We live near the corner of Rosecrans and Sunny Ridge, and for as long as we’ve been here, there has been a small bronze plaque at that intersection, mounted on a rock in the little drought-tolerant garden behind the fence. You have to be paying attention to notice it. Most people driving past never do.
Sometime this summer, somebody pried it off and took it. I don’t know who. I doubt they knew what they were taking. Bronze gets stolen for scrap, and a plaque is a plaque to a thief. But I stood there, looking at the empty mounting on that rock, and found myself more upset than I expected, and it took me a minute to work out why.
The plaque was dated Completion of Construction – October 1997. The inscription thanked the residents and the elected officials whose efforts had made the cleanup happen. That’s a strange thing to put on a monument, if you think about it. Most markers commemorate a building or a battle or a person. This one commemorated a neighborhood refusing to be brushed off.
From 1942 to 1946, the 22 acres now known as the McColl Superfund Site were used as a dump for petroleum refinery waste — roughly 72,600 cubic yards of it, poured into twelve unlined pits. Benzene, tetrahydrothiophenes, metals. It sat there and leached into the soil and the groundwater underneath…