The Last Resident

In the remote Big Bend country of southwest Texas, where summer temperatures push past 110 degrees and the nearest city is hours away across empty desert, a mining operation once pulled quicksilver — liquid mercury — from the earth in quantities that supplied a third of the entire United States.

Thousands of workers, many of them Mexican laborers paid almost nothing, breathed mercury v***r in the poorly ventilated mines and processing facilities. The company store kept them in debt. The desert kept them isolated. Many who worked the Chisos Mining Company's operations never recovered their health.

When mercury prices collapsed after World War II, the mines closed almost overnight. Workers scattered. Adobe walls began their slow return to the desert floor.

Today Terlingua is something rare — a ghost town with a pulse. A handful of artists, desert dwellers, and free spirits have built a small eccentric community among the ruins. They hold a chili cookoff every November that draws thousands.

Terlingua, Texas. Poisoned by its own product. Too stubborn to fully die.


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They built a school on top of it. Then a neighborhood. Then they sold the houses to young families who planted gardens and let their children play in the yards.

Nobody told them what was underneath.

For decades, Ho**er Chemical had used the Love Canal site in Niagara Falls, New York as a dumping ground for over 21,000 tons of toxic chemical waste. When the company sold the land to the city for one dollar, they buried a single disclaimer in the deed. The city built a school anyway. A developer built homes anyway. Families moved in and started their lives.

By the late 1970s, the chemicals were surfacing. In basements. In backyards. In the bodies of children who played outside. Birth defects. Miscarriages. Cancer clusters that couldn't be explained any other way.

Lois Gibbs — a local mother with no political experience — fought the government until they listened. President Carter declared a federal emergency. Over 800 families were evacuated. The neighborhood was condemned.

Love Canal, New York. A community built on poison. A cover-up that cost families everything. The disaster that created the Superfund program.


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