PROVIDENCE – Stroll through Olneyville Square and see all the marks of a colorful neighborhood. Busy restaurants. A local hardware store and a colorful florist. A branch of the public library.

But Scott Frickel sees more.

As you cross Westminster Street and take the motorcycle trail along the Woonasquatucket River, the Brown University sociologist talks about the area’s commercial history and the option that hidden pollutants have been left behind.

In the past, the threat of human exposure would have been minimal, but climate replacement increases the possibility of pollution. As torrential rains become more frequent, low-lying streets around Woonasquatucket are more vulnerable to flooding, which can release chemicals, compound volatile biological substances, or heavy metals such as lead or cadmium from the soil or river bottom.

In a study of the metropolitan domain of Providence and five other urban centers across the country, Frickel and other environmental experts uncovered thousands of previously unknown relic commercial sites that are located in flood-prone areas near residents.

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“The vast majority of production is located in small mom-and-pop shops,” said Frickel, a professor at Brown’s Institute for Environment and Society. “They’re bankrupt all the time. They move a lot. Every time they move, we leave anything behind. Thus, the magnitude of possible contamination increases in time and space.

Because cities are constantly changing, those commercial spaces are reused and forgotten, posing a potential hidden danger to the people living around them.

“Invisible sites,” Fickel said. They were lost. “

Previous studies have shown that some of the most polluted former trading houses in the country are prone to climate-related weather disasters. In a 2019 study, the U. S. Government Accountability Office of the U. S. Government said it was a study of the U. S. government. Related events, adding wildfires and floods.

But sites that are part of the federal Superfund program and are cleaned up make up only a small percentage of the places where contaminants may have been left beyond commercial activities.

Embedded content: https://thomas-marlow. shinyapps. io/flood_prone_relics/

Frickel and co-authors Thomas Marlow, a postdoctoral researcher at New York University, and James R. Elliott, a sociologist at Rice University, says the government is particularly underestimating homes that may still pose a danger because many sales areas are small and used for commercial purposes generations ago before agencies began documenting infected land, or have since been repurposed for housing. offices or parks.

Read more about the RI weather update: Flooding is a growing risk to New England hospitals. What is he doing?

“Ninety percent of historic commercial sites since the 1950s are on the firm radar,” Fricel said.

He has written in the past about the country’s commercial heritage. He and Elliott wrote an e-book on the subject: “Invisible Sites: Discovering Hidden Dangers in American Cities. “The new paper looks for the first time at the threat of flooding for those commercial sites.

Flooding might not have been a serious risk when homes were developed decades ago, but global warming has replaced the equation.

Rain in the Northeast is increasingly falling in giant events, rather than more gradually, because warmer air contains more moisture. Recent examples of violent flooding in Rhode Island come with the rains carried away by the remnants of Hurricane Ida in September 2021 and the last Labor Day typhoon of the month that closed Interstate 95 in Providence.

Overall, according to the study, the other people most exposed to commercial pollutants are other low-income people or other people from racial and ethnic minorities, teams that Frickel describes as “socially marginalized. “

They live in neighborhoods like Olneyville, which according to the examination has one of the highest concentrations of former commercial homes in the Providence area. About 70 percent of the neighborhood’s citizens are Hispanic and 15 percent are black. The average household income source is about three-fifths of the Rhode Island average.

The other part of Providence with a plethora of relic sites is the old jewelry district, which has been remodeled into a center for high-end doctors’ offices, labs, and loft departments.

But the threat isn’t limited to downtown Providence. Frickel followed Rhode Island’s business progression over time, beginning in the 1950s, when businesses clustered in the urban core, many along waterways, as its predecessors needed simple electric power and transportation.

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Over time, however, they moved from Providence, Pawtucket and Central Falls to the suburbs after the I-95 structure, with trucking being more important. And by grouping into dense groups, the commercial corporations dispersed.

“Once this road has been built, you see the geography of change,” Fricel said.

Frickel and the other researchers reviewed old state business directories collected from public libraries to map relict sites.

