Legacies of Pre-1960s Municipal Waste Incineration in the Pb of City Soils.

A 1937 street map of Durham, North Carolina, located four city-run waste incinerators that we recognized to be sites of contemporary city parks. We obtained city permission to sample three park's soils, developed a sampling design for geospatial mapping of hypothetical incinerator-ash contamination of park soils, and queried online Durham newspapers to understand histories of incinerator operations, ash disposal, and incinerator-to-park conversions. In 2021-2022, seven decades after parks were created, two parks had soil-Pb > 400 mgPb/kg, EPA's threshold for safe soil in play areas.