Life Expectancy and Proximity to Brownfield or Superfund Sites in Maryland
Question: Does proximity to Brownfield or Superfund sites in Maryland have effect on the life expectancy of the local population?
This is an interesting question because Maryland is a highly storied and urbanized state where many factors such as industrial, commercial, military, and governmental influences have created numerous Superfund and Brownfield sites. Superfund and Brownfield sites are locations where some kind of hazardous waste has either been left or stored. In contrast to a Brownfield, a Superfund site is where a much more dangerous substance is stored that is managed by the EPA.
Someone that would benefit from the answer to this question could be anyone planning on living, working, or doing recreational activities in certain locations around Maryland. It could influence many decisions such as where to build or buy a home, where to raise kids or retire, or even where its a good idea to go swimming.
The data that would answer this question would be a combination of fields that include life expectancy by geographic region, the site type (Superfund or Brownfield), the contaminate involved, site location, the cleanup status, and population data from near a site. There are a variety of conclusions that could be drawn upon analysis of this data. Primarily, whether life expectancy is impacted by living nearby to hazardous waste locations.
After doing some research I found precise current Brownfield and Superfund geolocation data. I also found life expectancy data from 2010 to 2015 that is divided into sub-county census tracts with an average of 4000 people in each one. A subset of this data I have now is the life expectancy of people in the over 1400 different census tracts in Maryland.
The exploratory data analysis I have done so far has primary been from browsing the interactive maps I have linked and screenshotted below. It is hard to discern any correlation from these alone as life expectancy is a complex variable effected by many factors. I plan to have an overlayed version of the two maps in the future to be able to analyze the data easier. So far in my Github I have a python program to generate an empty map.
In the data cleaning process, so far I have used python to extract Maryland life expectancy data and the associated census tract number from a larger dataset from the CDC. I plan to work more in the future with Superfund and Brownfield site data so I can associate their geolocations with the census tract locations from the life expectancy data.
I would not be surprised to see a correlation between site locations and life expectancy, the trick will be attempting to draw conclusions from it while accounting for the many factors that determine the life expectancy of a population in a certain location. However, I believe the the census tracts are regional enough to draw comparisons between them and potential nearby hazardous sites.
