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Flickinger had researched the birth defects, the miscarriages, and the spontaneous abortions that seemed like an epidemic in the residential subdivision near Brio. She had watched Little Leaguers walk off the baseball diamond near the site with their cleats covered with a chemical tar. She had smelled the malodorous black substance seeping from driveways.

The EPA was prepared to incinerate 245,000 tons of toxic sludge left by Monsanto, Atlantic Richfield, and other corporate citizens in the soil of a fifty-eight-acre site, twenty miles south of downtown Houston.

Flickinger is the maverick publisher of a community weekly newspaper. She never quite got it that the function of a small-town paper is to sell ads. Once the ads are sold, the paper is supposed to recap the city council meetings, write about high school sports, and keep the community informed of important birthdays, weddings, and funerals. Instead, Flickinger used the South Belt–Ellington Leader to report on the problems with the EPA’s plan. The agency, she argued, hadn’t done a proper site characterization. They didn’t know what was in the soils and sludge they were preparing to burn. They didn’t know where the sludge pits were. They hadn’t tested for metals. And they hadn’t looked carefully at the birth defects and miscarriages in the neighborhoods near the abandoned refinery.

According to the EPA, the site was used for “by-product recycling, copper catalyst regeneration, and petrochemical recovery.” Sediment was cleaned out of industrial and refinery tank bottoms; anything that was reusable was extracted. Styrene and vinyl-chloride tars were stored in open, unlined ponds waiting for processing. All this was done in one of the state’s environmental hot zones, where the Great State’s Bermuda Triangle of Superfund sites overlaps Houston’s Bubba Belt. As they put it in Southeast Texas, “A lot of dangerous chemical shit was boiled, baked, buried, and slopped across about fifty-eight acres of black gumbo swamp on the edge of Mud Gully. Then the bakers and sloppers upped and hauled ass.” Five thousand families lived very close to the site they left behind.

The experts at the EPA had figured out the problem, said Flickinger, but their solution was all wrong. Their plan to dig up the sludge and burn it was a greater public-health threat than leaving it all in the ground. At the Brio site, you didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. You just followed your nose. The earth regularly belched to relieve itself of the chemicals brewing together under the ground. Toxic air emissions drifted through residential neighborhoods, the playgrounds, the school yards, and the junior-college campus. Common sense—but not the EPA report on the site—indicated that digging up the pits would increase the problem, and that burning the sludge on-site would in turn create another round of deadly emissions.

“The EPA wouldn’t listen to us,” Flickinger said. “They treated us like hysterical housewives.” By 1992, all Flickinger had to show for her five-year fight over the Brio Superfund site were warnings from local advertisers that the South Belt–Ellington Leader was the problem. It was causing “bad publicity” for the South Houston community.

“Bad publicity!” Flickinger said. “The EPA was getting ready to burn toxic material in a residential neighborhood, and they didn’t even know what they were burning.”

When a botched EPA cleanup plan threatens your life and the lives of your neighbors, who you gonna call?

Flickinger called EPA national ombudsman Bob Martin.

She said she was beyond “out of hope” when she made the call to the ombudsman’s Washington office. She had already tried this route, when Martin’s predecessor, Robert Knox, was in charge, and she had gotten nowhere. She had tossed Knox’s number in the trash. The regional EPA office continued to ignore her and her neighbors.

Then providence took a little role. One morning Flickinger dragged herself to work, feeling beaten down by the EPA and resigned to a plume of toxic