Living on the Edge

Read the full story at Indyweek.com.

Ernest Alston grew up on East Alston Road, where as a boy he picked cotton and played among the brambles and the blackberries with his cousins, brothers and sisters.

He is among four generations of Alstons to have inherited this land from Allen Alston, a freed slave who, after emancipation, bought the acreage from his owner, Gid Alston. More than 140 years later, this Alston Road community is home to 47 families—45 of them African-American—and many of them were here long before 1973, when Chatham County dug an 80-acre dump in the neighborhood.

That dump, closed since 1993, has leaked cancer-causing contaminants into many residents' drinking water wells and has intermittently exceeded limits for explosive methane gas. As for Chatham County, officials not only ignored the drinking water issues for six years, they recently proposed East Alston Road for yet another landfill.