Caroline Fraser

But the war effort itself raised the amount of metals.

All these metals, lead, copper, et cetera, were needed so intensively for the war that they began to be produced more than at any other time in world history.

And so the pollution from that, you know, from producing all these, you know, tanks and vehicles and planes and everything that they needed was really going to form the basis of what would become the Superfund program because a lot of the Superfund sites in this country can be traced back to

And so that's when a lot of the stuff started entering the environment.

And once it's there, it's really hard to get rid of it.

I mean, that's the problem with lead.

It doesn't wash away.

It doesn't go anywhere.

It just hangs.

hangs around and becomes, you know, part of our environment.

It becomes dust that is, you know, in people's houses or their attics.

And that, I think, is what people eventually started, you know, when after the war, people started driving lots and lots more, you know, in the 50s and 60s.

This country particularly was doing really well economically and everybody was buying cars and driving them for the first time, you know, en masse.

That's right.

And so it really becomes, I think, a heavy burden.

pollutant around that time.

And so by the 70s, the kids who had been born in the 50s, they're starting to show the effects of lead poisoning.

Yeah, I mean, you definitely see, you know, what happened in Tacoma is very well recorded now.

Another city where this happened was El Paso, Texas, because Osarco had another major smelter accident.

in El Paso that had started in the 1890s and had been spewing this stuff out for decades.