Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
Speaker 1: from House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Josh Clark. Guess who's with me? And I'm Chuck Bryant.
Speaker 1: That's right and weird this stuff you should know? Team
Speaker 1: that's right, the that lumpy finger NAILI Harry tep stuff
Speaker 1: you should know Team We're a Tara Tomah. I know
Speaker 1: you hate that though, just just consist of the same
Speaker 1: things that I'm saying it for a one listener that
Speaker 1: who's from Racking Up right now? Right? That's that's who
Speaker 1: That's for? Who's who is you? When you listen to
Speaker 1: your own podcast next week? I know you you? Yes? Okay,
Speaker 1: can we get on with this. Let's do this. Chuck, Hey, Josh,
Speaker 1: what's a brown field? That's so funny? You should ask Chuck.
Speaker 1: I know what a brownfield is, and it's even the
Speaker 1: name of this podcast, so I will tell you as follows. Basically,
Speaker 1: a brown field is UM any abandoned industrial site, UM,
Speaker 1: A old dry cleaner's, an old gas station, any place
Speaker 1: where there's a potential for a local environmental contamination, but
Speaker 1: which necessarily proven to have contamination. Right, it can just
Speaker 1: be it can just be, uh, something that looks like it,
Speaker 1: or someone might suspect, um if there was a bunch
Speaker 1: of chemicals there at one point in time, um or
Speaker 1: over the years consistently, somebody could reasonably say, I'll bet
Speaker 1: that place is contaminated, which is not to be confused
Speaker 1: with a super fund. Really, you bust the super fund
Speaker 1: out this early. Let me redack that statement, now, go ahead,
Speaker 1: go ahead. Well, super Fun, Absolutely, it's contaminated. It is
Speaker 1: with serious, serious hazardous waste. Um. And actually I was
Speaker 1: looking around on the e p AS website because you
Speaker 1: know that's what I do. And um, there's several super
Speaker 1: Fun sites slated for cleanup in Georgia, but I came
Speaker 1: across one that I knew you'd be particularly interested in.
Speaker 1: Hit me your house, so I'm kidding. Um, there's you know,
Speaker 1: Robin's Air Force Base in Houston County. I think it's
Speaker 1: a little north of here. Um, I is Houston County
Speaker 1: north of here? Okay, Well, anyway, Robin's Air Force Base
Speaker 1: is up there, and um, they have an old sludge
Speaker 1: pond and in the sixties and seventies, they said, you
Speaker 1: know what, we've got these old cans of paint, throw
Speaker 1: them in the sludge pond. We have like all this trash,
Speaker 1: throw it in the sludge pod. So they kept throwing
Speaker 1: stuff in the sludge, old tires, and then finally, once
Speaker 1: the seventies rolled around and there was such thing as
Speaker 1: the E p A and Earth Day and all that,
Speaker 1: the Air Force and covered it up with five ft
Speaker 1: of loam. What's that It's like sandy silt, like real
Speaker 1: thick sand. So they made a beach. They just covered
Speaker 1: it over right, which actually again like yeah, it was
Speaker 1: a stupid thing to do, um, and now it's a
Speaker 1: super fun site to clean up all the loam in
Speaker 1: addition to everything else. Here's here's where it gets interesting.
Speaker 1: Why I think you'd be interested in it? And it's
Speaker 1: just a little sense just kind of crammed in there.
Speaker 1: They were like, yeah, there's like old chemical waste, there's
Speaker 1: old material waste, and also there's unexploded ordinance and agent orange.
Speaker 1: Really and there's agent orange and a sludge pond on
Speaker 1: Robin's Air Force basis. So this stuff was left over
Speaker 1: from Vietnam and they just dumped it there probably, yeah, yep.
Speaker 1: So yeah, so it's super fun sited a place where
Speaker 1: there's agent orange under five feet of loam, right, and
Speaker 1: it's seeping into the groundwater all that. Yeah, But like
Speaker 1: you said, these have been clearly identified. The government knows
Speaker 1: about them. They're doing their best to clean it up. Um. Actually,
Speaker 1: I don't know if that last part is true, but
Speaker 1: they know about them, and at the very least they're
Speaker 1: going to the trouble of identifying them. Right. But a
Speaker 1: brown feels different. Like you said, it's a it's potentially contaminated,
Speaker 1: it could be contaminated. It's still a brown field, but
Speaker 1: it's not so contaminated or the materials that are that
Speaker 1: have contaminated it are so dangerous that you can't use
Speaker 1: the site. Again. Well, now, in fact, quite the opposite,
Speaker 1: they're trying to encourage the use of these sites. Right.
