Wasted Places is a collaborative investigation by six nonprofit newsrooms into federal and state programs designed to cleanup and redevelop polluted tracts known as brownfields.The project was coordinated by the Investigative News Network, and reported and written by the Connecticut Health Investigative Team, City Limits, Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and INN.

Sites that have been funded through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s brownfields program, as of August 2012.

The stated goals of the federal government’s Brownfields Program are to fund the cleanup of contamination, to improve the quality of life of blighted communities and to provide economic stimulus. But an investigation by nonprofit newsrooms across the country, coordinated by the Investigative News Network, found problems in every community examined.

While the state has made some progress with the backlog in the past two decades, a “startling” number of plant closings during the recent recession has created “an entirely new generation of brownfields,” according to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Whoever is deemed responsible for the century-old toxic waste in Ashland, community residents — and others in Wisconsin — will pay for millions in cleanup costs.

The Kabasas, whose home is surrounded by a Superfund site with century-old pollution, are divided on whether to worry about it.

Millions of gallons of contaminated groundwater and thousands of gallons of gooey black coal tar lie underneath Ashland’s downtown waterfront. It is by far the thorniest cleanup of an old manufactured gas plant in Wisconsin — both because of the difficulty in cleaning it up, and in finding someone to pay for it.

In the best-case scenario, we’ll be able to eat all the Lake Michigan lake trout we want without worrying about getting cancer from the PCBs — in another 20 years.
Less optimistically, we might have to wait until 2046.
Those are the predictions of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency researchers, who have modeled how long it will take [...]