ABOUT THIS PROJECT

In 2024, I released a documentary covering the Lincoln Park Superfund site located in Cañon City, Colorado. The site was placed on the NPL in 1983. By the time the documentary was released, the site was still in the first phase of the cleanup process, over 40 years after its listing.

I spent hundreds of hours in the research phase reviewing documents, traveling to Cañon City, attending community meetings, speaking with residents, and putting it all together. The most time-consuming piece wasn't hunting down old media or transcribing a few dozen hours of taped conversations. The real hangup occurred any time I tried to collect and distill the official EPA record.

As it turned out, I wasn't alone.

The EPA publishes a profile page for every Superfund site. Those pages live behind a clunky federal search interface. They are fragmented, with sections often empty or outdated, and quality can vary significantly. One profile might offer a tremendous amount of detail and include up-to-date information on cleanup actions, community involvement, and more. Another might have seen three years pass since its last update.

In 2025, the EPA Office of Inspector General reported that over half of the Five-Year Review reports (FYRs) for federal Superfund sites could not be found via the EPA's public document portal, stating "public access and transparency is impaired" when information is kept "inconsistently across multiple locations."

For now, much of the Superfund program data is still public. It's the format that's a barrier.

KCC SuperScan exists to lower that barrier. A person who hears the word 'Superfund' in their community should be able to find their nearest site, read what it is in plain language, and decide for themselves whether they want to dig deeper into the official record.

Accountability works when the information is easy to access. And the US federal government is actively limiting that access. KCC SuperScan is an attempt to remove friction between public information about a Superfund site and the people who live next to it, while preserving a record of that data on the backend.

Every pin on the map is a site that is currently on, formerly on, or proposed for the EPA's National Priorities List (NPL), more commonly known as Superfund sites. Site locations, names, listing/deletion dates, listing status, Hazard Ranking Scores, contaminant lists, and site-specific contact information come directly from EPA datasets. Congressional representative information comes from the Congress.gov public API. Contaminant details come from the National Institutes of Health's PubChem database.

The data pipeline that feeds the map runs every Monday at 3 AM MT and writes to a single database, so everything you see on the map reflects the most recent weekly data sync. For the site profile pages, all data outside the Overview section is populated from EPA's Envirofacts API, EPA ArcGIS feature servers, NIH PubChem PUG APIs, and the Congress.gov API.

I'm actively working on adding more data and features to the map layer, site detail panes/popups, and site profiles. If there are public datasets or tables that you would like to see added, send me an email at feedback@keepcurious.co.

The short paragraph in each site popup, and the longer summary on each site profile page, were generated using two AI models. The AI was provided raw text pulled from every non-empty EPA profile page for every site on the NPL. Each prompt included multiple hard constraints and restrictions from using any outside content or context, including the data that powers the map and other sections. Its sole task was to compress the EPA profile text into something a non-specialist can read in two or three minutes.

To learn exactly how the summary generation works, read the full AI disclosure here, which details each step of the process, the exact prompts and constraints, and my plans to optimize this process.

KCC SuperScan is an independent project. It is not produced by, endorsed by, or affiliated with the US Environmental Protection Agency or any other government agency.

The information on this site is provided for general public awareness and educational purposes only. It is not legal, medical, real estate, or environmental-safety advice. It should not be used as the sole basis for any decision with health, property, or legal consequences. For matters that require accuracy, like assessing actual human exposure risk, filing complaints, pursuing remedies, or buying property, consult the relevant authorities directly. Contact information can be found on each site profile page.

Site summaries have not been reviewed by a toxicologist, an EPA official, or a licensed professional. The EPA's site profile is the authoritative source. Where KCC SuperScan and the EPA do not align, defer to the most up-to-date information on the EPA's website directly. If you spot an error, please report it by emailing feedback@keepcurious.co.

External links are provided as a convenience and do not imply endorsement of their content.

KCC SuperScan is a public interest tool built and maintained by Chase Patterson, an independent researcher, data analyst, and documentarian.

There are no ads. There are no paywalls. I don't collect user data.
KCC SuperScan is, and always will be, completely free to use. I will be adding additional data sources and features as time and resources allow.

If you have found this tool valuable and would like to help it grow, visit the Support page to learn more.

For questions or just to get in touch: questions@keepcurious.co.

For bug reports, data corrections, or feature requests: feedback@keepcurious.co.