Caroline Fraser

I don't know where they were going to put it.

But they said they were going to take it.

But then they went bankrupt.

And so they didn't remove it.

And instead, they created this very bizarre kind of

pit where they put all the worst stuff, including a bunch of the soil, the contaminated soil from Everett and the arsenic kitchen, and they put it in a sort of super heavy-duty plastic-lined

you know, garbage bag, essentially.

I mean, if you can imagine like the largest garbage bag in the world, they put all this stuff in it and they capped it with soil.

And that thing is sitting there, you know, still, even though they have now, you know, they cleared off the whole area where the compound was, where the factories and the furnaces were, and they built condos on top of that.

But behind the condos is this giant hump of contaminated stuff in a giant plastic garbage bag.

Well, there's a very small historical display with some photographs and materials about the smelter that's in one of the buildings on the way to the public bathroom.

Oh, my God.

So presumably if the people who are buying condos there know anything about it, they probably are aware of the history.

But they think it's –

And in a sense, it has been cleaned up.

I mean, but... In a sense.

Well, they have a lot of stuff that they've done.

I mean, in the book, I talk about, you know, Frank Herbert, who wrote Dune, he was from Tacoma.

And in fact, the stuff in Dune about the pollution and what has happened to the planet, you know, that he dramatized, a lot of that came from his disgust with the smelter.

And a planet that had basically destroyed its whole environment.