About Superfund

Superfund is the United States’ program for cleaning up the country’s most contaminated land. Congress created it in 1980 with a law called CERCLA, in the aftermath of Love Canal — a Niagara Falls neighborhood built on a buried chemical dump. The law did two radical things: it made polluters legally responsible for cleaning up messes they made decades earlier, and it created a trust fund — the “superfund” — so the government could act when no responsible party could pay.

The worst sites go on the National Priorities List (NPL) — about 1,300 places today, from abandoned mines to old smelters, wood-treating yards, and landfills. Listing is not a condemnation of a town; it is the federal government committing to a decades-long cleanup. Every site on the list has a public paper trail — investigations, decisions, five-year reviews — which is exactly what makes these sites teachable ground for a design studio.

A Superfund cleanup is a decades-long civic project: a deep investigation (RI/FS) of what is where and what could be done; a public decision (the Record of Decision) choosing the remedy; then design and construction of that remedy, operable unit by operable unit. Big sites are split into operable units so a town’s yards can be cleaned while the mine pool is still being studied.

“Clean” rarely means gone. Remedies often contain rather than remove — caps, slurry walls, water treatment running indefinitely — and institutional controls (deed restrictions, digging bans) manage what remains. EPA re-checks every remedy in public five-year reviews for as long as contamination stays on site. For a designer this is the crucial mindset: on a Superfund site, the remedy itself is part of the landscape you are given — Tar Creek’s chat piles, the pumped water level in Butte’s Berkeley Pit, Onondaga’s white waste beds, Homestake’s tailings mesa and Palmerton’s cinder bank are all designed ground.

Who pays? The polluter, wherever possible — companies are traced through decades of mergers and made to fund the work. Where no one solvent remains (an “orphan” site), the trust fund and congressional appropriations carry it, which is why some cleanups wait in line for years. Tar Creek is the hard case: most of the companies that dug the ore dissolved long ago, so much of the work has leaned on public money and on the Quapaw Nation’s own initiative.

Almost every one of our five sites made the materials of ordinary American building — the lead and zinc that galvanized its steel and coloured its paint, the copper in its wiring and plumbing, the soda ash behind its glass and cement and the chlorine behind its PVC. Homestake is the exception that sharpens the rule: its uranium went to warheads and reactors, and what the milling left the landscape instead was the ground itself, 22 million tons of it. The contamination is the other half of the ledger for the built world we inherited. Designing on these sites means taking that ledger seriously: reading the remedy, respecting the institutional controls, and asking what public life a repaired ground can hold — as the Lehigh Gap Nature Center on Palmerton’s stripped mountain and the Onondaga Nation’s own vision for its lake already begin to answer.

Load each site’s full record with one click from the Surveyor’s studio-site buttons: Tar Creek · Butte · Onondaga Lake · Homestake · Palmerton.