A 50-foot (15-meter) high pile of slag was left over from 74 years of making nails, wire and fencing from scrap metal.

There were 2,450 drums filled with solvent, oil and rubbish dumped at the bottom of a quarry pond and scattered across the 183-acre (74-hectare) property.

The creeks that ran through town were so badly contaminated that warnings were posted to stop people from eating even a single fish.

Thanks to a six-million-dollar infusion of economic stimulus funds, efforts to restore the sprawling site are now progressing two years ahead of schedule. But it will still be several years before the land abdicated in 1986 is deemed safe for use.

"I'm glad they didn't just abandon us," said mayor Greg Goodnight, 44, who hopes to turn parts of the site into an urban forest.

"Just a few short months ago, we had a toxic lagoon with about 80,000 tons (72,575 tonnes) of contaminated steel waste," he said, as bulldozers worked to bury the drained lagoon with slag pulled from the scrap pile that will eventually be capped with clean soil.

"Even though there's still a lot more work to be done, it's going to mean that at least in my grandchildren's lifetime the land will be put back to productive use."

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates there are more than 450,000 sites across the United States where hazardous substances, pollutants or contaminants are hampering redevelopment.

Many remain abandoned or under-used because the cleanup costs are higher than the property's value, while the polluters have gone out of business and can't be forced to pay for it.

Continental is among the 1,610 sites in such dreadful condition that they made the Superfund National Priorities List, which was established in 1980.

Since then, some 1,080 have been essentially restored at costs ranging from a couple million to a couple billion dollars.

The EPA was able to get responsible parties to pay for cleaning up about 70 percent of those sites. A tax on polluting industries raised billions to pay for "orphaned" sites but expired in 1995 and the Superfund ran dry in 2004.

President Barack Obama's administration is hoping to reinstate the polluter tax so the EPA no longer has to pay for cleanups through its general funds. It has also devoted nearly a billion dollars in stimulus funds.

But it will still be years -- likely even decades -- until the industrial mess can be removed.

--- 'The nastiest of the nastiest material' ----

------------------------------------------------

Pouring industrial by-products directly into the air, water and ground was standard practice until the EPA began regulating pollution with the Clean Air Act of 1970.

It took years to figure out how to store and treat hazardous waste safely, while the cleanups are incredibly complicated and laborious projects.

First comes the investigation and risk assessment to sort out exactly what contaminants are at the site and what threat they pose to human health.

The tests are expensive and have to be taken in different seasons to see how ground water is affected.

They often turn up hidden hazards that need to be dealt with immediately -- like when the EPA had to send in divers to pull out the 1,000 drums dumped at the bottom of a quarry on the Continental site.

Designing an appropriate remedy can also take several years, while the actual cleanup work can last for decades.

At Continental, the 78-million-dollar project started in 1989 when state officials began draining acid from a massive lagoon used to remove rust from steel.

A year later, the EPA built a berm to stop contaminated water from leaching out of the quarry and began removing drums scattered around the site.

The full plan was not presented for public comment until 1998 and a year later, work began on decontaminating and demolishing the site's 127 buildings.

Workers then had to dredge the creek bed and build a containment system to process its 22,000 cubic yards (16,820 cubic meters) of contaminated sediment.

"All the nastiest of the nastiest material we had were shipped off site," said Sharon Jaffess, the EPA's regional chief of remedial work.

Some contaminants can be burned. Others can be broken down by sunlight or bugs or buried under a cap of clean soil. Others still must be separated from salvageable soil and materials sent to an approved hazardous waste site.

"At some point there's nothing you can do," Jaffess told AFP.

Even when all the work is complete, it doesn't actually end.

Sites need to be revisited periodically to make sure the contaminants haven't escaped. And the number of new sites and spills is growing amid the latest economic downturn.

"We have made progress, but these are multi-generational efforts," said Ed Hopkins, director of the Sierra Club's environmental quality program.

"I think that climate change is likely to similarly be a very long fight."

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