A lot of people living in the South End, Fort Point, the Seaport, Lower Roxbury near Melnea Cass, and South Boston deal with things they can't quite explain. Basement flooding that doesn't match the weather. Sewer smells that come and go with no pattern. Dampness that never dries. Rashes, fatigue, hair loss, breathing problems that doctors can't pin down. Weird stuff growing in places it shouldn't be.

If that sounds familiar, you should know what's under your neighborhood, because the City of Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts have known for a long time and have gone out of their way to make sure you don't.

This is true whether you've been here your whole life or moved in last month. Whether you're renting a basement in the South End or bought a condo in the Seaport. Nobody was told. The difference is that some communities have been living with the consequences for generations, and some just got here and have no idea what they moved on top of.

On February 13, 2026, a CERCLA petition was filed with the EPA asking the federal government to investigate the South Bay as a Superfund site. There has never been a Superfund site anywhere in Boston. We think it's time for one, and we need your support.

What's actually in the ground? You know your neighborhood is built on fill. What you may not know is what that fill actually is, what else is leaching into it, what was dumped on it, and that nobody has ever cleaned any of it up.

At sites around the South Bay where someone has actually bothered to test, they've found lead in the soil at almost 100 times the level the EPA considers safe for a residential neighborhood. They've found TCE  (a cancer-causing solvent) in the groundwater, migrating through cracked bedrock in ways the cleanup plans didn't predict. They've found coal tar chemicals, arsenic, chromium, mercury, and asbestos mixed into the fill that everything is built on. They've found hydrogen sulfide gas (the rotten egg smell, the gas that can knock you out or kill you at high enough concentrations) actively being generated by the ground itself.

These aren't all from one bad property; there are dozens of small individual cleanup sites scattered across the area, each one handled separately, each one pretending the contamination stops at the property line. Nobody has ever looked at the whole area at once. But in addition, some of this is from a few bad properties and one of the worst was the City of Boston's incinerator and dump on South Bay. The City burned most of its trash at that site with no real abatement of the emissions, spreading pollution all around the South Bay surrounding neighborhoods and creating such a mess that newspapers reported "black rain" falling on houses. The City responded by blaming residents and claiming their smoke was pure and you could put your face in it -- the EPA found it was full of poison and highly dangerous and EPA nad the Courts ordered it to be shut down, but Boston refused and kept operating it knowing it was hurting Bostonians and the environment. 

Even more impressive, the Commonwealth passed a law (the "historic fill" exemption) that says if contamination is widespread enough, it doesn't have to be cleaned up -- for example, the City's incinerator smoke and black rain residue. The theory is if the pollution extends across an area like South Bay, then even if its dangerous and will make people sick, no one has to clean it up because its too big of a mess. They've used it at almost every site in this area, and it almost always excuses clean up by Boston and the Commonwealth (its their own get-out-of-jail-free card). That's how you get soil with 100 times the safe level of lead under an apartment building and no requirement to do anything about it.

If you just moved here and paid $800,000 for a condo in the Seaport or Fort Point, they may claim that nobody was required to tell you any of this. If you've lived in Roxbury or South Boston your whole life, you may have always known something was wrong but never had the numbers to prove it. Either way, you have a right to know, even if the local system is designed to make sure you don't find out.

What's coming up through your sewers? Most of the sewer system under this area is from the 1870s-1890s. It's brick. It's combined, meaning your toilet and the rain from the street go into the same pipe. When it rains hard enough, the system overflows and dumps raw sewage straight into the harbor. You probably knew that.

What you may not know is that the tides come in through the sewers too. Every high tide pushes harbor water back up into the system. A 1967 engineering report documented that the sewers in this area fill with tidewater on every flood tide and discharge raw sewage on every ebb tide — every single day, rain or shine. The old Roxbury Canal, which was sealed inside concrete tunnels in the 1960s without ever being cleaned out, has no tide gates at all. The water inside rises and falls 13 feet with the harbor. When someone finally inspected it in 2019 (the first time in over sixty years) they found feet of accumulated sewage, bacteria coating the walls, and worms in the water.

