Environmental Disasters at Home
In 1980, the U.S. congress created the the the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act to recognize and remediate environmental damages caused by hazardous substances. Since its inception, there have been thousands of sites deemed unsafe by the act, but less than 500 have been recovered enough to take off the list.
Because of lack of funding, many of these sites are recovered only to a point where the hazard is contained. Lack of public awareness does not make it easy for funding to increase. My reason for creating the app is to increase the public knowledge of these sites and their contaminants, so we continue to push our government to hold offenders accountable for their actions.
The shiny app allows you to select a window of dates that a site was created to check to see if a person may have come into contact with the contamination. After locating a site that you have an interest in, clicking the marker will give you the name and possibly a short description. There is also a checkbox to remove all sites that are no longer active.
In the future, I plan to add contaminant metrics that will allow you to explore the site-specific hazards and explore the health symptoms associated with exposure to them.
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