Preface. If you’re thinking of moving to another state that is under carrying capacity, where agriculture depends on rainfall rather than irrigation, with good topsoil and other ecologically important factors in the approaching postcarbon world, also make sure you’re not near a superfund or other hazardous site. The links below are for the USA, and there are certainly other sites to be concerned about I haven’t listed, but this is a start.
Energy shortages will make it less and less likely toxic sites will ever be cleaned up. The energy to fight wildfires with thousands of fire trucks and personnel arriving from many states will no longer happen. The EPA will have far less money to go after polluters.
Releases of toxic substances will happen for many reasons such as holding pond failures, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters such as tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, explosions, volcanoes, and so on. Worse yet, rising sea levels will affect hundreds of thousands of facilities that will create toxic waste — refineries, warehouses, underground tanks, sewage systems will back up and more. Check out the hundreds of hazardous waste sites that will be affected in the San Francisco Bay Area here.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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Coal Ash pond sites locations Earth Justice here, and if you search other maps are available
Nuclear Waste Sites here. Because there are no safe repositories, nuclear waste is stored at every nuclear power plant, vulnerable to natural disaster, terrorists, and so on, each waste site a potential source of fuel for a nuclear or dirty bomb, and life-threatening if plutonium waste is inhaled. Do see my posts on nuclear waste here, especially the ones about spent nuclear fuel pools, which are not under the containment vessel and could force millions to flee (this was learned from the Fukushima disaster)
Air Pollution Map. here
Water Polluter Map (New York Times).
Water Pollution Maps. PFAs here. USGS National Water-Quality Assessment Project here, and many more.
Superfund here To learn all about the superfund sites and drill down to your state and county go here. For 945 sites vulnerable to climate change see this post here. The EPA also has a list of underground storage tanks that are hazardous.
Contaminated sediment sites. What substances need to be cleaned up: The Priority List of Hazardous Substances.
EPA Brownfields – be sure you don’t buy this land, which needs expensive remediation
Animal Waste Map. Do your own search, the links keep changing. Almost two trillion pounds of animal waste are produced per year mainly by intensive livestock operations. Their treatment practices are often inadequate to protect our drinking water and environment, posing one of America’s serious pollution problems.
Map of pesticide use by chemical. You’ll get a list at this link, when you click through a particular pesticide, sometimes you’ll see a map, sometimes it’s missing
EPA Enforcement of air, water, and land violations here.
USFS Wildfire Assessment map here. There are probably others. If you can get insurance in an area prone to wildfire it will be very expensive. After our house burned down many companies stopped selling insurance to homes in our area.
Other kinds of waste that exist but the maps are hard to navigate, or understand, or drill down to a local level on such things as ground water or aquifer pollution, arsenic in water, Mercury, Electronic Waste (some of the worst superfund sites in the USA are where computer chips used to be made in Santa Clara county, CA), Industrial Waste, Construction & Demolition Materials, Cement Kiln Dust, Crude Oil and Natural Gas, Mineral Processing Mining Waste, Medical Waste