Speaker 1: And actually, Chuck, what what makes brown feel so interesting
Speaker 1: to me? Is there not just like an environmental hazard,
Speaker 1: they're an economic hazard as well, because usually, like let's say, um,
Speaker 1: you know we've talked about urban exploration before, right, there's
Speaker 1: all these old like abandoned industrial sites or something like that. Um,
Speaker 1: and they're just sitting there there being left or rot
Speaker 1: their derelict because no one wants to do anything with them.
Speaker 1: And the reason why is because there's so much potential liability. Like,
Speaker 1: let's say you or I got a wild hair and
Speaker 1: we wanted to invest in a new mixed use development.
Speaker 1: Sounds good, So we buy some old industrial site kind
Speaker 1: of on the edge of town. Heck, in the middle
Speaker 1: of town, right Atlantic Steel here in Atlanta. Yeah, Atlantic
Speaker 1: Station was a brownfield redevelopment remediation site. Um. So, so
Speaker 1: we buy this thing. Everything's hunky dory, and um we're
Speaker 1: starting to get some business. We've got some ten it's
Speaker 1: in our buildings. There's people walking their dogs. I see
Speaker 1: some guy flying a kite. There's a cute little girl
Speaker 1: with bows in her hair. She looks like she's going
Speaker 1: to the gap for the first time ever and pretty
Speaker 1: excited about it. Right. So uh and then bam, out
Speaker 1: of nowhere, somebody finds out that the groundwater under our
Speaker 1: site is contaminated old petroleum investors pull out, buddy, you
Speaker 1: better hope we have investors soon. Where at this point, Yeah,
Speaker 1: if if it's all our money sunk into it, we're
Speaker 1: not only are we getting Um, you know sued, we're
Speaker 1: gonna lose all of our tenants were in big trouble, right,
Speaker 1: which is why people stay away from brownfield sites. But
Speaker 1: if we remediate brownfield sites, and we'll get into remediation
Speaker 1: in a second, if we if we remediate brownfield sites,
Speaker 1: not only do these old, you know, hulking, rotting derelic
Speaker 1: places get rebuilt, which is bad for urban explorers, but
Speaker 1: good for everybody else. It actually saves virgin tracts of land, woodland,
Speaker 1: other areas. It keeps green space out there. We don't
Speaker 1: have to develop green space exactly because we're reusing land
Speaker 1: rather than just abandoning, right. And that's one of the
Speaker 1: great things about brown field areas is that it's it's
Speaker 1: it's not, like you said, completely untouched. So what you've
Speaker 1: got probably in place of some infrastructure. You have waterlines,
Speaker 1: you have gas lines and stuff like that, any kind
Speaker 1: of line, any kind ofline, So, uh, that's awesome. It's
Speaker 1: not as expensive. No, it's not. In theory. You don't
Speaker 1: have to lay down that new infrastructure. You don't have
Speaker 1: to lay the pipe, so to speak. That's exactly right, Chuck.
Speaker 1: The infrastructure is already their pipes and all, you know,
Speaker 1: how many brown fields are in the United States estimated?
