Informal_Persimmon7@reddit

Very many. You're not allowed to swim in rivers in many cities

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Big_Lab_Jagr@reddit

Is this a joke?

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Far-Increase8154@reddit

The environment is really not that great

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Cheap_Coffee@reddit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites

In the US those type of sites are called "Superfund Sites."

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skivtjerry@reddit

Read up on brownfields, Superfund sites, Love Canal, Cancer Alley, ad nauseum (literally).

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dirty_corks@reddit

Oh absolutely. Look up Onondaga Lake, or the Ohio River Fire.

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Late_Resource_1653@reddit

Oh, so many.

We've been doing a decent job of trying to clean them up though since a bunch caught on fire (not kidding).

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Adamon24@reddit

There was a river in Ohio that caught on fire in the 70s because of absurd levels of pollution.

While pollution is taken more seriously now, it used to be pretty atrocious in lots of areas. There’s still work to do though given the long term damage that’s been done over the years though.

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kingamazon100@reddit

There have been entire towns that have been abandoned due to lead exposure im pretty sure.

I will say as an American, I refuse to drink the tap water. I only drink bottled lol

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Gnarlsaurus_Sketch@reddit

Yes. The Cuyahoga river in Cleveland is famous for having caught fire several times in the early and mid 1900s when pollution was a lot worse.

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Illustrious-Jump-398@reddit

Yes