Twenty-one years ago this spring, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and others were working to transform the former Fernald uranium processing facility in northwest Hamilton County into a nature preserve. The site cleanup was nearing the finish line — the remediation would be declared complete the following year, in October 2006, with the Fernald Preserve opening a year later.
Back then, the EPA had one key indicator it was eyeing to see if the wetlands it had built were working: salamanders.
“Salamanders, basically, are a sign of an established wetland, and in this case, would show that we’ve put a wetland in a location where salamanders need additional breeding habitat,” then-team leader Tom Schneider told me for a story for WMUB in 2005.
It was a cold, windy day in late March of that year when I joined Schneider and other specialists at Fernald to search for salamanders in the man-made wetlands. Their presence would be a sign the land was healing from its Cold War-era scars, when employees spent nearly 40 years producing uranium metal for nuclear weapons…