That system may be connected to your building - it was connected to mine in South End. If your building was built before the 1890s, the connection might be the original one — and nobody knows exactly how it was done or what condition it's in. If you've had water in your basement, sewer backups, or smells that seem to come and go on a cycle, the cycle is the tide.

The newer buildings in the Seaport and Fort Point may have modern plumbing, but they're built on the same fill, over the same groundwater, connected to the same system. The old buildings in the South End and Lower Roxbury have it worst — they predate the sewer system entirely, they have no modern building envelopes, and they have the most direct exposure to what comes up from below. The communities that have been here the longest, in the oldest housing, with the least resources to fix it, are the most exposed. That's not an accident.

Boston City Hospital was built in 1864 right next to the Roxbury Canal. It treated smallpox, typhoid, diphtheria, and scarlet fever starting in 1865. For 160 years, everything from that hospital went into the same combined sewers that connect to your building — blood, bodily fluids, chemicals, pharmaceutical waste, everything. Between the 1930s and 1970s, about half the people who died from infections at that hospital caught the infection after being admitted. The hospital never publicly investigated whether the open sewer running through the property or the tidal flooding of the basements might have had something to do with it. That hospital served the community around it — the working-class and low-income residents of the South End and Roxbury who had no other option. They went there because they had to. They got sick there because the City built a hospital on a sewer. The Hospital acted surprised and then let the universities study the sick and exploit their illness and study them like guinea pigs for academic papers and grant applications. 

The hospital, Harvard University , and Boston University also used radioactive materials for decades. Federal inspectors found radioactive waste thrown in the regular trash, radioactive labs left unlocked and unattended, and sewer pipes so contaminated they had to be ripped out. They burned hundreds of radioactive research animals (including hundreds of dogs) and vented the smoke into the air over the South End with no filters.

On top of that, DuPont ran a company called New England Nuclear out of at least seven buildings on Albany Street, East Canton Street, and East Dedham Street, manufacturing radioactive compounds at industrial scale. Their federal license covered essentially every radioactive element from lithium to plutonium. They routinely discharged radioactive waste into the same combined sewer system. The same one that overflows into the harbor. The same one connected to your building. I found what looks like nanotech with mercury in it on my kitchen floor. That's mine. Maybe tracked in from the alley or maybe flowing in with the groundwater intrusion through the fieldstone, but Du Pont appears to have left some stuff behind. 

The Commonwealth & the City removed the Roxbury Canal from its own maps and records. They renamed sections of it so searches come up wrong. ("Bass River" is not a thing. Its the Roxbury Canal cesspool, but that might decrease their property tax revenue). The state's wetland maps show the area as blank. The state says there are no natural resources there — in what used to be a productive tidal estuary. The City's old landfills and dumps aren't in any state database. There is no mention anywhere of the incinerator the City ran for 25 years — the one that caused "black rain" to fall on the South End, the one the EPA and the courts ordered shut down and the City refused to close — that ash was used as fill under buildings and never cleaned up.

Right now, the City is promoting and approving new residential construction on this land with no site-wide environmental testing and no mandate to tell buyers or renters what's in the ground. Luxury buildings are going up in Fort Point and the Seaport marketed as waterfront living. The waterfront is Fort Point Channel — the same channel that receives raw sewage on every outgoing tide, the same channel that was the discharge point for the Roxbury Canal cesspool, the same channel currently thriving with fouling organisms unique to highly polluted ecosystems, the same channel where they dredged sludge and debris from the harbor floor for decades. The people buying those condos have no idea. The people who have lived in the neighborhoods next door for decades, who watched the "revitalization" happen around them while their own buildings deteriorate and their own health complaints get ignored — they know something is wrong. They've always known. They just couldn't get anyone to listen.

