I Filed a CERCLA Petition to Put the South Bay (Boston, MA) on the National Priorities List

Read the full petition here: Petition to put South Bay on the NPL (Feb. 13 2026).

For those of you following my work, this is going to be a surprise. I've been dealing with a second environmental disaster — this one in Boston — while simultaneously litigating against Apple and navigating bankruptcy. I didn't talk about it publicly because I needed to be sure of what I was looking at before I said it out loud, but I'm sure now & it's a real mess.

Today I filed a Petition for Preliminary Assessment under CERCLA § 105(d) and a Sixty-Day Notice for a Citizen Suit under the Clean Water Act and CERCLA, nominating the South Bay in Boston for the National Priorities List. There have never been any NPL sites in the City of Boston. The petition argues there should have been one a long time ago.

Most people who visit Boston don't realize that at least a third of the city shouldn't exist. The Shawmut Peninsula (the original landmass) was a tiny, hilly island barely connected to the mainland by a narrow tidal isthmus called "the Neck." Everything around it was ocean, tidal flats, salt marshes, and bays. The South Bay was one of the largest of these. It was a working harbor, a port of international importance, and the economic heart of early colonial Boston. Tidal streams, including the Roxbury Creek and Dorchester Brook, fed into it. The ocean ebbed and flowed, with high tides twice a day.

Over approximately two hundred years, Boston filled this bay. They filled it with garbage, sewage, construction debris, coal ash, rubble from the Great Fire of 1872, cinders, street sweepings, and dredged harbor mud. The wharves were built on timber cribbing and wood pile foundations; the spaces between were stuffed with whatever was available. Sugar refineries, iron foundries, and slave-trade shipping operations filled the shoreline for their own purposes. The South Boston Iron Works, the largest foundry in the country by mid-century, repeatedly filled its land from the 1830s through 1860. The Boston Wharf Company (whose directors were also shareholders in the Bay State Sugar Refinery and notorious slave owners) filled the areas around Fort Point Channel. The Gillette razor company moved in around 1905 and was still filling (with straight-up bricks) into the 1960s. The City and Commonwealth were involved in or approved nearly all of it.

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