Interactive Map Details Toxic Hot Spots Around US

The journalistic organization ProPublica has crunched EPA data to produce what it calls the most detailed map ever of industrial sites that produce cancer-causing air pollution. The project has identified more than 1,000 "toxic hot spots" around the country with a threshold of having a 1 in 100,000 risk of cancer. That is, if 100,000 people live in an area, there would be "one additional case of cancer over a lifetime of exposure." The EPA's level of acceptable risk is 1 in 10,000, but the agency says the ideal risk would be 1 in 1 million. ProPublica uses a risk factor in between, "10 times lower than the EPA’s threshold, but still high enough to be of concern," Click to use the interactive map, which allows people to plug in their ZIP codes to see if a hot spot is nearby. A more complete methodology is here. (More air pollution stories.)