Notify me about new: Guides Cheats Reviews Questions Add this game to my: Favorites Now Playing Wish List Play Queue Home Board More Home Summary Release Data Media Images Board.They are the countys landfills, built to contain only municipal household waste.It was like a movie: the high school students who uncovered a toxic waste scandal.Students taking Fred Isseks Electronic English course uncovered environmental crimes.
The goal was to train the schools teenage students in film-making and media production, using local subjects as a starting point perhaps a documentary about the citys sports teams or an amateur talkshow. Instead, under the tutelage of Middletown highs popular English teacher, Fred Isseks, a rowdy and diverse group of teenagers organised themselves into an investigative journalism unit. Kids not even enrolled in the course joined Isseks students in shooting short films. The teenagers alternated between grungy early-90s flannel and choker necklaces and awkward attempts at business attire as they honed their reporting skills. They invited local representatives into the schools new media studio for a political debate, and covered topics such as the citys curfew for teens. One former student joked to me that the class became a surreal mix of rap videos and corrupt politicians. Industrial solvents, liquid refrigerants, crushed battery casings, petroleum additives, printing inks and untreated medical waste, including radioactive isotopes: it all flooded the landfills around Middletown, constructed without ground liners, atop freshwater aquifers that fed the regions drinking wells. As a retired compactor operator explains to Isseks students in the film, sometimes there was so much bloody hospital waste on the ground, it looked as if he had run someone over. A Town Uncovered Driver For AAnother interviewee, a former driver for a mafia-owned waste-hauling firm, described tipping fuming truckloads of paint sludge from a nearby automobile factory straight into the dump. Middletown residents were told it was all just certified municipal waste. There were warnings of arrest from the county sheriff; near-total disinterest from the citys local newspaper; public frustration from regional politicians; and at least one death threat. He lives in town with his wife and four children; their eldest daughter graduated from the school in 2019. In the beginning, I just thought it was too fantastical to be true, Birmingham says. To me, it was like: theres no way theres a toxic waste dump basically in my backyard. Theres no way all these politicians I see on TV are actually covering something up. People would tell me, You know, this isnt what you think it is. But, as it turned out, it was exactly what we thought it was. Nevertheless, the question seems to haunt both Isseks and Birmingham: what did the documentary achieve Is Middletown, as a community, safer today because of the students work. The financial magazine Kiplinger routinely rates it as an idyllic place to raise a family, and an equally inviting place to retire. These unearthly blisters, together occupying an area more than three times the size of Disneyland, California, loom over the surrounding fields and forests.
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