© M. Scott Mahaskey/Politico
Minden, West Virginia, is in a small holler — hollow, to non-Appalachians — and 40 years ago it was home to about 1,200 people. Today it's home to 250. There are around 25 homes on the main road into town, mostly low-slung or trailers, and we drove slowly so Worley-Jenkins had time to recount the dead.
"This woman here, she died of cancer. Her son's right there now, he's dying with bone cancer. And the woman there died of cancer. This guy and his wife both died with cancer; he bought this to fix it up. He was our sheriff."Minden was born a coal town. Five decades ago, the Shaffer Equipment Company, which serviced the local coal industry, dumped its transformers into the abandoned mines above town. The machines were laced with extremely toxic industrial chemicals called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as probable human carcinogens.
Comment: Politico does not often give the president more than passing credit for his leadership or humanitarian efforts. 54 Superfund sites were redeemed and Trump put corporations on the hook for cleanups that numbered 80% of the sites...that, in itself, is remarkable. Does everyone want these sites cleaned up? Yes. Has anyone else done it? No. Leading activist Lois Gibbs said: "You know the last time I saw something like this? Never." Green groups aren't about to focus on this Trump priority, neither will a Biden administration.