They took virtual photographs of each and every page of each and every directory they can locate for 60 years and created a set of rules for finding companies that used chemicals, made plastics, subtle fossil fuels, made concrete, made metals or engaged in other business activities.

They mapped the locations and compared them to flood threat projections from the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit that calculates climate threats. Then, they combined it with census information to find out who lives in those places lately.

They did so in six cities in other parts of the country. With Providence, they looked at Houston, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon.

They discovered more than 6,000 old businesses in cities with the greatest threat of flooding until 2050. They estimate that another 200,000 people live on the same block as at least one of those properties. In all six cities, they found that the main predictor of a community with an old commercial flood is the proportion of non-white residents who don’t speak English.

“All of them showed a significant amount of those ancient sites in low-lying and flood-prone areas,” Frickel said of the area. “And in every city, underserved teams will be disproportionately affected by this new type of threat that is emerging. “. “

Houston has the most past commercial homes in danger of flooding, with 1985, and the most nearby residents, with 78,000. But the Providence area, despite its much smaller size, is similar in terms of how many relic sites will likely be flooded. It has 1,882 and 28,000 more people living nearby.

This stems from the legacy of Rhode Island’s textile mills.

“And jewelry is a huge, huge piece for Providence in particular,” Frickel said.

Five years ago, excessive rainfall from Hurricane Harvey damaged Superfund sites in Houston and added one in the San Jacinto River, where a design containing dioxins and other dangerous ingredients eroded, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Nothing like this has ever happened in Rhode Island, according to the state Department of Environmental Management. But in the historic flooding of March 2010, the Centredale Manor Superfund site on the banks of the Woonasquatucket River in North Providence was flooded.

“Fortunately, the two plugs at the site withstood with minimal leaching and visual inspection showed that no further infected curtains were released into the river,” DEM spokesman Michael Healey said. “The site also comprises a giant volume of infected sediment in the river that we feared would be mobilized and spread downstream. “

The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency The U. S. Food and Drug Administration took samples from the river and found that none of the sediment was beyond the existing infected area, Healey said.

Since the 2010 floods, DEM’s Office of Land Revitalization and Sustainable Material Management, which monitors infected sites, has replaced climate effects in any remediation plan.

“These events have brought the factor to the forefront for us,” Healey said. “Typically, the sites we monitor are covered and protected down to the floodplain, so the effects of flooding on encapsulated debris are expected. “

Alicia Lehrer, executive director of the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council, said she is involved in flood pollution in public recreational spaces near the river, such as Merino Park and Riverside Park. The EPA tested those sites after the 2010 floods and discovered dioxins in Merino. Park, however, on the playgrounds.

“The domain where the contamination was discovered is now fenced in,” he said.

Frickel is careful to say that the sites discovered during the study are possible sites of contamination. They did not assess the location of the pollutants and whether floodwaters would release the pollution.

“The challenge is that we just don’t know,” he said.

It is being implemented with the DEM and the state Ministry of Health to expand the particularities of individual sites.

“Dr. Frickel’s paintings are a vital component of our understanding of the legacy of business activity in Rhode Island and inform our recovery and cleanup strategies,” said Terrence Gray, DEM director. “Climate change and long-term flood predictions threaten disadvantaged communities. Historic commercial pollutants in many of those same communities make cleaning up those sites and addressing social inequalities even more urgent.

Frickel saw the effects of the flooding up close. He and his family circle were living in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. His space was not flooded, but he made his way through the wind.

A quarter of a million more people fled the paralyzed city after the storm. Among them were Frickel, his wife and daughter.

“It’s a life-changing event,” he said.

The risk of hurricanes has been evident. But now flooding is happening in other forms, from exacerbated high tides to emerging seas and, increasingly, intense storms.

Frickel and his colleagues say those changes add to the urgency of the need to close homes used abroad for commercial purposes. They stress the importance of loading more coverage on hazardous sites so that they can cope with the effects of the elements.

The bottom line, they say, is that the threat of flooding wants to be part of the conversation.

“Now is the time to start dealing with this, because the threat of flooding will accumulate more and more,” Frickel said.