Speaker 1: I want to hear it, four hundred and fifty thousand.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of brown field site, it is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a lot of real estate it is. And um,
Speaker 1: what you were saying before that the fact that there's
Speaker 1: infrastructure there, there's buildings there. This makes brown field site
Speaker 1: it's real property, right And well that yeah, it means
Speaker 1: you get whatever is on the property. The buildings are yours,
Speaker 1: the mineral rights yours, it's all there for the taking. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: but if there's so much liability attached, right, how how
Speaker 1: do you overcome this kind of thing? Well, what do
Speaker 1: you mean, like, how do you clean it up? Well? No,
Speaker 1: I mean like, how do you attract people to brown
Speaker 1: field sites rather than you know, have them go cut
Speaker 1: down a bunch of trees and just build on land
Speaker 1: that they don't have to worry about is contaminated. Well,
Speaker 1: one way is with incentives, government incentives. And there's a
Speaker 1: ton of them, aren't they huns dude, Yeah, it's happening
Speaker 1: all over the place. Let's hear about them. Well. I
Speaker 1: went to the news section of Google to find out
Speaker 1: like the latest breaking news and they were literally a
Speaker 1: dozen stories on brownfield remediation, like this week, it's definitely
Speaker 1: picking up all over the place. And this is I
Speaker 1: should say. Brown field remediation has been like a viable alternative,
Speaker 1: or at least a government backed alternative, since I think
Speaker 1: the early to mid nineties. That's the impression I have you. Yes, Uh,
Speaker 1: Texas is getting two point two million dollars worth of
Speaker 1: funds nice to UH to remediate some of these brownfield
Speaker 1: from the Feds. Baal the more is has potentially more
Speaker 1: than one thousand contaminated properties. I can believe that. I
Speaker 1: went to Baltimore recently and I Hey, Baltimore, shouts out,
Speaker 1: but I can believe it. Okay, we love you, but boy,
Speaker 1: it's just like one big brownfield. And actually they have
Speaker 1: this place remember Buckhead, And sort of I wasn't one
Speaker 1: big Buckhead guy, but yeah, they have a place there
Speaker 1: that is Buckhead. It's like a time machine. It's called
Speaker 1: the power Station Live and it looks like a remediated
Speaker 1: brownfield site. And it's crazy. It's like everybody just finished
Speaker 1: watching the most recent episode of France. It's a Thursday
Speaker 1: night and now they're going out. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, So,
Speaker 1: getting back to the different projects, Maine is getting about
Speaker 1: six point one million bucks. I don't know much about
Speaker 1: mains brownfield situation. Well it's probably nicer looking, I would guess,
Speaker 1: but six point one million that's a lot of money
Speaker 1: considering Baltimore is only getting about four hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: You know, that's the that's the problem with the allow
Speaker 1: one a half trillion dollars. Six million dollars seems like
Speaker 1: peanuts these days, it does, you know. Yeah, uh so Georgia,
Speaker 1: Actually it's happening right here to Governor Perdue has signed
Speaker 1: a bill which UM is going to help clean up
Speaker 1: six hundred polluted sits here in our own states. That's awesome. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I got a friend that works in hazardous waste clean
Speaker 1: up really. Yeah. He worked at Atlantic Station and when
Speaker 1: there's like a train derailment and spilled hazardous chemicals, he's
Speaker 1: he's manages the site. A train derail to my neighborhood
Speaker 1: once when I was younger, but it just spilled grain.
Speaker 1: Well he practiced, well, I don't know, they usually kind
Speaker 1: of clean up any kind of derailment. Okay, Yeah, cool
Speaker 1: stuff though, Yeah, that is very cool. So, yeah, like
Speaker 1: you were saying, there's a bunch of incentive programs. You're
Speaker 1: just talking about the FEDS doling out money. Big time.
Speaker 1: States stole out money too. And one of the ways
Speaker 1: that they do it that's almost specifically for remediation projects
Speaker 1: and and reuse projects is a text increment financing. Have
Speaker 1: you heard about this? Yeah, go ahead, Okay. So basically
Speaker 1: what the government does is, let's say it's a local
Speaker 1: or state government. Um, they say, you know what, if
Speaker 1: you remediate the site and you turn it into a
Speaker 1: big mixed use development, all the area around it, if
Speaker 1: it's successful, is going to start attracting businesses. The real
Speaker 1: estate values around this area are going to go up.
Speaker 1: If the real estate values go up and all these
Speaker 1: businesses and condos and all that stuff goes out to um,
Speaker 1: we're going to start as a government, we're gonna start
Speaker 1: making more money off of it's gonna increase our tax base.
Speaker 1: So we're going to help fund your brown field remediation
Speaker 1: and reuse project by giving you money based on what
Speaker 1: we think we can make in the future. Because you're
Speaker 1: raising the tax value of the real estate in the area.
Speaker 1: It's a very cool idea. Well, and also they also
Speaker 1: give tax breaks UH to people that are doing this
Speaker 1: right sure for the cost of the cleanup, and they're
Speaker 1: they're practically giving I think we should look into getting
Speaker 1: a brown field together. Seriously, we can build that gap.
