Mini Project #5- Pollution In My Neighborhood

What is a Superfund?

I had no idea what this word meant when I can across it in this week's Mini-Project. Upon going to the EPA.gov website I found out that the government implemented a program that is designated to locate, investigate and of course clean up certain areas where garbage or hazardous waste has been dumped and forgotten. Below is a more detailed explanation from the website based on the legend of the EnviroMapper Map Legend Descriptions:

Superfund Site

This layer of EnviroMapper indicates the specific facilities designated as Superfund sites by the USEPA. (Data currently cover the conterminous United States. Alaska, Hawaii, and U.S. territories will be added later.)
Years ago, many wastes were dumped on the ground, in rivers, or left out in the open. These actions resulted in thousands of uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous-waste sites. Some common hazardous-waste sites include abandoned warehouses, manufacturing facilities, processing plants, and landfills.
In response to growing concern over health and environmental risks posed by hazardous-waste sites, Congress established the Superfund Program in 1980 to locate, investigate, and clean up these sites. The Superfund Program is administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) in cooperation with individual states and tribal governments.
To Find Out More About a Specific Facility
You can locate a fact sheet for a specific Superfund site, searching by state or EPA region.
The National Priorities List (NPL) is a published list of hazardous-waste sites in the country that are being cleaned up under the Superfund Program. To locate Superfund sites across the country, see the Final National Priorities List Sites by State.
For information on topics such as cleanup costs, risk assessment, community resources, and technical assistance grants, see the Superfund Program.
A Superfund Hotline is available to the public providing up-to-date information about the Superfund program.
Data Source
The EnviroMapper layer for Superfund sites is obtained from the US Environmental Protection Agency's (USEPA) Envirofacts Warehouse. The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Information System (CERCLIS) is the Superfund database that is used to support management in all phases of the Superfund program.
The system contains information on all aspects of hazardous-waste sites including an inventory of sites, planned and actual site activities, and financial information. It contains information on hazardous-waste site assessment and remediation from 1983 to the present.
The Envirofacts Warehouse page giving a Superfund Overview also has additional links to relevant laws and database information.
The Superfund Query Form and the Envirofacts Query Form provide access to Superfund National Priorities List (NPL) Factsheets, Record of Decision (ROD) documents, and CERCLIS Site Reports. These documents are maintained by the Superfund Office.
Technical Data Description
USEPA has created a unified database to track and share information on facilities it regulates. This map layer was built by accessing that database.
The Envirofacts Warehouse makes available very detailed technical information about that database, information called metadata.
Metadata (or "data about data") describe the content, quality, condition, and other characteristics of data. Metadata are used to organize and maintain data, to provide information to data catalogs and clearinghouses, and to aid data transfers.
For technical background, see metadata about the database on U.S. EPA-regulated