Still, no one denied that the aging Superfund program was in trouble. The Trump administration would dedicate itself to remediating the most polluted parts of the country, they said, while simultaneously rolling back regulations designed to stanch pollution? The movement collectively rolled their eyes and went back to the dreary work of suing the agency to halt rule changes and scraping government websites for climate data before it could be deleted. “Under my administration,” he wrote in a memo, “Superfund and the EPA’s land and water cleanup efforts will be restored to their rightful place at the center of the agency’s core mission.”įor anyone who’d been watching Pruitt over the years, it felt like a joke.Īt the time, I was covering the EPA’s aggressive deregulatory efforts for Outside magazine, and the environmentalists I interviewed scoffed at the Superfund proclamation. Shortly after Donald Trump took office, newly installed EPA administrator Scott Pruitt-a man who had previously sued the agency a dozen times to combat what he called unwarranted regulation and systematic overreach-vowed the Trump administration would clean up America’s most toxic places, places like Minden, known as Superfund sites. All told, Worley-Jenkins figures, at least 500 residents have died unnatural deaths in the last two decades. Late winter snow drifted through a broken window into a burned-out home, abandoned since the occupants died. In the last two or three years, there’s been 160 that died or has cancer.”

A miscarriage on the right, blood disorders on the left, hundreds of cancer cases everywhere. The creek we drove along snakes through town and across property lines, and today it was swollen, fouled with rain-driven runoff from the toxic mines above it. The guy there has real bad breathing problems and has cancer, dealing with it now, too.” “The lady that lived here, let’s see, she’s got breast cancer. The machines were laced with extremely toxic industrial chemicals called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as probable human carcinogens. Five decades ago, the Shaffer Equipment Company, which serviced the local coal industry, dumped its transformers into the abandoned mines above town. This guy and his wife both died with cancer he bought this to fix it up. There are around 25 homes on the main road into town, mostly low-slung or trailers, and we drove slowly so Worley-Jenkins had time to recount the dead.

8 good things trump has done