Mapping Hometown's toxic threats

I came across these useful maps today while wandering the Internet, at the website My McAdoo Home. They show various sources of toxic pollution in the area around Hometown, Pa., including coal ash dumps, Superfund sites, industrial operations and waste coal-burning co-generation plants.

The maps are not completely comprehensive -- for example, they don't include acid mine drainage sites, or gas stations where leaking underground tanks contaminated groundwater. But they do give a good sense of the scale of the environmental health problem facing the area, where a consultant recently told local residents that he hadn't before seen a community that's suffered so many different "environmental insults."

Click on map to see a larger version: