AHHH...livability, vitality and variety!
There goes the neighborhood!
And anyone who has lived here a while knows where those leaking storage tanks and brownfield sites (under the condos)are too!

And how do you spell sustainability.... for the children..... of Portland's.... young creatives?

#3 is consistent with mediocrity.

As KP says: Thrive!

And Tom's "vision" gets dimmer and further blurred.

Is this a great city, or what?

The current state of Portland's environment can't be laid at the feet of the current city government.

But it is disturbing to think about what might happen if the city's "green, sustainable" p.r. gets stripped away. Without our reputation for a clean environment, we're in deep doo-doo.

The blind use of statistics can be pretty deceiving. The Business Week article gives little insight into what's being counted, but it did suggest that residential, underground oil storage tanks were counted in these statistics. I suspect that given Oregon's very clear requirement that underground storage tanks be identified and repaired upon the sale of residential property, Portland has identified the real number of tanks, while other major cities (with less strenuous reporting requirements) have not identified these tanks as fitting in the "contaminant" category. And, frankly, it's a pretty stupid paradigm to lump backyard oil tanks with superfund sites.

These are the specifics from the post:
Contaminated sites: 62,466 total (7th)
Leaking storage tanks: 20,655 (1st)

Where is the map identifying the locations so the public can avoid the hazards??

Did you notice the other articles? The one on the most and least expensive housing in each state. According to the article the least expensive housing of all the larger towns in Oregon is in Salem.

The most expensive housing?

Medford.

Bet you would have never thought that.

Greg C

BusinessWeek.com looked at number of contaminated sites per capita because the metropolitan areas with the most contaminated sites are, in general, the largest metro areas. Los Angeles ranks first when it comes to sheer number of contaminated sites, with a total of 271,360 on record. New York and Chicago follow, with 191,356 and 103,704, respectively.

Oh - and let's NOT forget that poo-poo still goes in the river almost every time we get serious rain in Portland.

I suspect that given Oregon's very clear requirement that underground storage tanks be identified and repaired upon the sale of residential property, Portland has identified the real number of tanks, while other major cities (with less strenuous reporting requirements) have not identified these tanks as fitting in the "contaminant" category.

Wrong.

backyard oil tanks are a small fraction of it.

and, Portland's actually behind nearly every city over 400k in identifying and counting these. another Portland myth--that the city somehow suffers statistically due to its environmental diligence.

And, frankly, it's a pretty stupid paradigm to lump backyard oil tanks with superfund sites.

that's not all they counted. and treating some pollution as somehow "not terribly important" is even stupider.

The blind use of statistics can be pretty deceiving.
wonkifying the issue of pollution through abstraction is even worse. gimme a break.

Where is the map identifying the locations so the public can avoid the hazards??

Right here.

Regarding how you avoid them, well, that's going to present a degree of a problem to you...

John, your link took me to the DEQ LUST (leaking underground storage tank) page? I presume that is part of the problem, but to discern location one must know the LUST number and specific address. There must be a map somewhere with not only leaky tanks IDed but also hazardous waste sites??? Thanks for trying though.

Sorry, I meant to post another link that gets you directly to a pdf listing of cleanup sites, ordered by zip code. You can push buttons from the link I gave above to get there, but here's the direct route.

Have some patience; it's 433 pages of fine print. The Portland area starts on page 142.

Wow. Too much information and not the visual I was hoping for. I did locate this one which is more manageable and what I had in mind. Thanks again John. Map of sites:http://www.oregon.gov/DHS/ph/shine/sites.shtml

Well, that certainly shows the big sites, and it isn't limited to LUST sites only. But I know of all of these sites already.

For all of the other LUST sites, I note that they also offer CSV database format in addition to the pdf images. Does anyone know if there's a way that Google could take these addresses from such a file and mark everything on a map for us - and hopefully link the data point back to a description of the problem? I think that's the intent of genop's original request.