Hi, Uprooters! This is Jordan Gass-Pooré, writing to you from New York City. I’m an investigative journalist and creator of two limited-series podcasts called “Hazard NJ” and “Hazard NYC,” which look at the impacts of climate change on hazardous Superfund sites. 

I became interested in hazardous sites as a kid growing up in Seguin, a small Texas town near Austin, where I heard stories about three-eyed fish in the Guadalupe River and, on a handful of occasions, couldn’t drink the tap water at home because it was orange.

For years, I felt like I couldn’t escape what I still believe to be the environmental hazards that continue to plague my home town and others like it – and if I couldn’t escape it, I was going to write about it because, as I discovered through my reporting, no one is ever far away from a hazardous site. 

This couldn’t be more true than in New Jersey, the state with the most Superfund sites in the country at 115, or New York City, where I currently live near two of the city’s four Superfund sites. That’s why I created the “Hazard NJ” and “Hazard NYC” podcasts, so people could learn about their neighborhood’s industrial past and inspire them to think about the site’s future use once it’s cleaned up. 

Some of these sites are contaminated with the chemical trichloroethylene, or TCE, a known human carcinogen, commonly found at Superfund sites. TCE contamination from historical industrial pollution can spread into groundwater and, in some cases, turn into vapor and rise into homes and businesses in a phenomenon called vapor intrusion. 

Vapor intrusion has been a topic I’ve been covering for more than a year now, and until a few weeks ago, I never thought I’d be personally impacted by it, but I’m now trying to make sense of my mom’s potential lung cancer diagnosis: Could it be caused by exposure to radon gas, which can get into homes the same way TCE does? What about fine particulate matter, PM2.5? 

We don’t know yet if she has lung cancer; she goes in for a biopsy in April. But even if she is diagnosed, we may never know if her cancer is tied to environmental pollutants, or if my high school illnesses were caused by this exposure. Seguin doesn’t have any Superfund sites, my childhood home isn’t near a trash incinerator or a landfill, and the latest water quality report for the city conducted in 2022 by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality indicates that the tap water is completely harmless (I couldn’t find reports for 2004-2008, the years I was in high school). 

But what I do know is that I’m going to continue reporting on hazardous sites and that I hope others will join me. There’s one project, in particular, I’m requesting collaboration: A state-by-state investigation on leaking underground storage tanks.  

As a 2023 Uproot Project Environmental Justice Fellow, I’m working with the Associated Press on an explainer about this topic. Thousands of these old and rusting tanks, storing petroleum and other hazardous chemicals, contaminate private and public water wells across the U.S., many in historically marginalized communities or neighborhoods facing economic hardship. 

Underground storage tanks, found under most gas stations, are one of the country’s leading causes of groundwater pollution, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Forty-three million Americans, including some of my family members who live in my home state of Texas, have their supply of drinking water potentially threatened by this contamination. 

If this sounds interesting to you, please feel free to contact me. Thanks for reading. 

“Hazard NJ” is a production of NJ Spotlight News, the news division of NJ PBS. 
“Hazard NYC” is produced by the nonprofit news outlet THE CITY and co-hosted by Jordan Gass-Pooré and Samantha Maldonado, a senior reporter at THE CITY.