The U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) has unveiled a new Web site that joins detailed information about toxic waste sites, abandoned factories and other environmental hazards with detailed maps of communities and neighborhoods across America.
The HUD E-MAPS effort brings together pollution data provided by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) -- including "brownfield" sites, wastewater discharges, air pollution and also clean-up efforts -- with the housing agency's own neighborhood-by-neighborhood maps of the country, the Environmental News Service reports.
HUD launched the free service to help community residents, planners and others learn more about their neighborhoods, offer information about local air pollution and hazardous waste generation, and generally make people more aware of what is going on where they live. HUD officials say they hope E-MAPS will serve as a "one-stop shopping" site for citizens and officials around the country, ENS reports.
HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo says using the E-MAPS will allow communities to make informed decisions about the healthiest locations to build new facilities, including deciding whether redeveloping land once used as a industrial site would pose a health risk due to contamination.
"Parents everywhere wonder whether their children's drinking water is polluted, and few of us know what's buried in our backyards," Denis Hayes, organizer of Earth Day and president of the Bullitt Foundation, told the news service. "(This site) will bring such information to everyone, including those in the nation's poorest neighborhoods."
The site uses a database generated from HUD's Community 2020 software, which offers more than 600 types of census data for geographic areas ranging from entire states to individual city blocks. Community 2020 was developed in 1997 as an internal tool, but has won an Innovations in Government Award from the Ford Foundation and Harvard University, ENS reports.
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