Environmental Justice in the Town of Somerville, Massachusetts

        I.            The goal of this project is to determine the impact of toxic sites on the town of Somerville, Massachusetts. By setting up 2000 meter buffer zones around known toxic sites we can measure the percentage of the town that may be affected by them. Measuring the boundaries and area of environmental justice zones in the town allows us to see how bad Somerville’s toxicity may be.           Table 1: 

 Table 2:                                                                                                                                                     

           After analyzing the data and creating a map to visualize it the results of this study are able to be interpreted. The total area of Somerville is about 10.718 square kilometers. Just about fifty-five percent of that land in Somerville is made up of Environmental Justice populations. When toxic sites were added into the map with 2000 meter buffers, it covered the entirety of Somerville. In other words, the toxic buffers covered one-hundred percent of the town’s land area.                                         Figure 1:    

 So            Somerville has a very high rate of toxicity in both environmental justice and non-environmental justice areas. We can see this to be true in figure one and both of the tables. A layer showing types of industry and businesses in the area could lead to insight on why there are so many toxic points on the map. Factors that might influence toxicity in Somerville could be wind direction that could help toxic material travel, precipitation levels which might spread toxic materials as well as a look at population details to see if it fits the environmental justice population’s criteria.