Bumpas Cove once listed on EPA's "100 Most Dangerous Landfills"

Although FLIGHTSUIT is a science-fiction novel, it’s set in a combination of actual places with their own interesting histories. The abandoned iron-mining village is based on The Lost Cove between Erwin, Tennessee and Poplar, North Carolina.

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In the story, I set the Lost Cove’s abandoned village down inside the mountains of another real place, Bumpas Cove, Tennessee.

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Bumpas Cove is a beautiful river valley today, but in the 1970’s a Pennsylvania company hauled truckloads of toxic chemicals there, literally opening up the valves and dumping them on the ground, according to the article below. By 1980, the site was listed as one of the EPA’s “100 Most Dangerous Landfills”, which is hard to believe when you see it today.

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Newspaper article from August 31, 1980