Speaker 1: We can if we you know, we need some dough
Speaker 1: So yeah, not a bad idea. So Chuck, how do
Speaker 1: you remediate a brownfield? Well, the first thing you gotta do,
Speaker 1: my friend, is go out to the site, conduct an
Speaker 1: assessment from from some soil samples, look at what you're
Speaker 1: you know, get those tested, see what you're looking at,
Speaker 1: seeing just how contaminated it is, and um confirm what's
Speaker 1: there what's not there. And the e p A UH
Speaker 1: says that nearly one third of these sites are contamination free.
Speaker 1: So that's awesome. If you get lucky and picked the
Speaker 1: right site, your your gold and UM. There is a
Speaker 1: huge process involved, and there's actually a huge I guess
Speaker 1: sub construction industry probably related very closely to the demolition
Speaker 1: industry UM that is engaged in remediating sites. And it
Speaker 1: is huge, massive work depending on how, if if the
Speaker 1: area is contaminated and what the pollutant is. Right, because
Speaker 1: do you remember when we did our webcast and were
Speaker 1: I think it was last week or whatever we were
Speaker 1: talking about now is this week? Everything's blending together these days. Um,
Speaker 1: we were talking about, um, the lost nuclear bombs, Yes,
Speaker 1: missing bomb, and we're saying in Florence, South Carolina. There's
Speaker 1: a sizeable chunk of Florence, South Carolina that's now in Savannah.
Speaker 1: What they did was remediate that site, right because the
Speaker 1: bomb exploded, the T and T exploded, not the actual
Speaker 1: nuclear part of it, thank goodness, but it was still
Speaker 1: spewed contaminated metal and stuff all over the place, so
Speaker 1: they scooped it up and shipped it to Savannah. That's
Speaker 1: exactly right. Um. So removing soil, contaminated soil, just actually
Speaker 1: physically getting it out of there and storing it in
Speaker 1: a safe place. That's remediation. UM. A lot of times
Speaker 1: the water is tainted, so you have to remediate that.
Speaker 1: And actually there's some pretty cool bacteria out there that
Speaker 1: actually eat petroleum and converted into like harmless compounds. That's awesome. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: So there's all sorts of water treatment UM equipment that
Speaker 1: you run it through and like this bacteria just eats
Speaker 1: the stuff and spits green water out the other end,
Speaker 1: you can plant vegetation. Certain vegetation will suck out the
Speaker 1: chemicals from the ground. Trees actually, especially a lot of
Speaker 1: invasive species of trees planted in a in a brown
Speaker 1: field area will just suck it up and then you
Speaker 1: just remove the trees. Right, And they did say they
Speaker 1: mentioned that covering it up can work to which was
Speaker 1: what you're talking about the loan, but clearly not. You
Speaker 1: can't cover up everything, you know, right, it depends on
Speaker 1: what it is. And also, UM, the the the E
Speaker 1: p A is starting to really kind of encourage green
Speaker 1: brownfield remediation. Not your mind, that's actually yeah, that's totally different.
Speaker 1: Green brown field remediation is basically remediation practices that we're
Speaker 1: already using. But say throwing um some windmills on the
Speaker 1: site to power the equipment you're using, you know, like
Speaker 1: the the equipment that that UM that remediates the water
Speaker 1: or decontaminates the water uses up a lot of energy.
Speaker 1: Why not power with windmill or solar or something like that. UM,
Speaker 1: trying to use alternative fuels on the heavy machinery that
Speaker 1: you're removing the top soil with stuff like that. So
Speaker 1: there's a there's a lot going on, and I gotta
Speaker 1: tell you where it was six billion people. Agriculture has
Speaker 1: a carrying capacity of ten billion people. We're coming up
Speaker 1: on that. I think some some predictions. Land is important,
Speaker 1: it's very important. We we need to start reusing it
Speaker 1: rather than just you know, we are just such a
Speaker 1: wasteful consumer, disposable society species even yeah, like, oh, that's
Speaker 1: an old gas station, Let's build a new one across street.
