What's Hidden on America's Most Radioactive Beach?

What the film says

1. Radium-226 has a half-life of about 1,600 years.

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2. Dead Horse Bay is part of Gateway National Recreation Area's Jamaica Bay Unit in Brooklyn; the shoreline is known as Glass Bottle Beach.

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3. The island had a public school, a church and saloons.

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4. The fill was described as compacted garbage under sand 1 to 2 feet thick.

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5. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers found PAHs, pesticides, PCBs and metals in site soils in 2002.

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6. A 2019 NPS gamma walkover survey found 31 locations above ambient levels on the 178-acre site.

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7. Two radium-226 deck markers had leaked, contaminating soil to about 2 feet.

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8. NPS closed the southern ~84 acres, including the beach, in August 2020; it said the radiation was not a significant health risk but the full extent of chemical contamination is unknown.

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9. Follow-up surveys in 2021 and 2023 found more elevated readings, and another 40 acres were closed.

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10. Miriam Sicherman, a Brooklyn elementary school teacher, wrote the history of Barren Island.

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11. At its height, Barren Island received 3,000 tons of garbage a day, making it the largest waste-reduction site in the world, and its stench could be detected four miles away.

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12. From the late 1850s, rendering plants on Barren Island turned the city's dead horses into glue, fertilizer and other products, processing as many as 20,000 horses a year along with other dead animals.

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13. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the city dumped garbage into the bay and covered it with soil to make new land, a project Robert Moses oversaw. The fill was poorly capped, and old refuse now spills out onto the shore.

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