The petition also presents evidence that the bedrock under Boston may have been shattered by a meteorite impact. There's a separate petition about that with the full details. What matters for you right now is this: if the bedrock is cracked and chemically reactive (and there's good evidence it is) then it may be dissolving toxic metals into the groundwater and pushing them up into the soil and into your basement. Every environmental cleanup in the area assumes the bedrock is solid and the contamination sits on top. If the bedrock is part of the problem, those cleanups aren't working the way they're supposed to. The areas with the most damaged bedrock sit at the lowest elevations — which are the same areas that were historically redlined, that have the highest concentration of public housing, and that are home to the communities with the least political power to demand answers. That's not a coincidence. The topography itself is shaped by the geology, and the communities that ended up in the lowest-lying areas are bearing the highest exposure from below.

I'm the person who filed the CERCLA petition and I lived in a South End basement for over two years. I dealt with the same things a lot of you may deal with — water in the basement, sewer smells, dampness that never went away. I was exhausted all the time, sleeping 14-18 hours a day. My hair was falling out and felt very strange. I bought a microscope and found bacteria in my apartment that normally live at waste water treatment plans or volcanic vents on the deep ocean floor. It had also taken over my hair - it was falling out because it wasn't even hair anymore. I was horrified. That's like literally a nightmare. There're a much longer story about how this all played out for me and you can read it in the Petition if you'd like, but this isn't about me, its about all Bostonians exposed to this pollution and who don't even know it. 

I filed the petition because it seemed like nobody else was going to and because the City and Commonwealth seemed to be highly invested in concealing these issues while refusing to clean up the mess. 

What I'm asking for:

• A full investigation. Not more tiny individual cleanups. One real Superfund investigation of the entire South Bay area so we can finally understand what's in the ground and how it's moving.
• Stop the sewage. It's 2026. Raw sewage should not be flowing into the harbor and backing up into people's homes on every tide. EPA told Boston to stop this in the 1970s and its more than fifty years later and still happening. It's unacceptable. 
• A health study. The federal government should study what living on this land is actually doing to people — the gases, the water, the biological hazards, all of it.
• End the "historic fill" exemption. A law that says widespread poison doesn't count as poison is not protecting anyone except the people who put the poison there, and is contrary to the idea that the sites with widespread contamination require the most stringent oversight and cleanup, not less, not nothing. 
• Tell people what's under their buildings. If you're buying or renting on land with documented contamination, you have a right to know. Right now they think nobody has to tell you — not the seller, not the landlord, not the city, not the state. If you get sick and they knew there was pollution on site that could make you sick and they did not even warn you about it, that's at least a tort claim. They need to tell you.
• Put someone in charge. At least six government agencies have some jurisdiction over parts of this. None of them talk to each other. Nobody looks at the whole picture. Everyone's deferring to the same selfish city and state that created much of the issues to tell them if there's a problem. All public health screening is going through colonial, exploitive universities who also helped create these issues through their own dumping and negligence. That's exactly how you get the most contaminated neighborhood in a major American city with zero Superfund sites.

This site has been poisoning people for two hundred years. It poisoned the patients at the City Hospital who caught infections from the sewers under the building. It poisoned the residents who breathed incinerator ash for 25 years. It is poisoning people right now — in old basements and in new construction, in public housing and in luxury condos — because the contamination doesn't care what you paid for your apartment. The difference is that some communities have been fighting to be heard about this for generations, and the rest of us are just finding out.

Boston has never had a Superfund site. That's not because Boston is clean, its because Boston lies about how dirty it is & Boston was one of the parties who dirtied itself & now it doesn't want to clean up its own mess.

Please sign and share. Let's clean up the South Bay, and hold Boston & the rest of these polluters accountable.

Initiated by Ashley M. Gjovik, J.D

Full petition: A CERCLA Petition and Clean Water Act Citizen Suit Notice regarding the South Bay, Fort Point Channel, Roxbury Creek, and Dorchester Brook in Boston, Massachusetts. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18634019

Geology paper: Gjøvik, Ashley M. “Identification of a New England Bolide Impact Site: A Geologic Reckoning with the Ground-Zero for the Younger Dryas Impact Event”. (March 21, 2026). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19146482 (PDF).

More information: https://www.ashleygjovik.com/southbay.html

Companion petition: Formal Reassessment of Boston Basin Geology: https://c.org/K6J5hX8NLw