Locals to receive help with blighted areas

Abandoned factories and contaminated soil can stall efforts to revive blighted urban neighborhoods. City officials, developers and residents must be convinced that those areas are safe and that workers and residents will not become ill because of toxic materials in air and water supplies.

A new research center, led by engineers and scientists at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, will help local governments in the Northeast address those fears by creating tools to gauge risks associated with hazardous waste sites and by developing new ways to clean up harmful pollutants. The Center for Hazardous Substances in Urban Environments will provide research and technical help to state, municipal and local environmental regulators, industry representatives and community groups. Researchers from the University of Maryland, Morgan State University, the University of Connecticut and the New Jersey Institute of Technology also will be involved with the center, which is being funded through a five-year, $5.2 million grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“Before we applied for this grant, we asked regional EPA officials about the most serious challenges they faced,” says the center’s director, Ed Bouwer, a Johns Hopkins professor of geography and environmental engineering. “One of the top issues mentioned was urban livability Ñ making sure that people in cities have air, water and soil that will not expose them to toxic substances.”

Bouwer and his colleagues are developing tests and computer models to identify chemicals that are present on blighted sites and to determine whether and how they are spreading away from the sites. The tracking methods are expected to help local officials, developers and community leaders determine the best way to remove or neutralize the hazardous wastes.

For more information, visit www.jhu.edu/~dogee/centers/hsrc.