Rising seas magnify the dangers of coastal Georgia’s industrial past

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station.

Just across the road from the waterfront in Brunswick, Semona Holmes lives in a house surrounded by fruit trees, potted flowers, a fish pond, and — when it rains or the tide is extra high — floodwater.

“If you can imagine this entire area here completely flooded,” she explained on her front porch on a recent afternoon. “The flooding would be — we would have, like, a river on our street.”

The floodwater has reached to her knees at times. Once, after a hurricane, her neighbor canoed down the block.

Improvements to the stormwater system have helped a bit in recent years. But Holmes’ concerns go beyond the inconvenience of an occasionally flooded street. She lives about half a mile from a former pesticide plant, which is now a toxic Superfund site — one of thousands of contaminated former industrial sites identified by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Holmes is worried about what the floodwaters contain.

“Everything from that chemical plant has flowed into our community,” she said.

Scientists want to get a better handle on what, exactly, has flowed into this community’s air, soil, water, and people. Researchers from six institutions will soon launch Georgia’s first Superfund research center, with $15 million from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Over five years, the team of scientists from Emory University, the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, Morehouse School of Medicine, Spelman College, and Texas Tech University will look at Glynn County’s four toxic Superfund sites, including the one near Holmes.

The work has two main goals, according to Emory public health professor Noah Scovronick.

“One is to understand the health effects of past chemical exposures, and the other is to try and reduce people’s future exposures,” he said.

To do that, they’ll study links between the toxic substances at the former industrial sites and po…