King County Hazardous Sites

The maps shown above are focusing on the unequal distribution of hazardous pollution sites amoungst Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) communities and people living in poverty. This first map is showing the distribution of BIPOC communities across King County. It utilizes four different methods of representing the data to illustrate that the ways in which data is symbolized can have a strong impact on how it is perceived by someone else. The population group analysis was done by selecting different populations from the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS) census data. 

The second map looks specifically at superfund sites and toxic release inventory (TRI) sites and compares that with areas where large number of BIPOC and people in poverty live. It shows that there is a high number of people in these communities living with in a four kilometer radius of a hazardous site. This analysis was done by taking superfund and TRI data from Environmental Protection Agency and filtering it to locations that had data for the year 2016 and then combing that with the ACS census data from the previous map. 

The model shown beneath the maps illustrate the analysis that was done in order to come to the conclusion that BIPOC and people living in poverty are more likely to live close to a hazardous site.