Friendswood is a 2014 novel by René Steinke. It is about an incident of dumping toxic waste in Friendswood, Texas. [1] Riverhead Books is the publisher. [2] The waste site featured in the book never was located in Friendswood and has never been under the jurisdiction of Friendswood.
Friendswood is a city in the U.S. state of Texas. It is part of the Houston–The Woodlands–Sugar Land metropolitan area. The city lies in Galveston and Harris counties. As of the 2010 census, the population of Friendswood was 35,805.
Riverhead Books is a division of Penguin Group (USA) founded in 1993 by Susan Petersen Kennedy.
The novel's plot involves a superfund site that is based on the real Brio Superfund site in the South Belt area, [3] located in an unincorporated area in Harris County. [4] The author, who lived in Brooklyn in 2014, originated from and was raised in Friendswood. The author stated that she "wanted to write about the particular textures of Friendswood itself—the Quaker church in the center of town, the humidity and heat, the local Mexican restaurant, the country music I heard so often in the background." [3] She added that "The Friendswood in the novel is fictional. I was more interested in creating the essence of the place than its actual, factual geography." [3]
Superfund is a United States federal government program designed to fund the cleanup of sites contaminated with hazardous substances and pollutants. Sites managed under this program are referred to as "Superfund" sites. It was established as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA). It authorizes federal natural resource agencies, primarily the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), states and Native American tribes to recover natural resource damages caused by hazardous substances, though most states have and most often use their own versions of CERCLA. CERCLA created the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). The EPA may identify parties responsible for hazardous substances releases to the environment (polluters) and either compel them to clean up the sites, or it may undertake the cleanup on its own using the Superfund and costs recovered from polluters by referring to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Brio Superfund site is a former industrial location in Harris County, Texas at the intersection of Beamer Road and Dixie Farm Road, about 16 miles (26 km) southeast of downtown Houston, and adjacent to the Dixie Oil Processors Superfund site. It is a federal Superfund site, although it was deleted from the National Priorities List in December 2006. A neighboring residential subdivision called South Bend, now abandoned, was located along and north of the northern boundary of Brio North. The former South Bend neighborhood consisted of about 670 homes, an elementary school, and a Little League baseball field. Documents pertaining to the Brio Superfund site are located at the San Jacinto College South Campus Library, which houses Brio Site Repository Documents, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrative Records, and documents concerning the adjoining Dixie Oil Processors site.
In law, an unincorporated area is a region of land that is not governed by a local municipal corporation; similarly an unincorporated community is a settlement that is not governed by its own local municipal corporation, but rather is administered as part of larger administrative divisions, such as a township, parish, borough, county, city, canton, state, province or country. Occasionally, municipalities dissolve or disincorporate, which may happen if they become fiscally insolvent, and services become the responsibility of a higher administration. Widespread unincorporated communities and areas are a distinguishing feature of the United States and Canada. In most other countries of the world, there are either no unincorporated areas at all, or these are very rare; typically remote, outlying, sparsely populated or uninhabited areas.
In 2014 Elizabeth Fowler, Susan Duff, and Dannielle Thomas obtained the rights to make a film version of Friendswood. [2]
