Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.
Last August fellow Daily Yonder reporter Ilana Newman and I visited a 1,500 square-mile lead cleanup site in the Coeur d’Alene mountains of North Idaho, a region nicknamed the Silver Valley because of its international reputation for high-production silver mines. Industrial mining has more than a century-long history in this region, and lead is one of the byproducts of the silver mining and refining process.
For almost a century, mining companies dumped tailings, or waste, directly into the Coeur d’Alene River and its tributaries, eventually leading to one of the worst lead poisoning events in United States history. By the early 1970s, the Silver Valley had some of the highest blood lead levels ever recorded in children.
In 1983, the EPA added the Silver Valley to the National Priorities List (NPL), a list of communities prioritized for federal assistance with hazardous waste mitigation. The site itself engulfs surrounding small towns and both active and inactive mines that comprise the Historic Coeur d’Alene Mining District.
Congress created the NPL on December 11, 1980, through the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), also known as Superfund, which established a trust fund for cleaning up hazardous waste.
In this edition of the Rural Index, I mapped the hundreds of Superfund sites that are scattered across rural America. While Superfund sites may appear evenly distributed overall, research shows that the most hazardous types of sites are more likely to be located near disadvantaged communities.
The National Priorities List
Today, 1,340 active sites make up the NPL all across America – in rural and urban communities alike. The following map displays all of the nonmetropolitan, or rural, Superfund sites. Click on the interactive version of the map and zoom in to your own state or county. (Keep in mind that some sites may be divided into multiple points depending on the size and the complexity of the cleanup area.)
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Most of the communities included in the NPL have been polluted by industrial operations like oil refining, metal smelting, or manufacturing, among many others.
The historic industrial corridors in Pennsylvania and New York are home to a concentration of rural Superfund sites. In the small town of Frackville, Pennsylvania, for example, a glass company dumped hazardous waste into lagoons which seeped into the soil and contaminated groundwater.
At a Superfund site in South Cairo, New York, public health officials discovered that employees of American Thermostat improperly disposed of volatile organic compounds into the nearby area, which polluted private wells. The EPA added the several acres surrounding the American Thermostat facility to the NPL in the 1980s.
Superfund sites are not evenly distributed across the country. A 2025 research paper from the Journal of Environmental Epidemiology found that Superfund sites related to industries like lumber, scrap metal, metal processing, and battery production, which have the highest risks to human health, are near communities that had lower incomes and educational attainment compared to the general American population.
The geography of Superfund sites also exhibits racial disparities. Compared to Americans at large, Black residents are more likely to live near Superfund sites, according to Shannon Z. Jones, a biology professor at the University of Richmond who studies environmental racism.
The EPA is establishing a new waste repository in the Lower Burke Canyon located in the town of Wallace, Idaho. (Photos by Ilana Newman)
Environmental health activist Barbara Miller took me and Ilana on a tour of the Superfund site in her North Idaho community. One of the many EPA-managed waste repositories we visited that day was in the small town of Wallace at a repository called Lower Burke Canyon.
As we turned off the main highway, a straight, gravel road passed under a metal fence flanked by pine trees. A neon yellow sign explained that, beyond the woven wire fence, a toxic waste repository stored lead-contaminated soils from the area’s Superfund site. The EPA monitors all waste going into and out of the Superfund waste repositories on a recurring basis, collecting data on things like water pollution and air quality. This monitoring program is meant to ensure that the waste repositories themselves do not pose risks to humans and the environment.
But despite EPA procedures, Miller told the Daily Yonder she is still concerned about negative health outcomes in the communities where these repositories are located. Directly across the street from the Lower Burke Canyon repository is an affordable housing development for low income families. Although we can’t say anything definitive about the residents of this particular housing development, government agencies do often fail to disclose when affordable housing units are polluted with contaminants like lead.
And despite reassurance from environmental engineers that the waste repositories aren’t doing any additional harm, Miller’s worry is understandable. When she was younger, Miller saw concerns about the mining waste being disregarded. “And now, there’s documentation that it was … harming. It did harm,” Miller said.
A long-form story detailing the history of the Silver Valley will appear in the Daily Yonder later this month. Stay tuned.
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