Speaker 1: Just let that one sit there. Yeah, And actually I
Speaker 1: used to work in a town in a county down
Speaker 1: south of here, and the mayor's brother owned a gas
Speaker 1: station and he sold it to the city. Well it
Speaker 1: turned out that the city, uh found out that there
Speaker 1: was a h an underground storage tank for the gas
Speaker 1: that had leaked and the the soil was contaminated, and
Speaker 1: that was that. Nothing ever came of it. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: quite a few. I've seen some abandoned gas stations around
Speaker 1: the Decatur. They've been there for years, like Kadzus swamped
Speaker 1: and yeah, because no what he can do anything. Well,
Speaker 1: hopefully you know this this is changing, or I shouldn't
Speaker 1: say no one can do anything with it. That kind
Speaker 1: of contradicts our entire podcast. Right, let me say people
Speaker 1: are afraid that they're not gonna be able to do
Speaker 1: anything with that, right, But there's a lot of incentives,
Speaker 1: a lot of tax breaks, and a lot of money
Speaker 1: being told out. So if you're a developer, man, I say,
Speaker 1: get on it. Yeah, I think we should get on
Speaker 1: it too, right after Chuck, since we have nothing to
Speaker 1: plug listener mail? Right, are we? There? Is that your setup?
Speaker 1: That was it? Beautiful listener mail time? Josh Today, I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna call this, uh, scary dreams of an impressionable
Speaker 1: fifteen year old girl. Awesome fan man. So Shelby, who
Speaker 1: says she's an impressionable fifteen year old girl wrote us.
Speaker 1: She says, guys, you have scared me out of my mind.
Speaker 1: I had an extremely vivid nightmare last night, and I
Speaker 1: had way too much in common with your podcast. I
Speaker 1: was a victim of a second holocaust in her dream,
Speaker 1: just her. I think you have to have more than
Speaker 1: one person for a holocaust. We'll give her break. She's fifteen.
Speaker 1: The Disney Corporation was behind it, but I don't know
Speaker 1: what their goal was and killing millions of people anyway.
Speaker 1: They started mass producing propaganda films and we're aiming to
Speaker 1: rule the world and established Disneyism as a mandatory global religion.
Speaker 1: So I might say that's happening for real. I was
Speaker 1: in a very large movie theater with one such film
Speaker 1: being played, and at the end, a Disney rep announced
Speaker 1: that the entire audience was going to die. The rest
Speaker 1: of my dream consisted of me dodging bullets being fired
Speaker 1: at me by various mascots inside of and doing forced
Speaker 1: labor making parts for the Disneyland trains, which brought new
Speaker 1: prisoners from the parking lot, and working on the Disneyland Railroad.
Speaker 1: Savage beatings abounded. Awesome, This is so cool. All prisoners
Speaker 1: had to be stamped on the forehead with one of
Speaker 1: those re entry stamps, like they that smell like lemons,
Speaker 1: you know, like the amusement park. My number was D
Speaker 1: three one seven four nine. I can't believe she remembers
Speaker 1: on this well, the gates of the entrance of the
Speaker 1: park read work makes you the Happiest person on Earth,
Speaker 1: and the statue of Alt Disney standing next to Mickey
Speaker 1: Man else was replaced with one of Mickey Mouse and Hitler.
Speaker 1: I can't believe this girl's fifteen, poor thing at the
Speaker 1: end the park camp was liberated, but I don't know
Speaker 1: by who or who. But that's not the point. The
Speaker 1: point is that I spontaneously had this nightmare with all
Speaker 1: of these details similar to your podcast before even in
Speaker 1: the title of it. That really creeps me out. I'll
Speaker 1: keep listening anyway. So what was your name again? Shelby? Shelby,
Speaker 1: you have one of the more fertile imaginations I've ever encountered.
Speaker 1: Camp I left beautiful. I'm sorry you were terrified, but
Speaker 1: you're gonna go places right now. At the Disney Corporation,
Speaker 1: here's just they're thinking, we need to find the Shelbys here.
Speaker 1: To us, it's like Italy here it is. So if
Speaker 1: you want to reveal your you know, innermost thoughts and fears,
Speaker 1: or you wanna tell us what you think about the
Speaker 1: Disney Company, or just say hi, you can send us
Speaker 1: an email to Stuff podcast and how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works,
Speaker 1: check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot
Speaker 1: Com home page. Brought to you by the Reinvented two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve Camri. It's ready, are you