Polar Bear Water Distillers

This was the only image that TIME Magazine used twice.

If the subject of this week's cover story in the Environment section, the dangers of toxic wastes, seems familiar, it is not because your imagination is playing tricks. Five years ago, TIME ran a lengthy report on the poisoning of America and the pressing need for greater awareness of environmental hazards.

Indeed, the decision to reexamine the subject was prompted by a heightened sense of urgency about the problem. Says Senior Writer Ed Magnulson, who wrote both stories: "Five years ago, our story raised national consciousness, and soon afterward Congress passed the Superfund to clean up toxic-waste sites."

Last week the Superfund law expired after much of the federal money earmarked for cleanup efforts had been mismanaged and squandered. The failure has served only to reveal the magnitude of the task that still lies ahead. All the while, fears about toxic wastes have continued to grow, and with good reason: more and more communities across the U.S. have discovered they are living atop contaminated ground. In spite of the mounting dangers, though, renewal of toxic waste funding remains hopelessly snarled in Washington.

The staffers who visited toxic sites were struck by the eerie nature of the newly created wastelands. Associate Editor Kurt Andersen was most impressed, and depressed, by Times Beach, Mo., which was evacuated in 1982-83 after being contaminated by dioxin, Says Andersen: "It looks as if a neutron bomb hit. Houses are standing, windows are unbroken, toys are scattered, but nobody walks the streets."

Senior Correspondent Peter Stoler and Chicago Correspondent J. Madeleine Nash experienced a strong sense of deja vu as they updated their 1980 reporting. Stoler was reminded of John Brunner's 1972 science-fiction novel, The Sheep Look Up, which described a world that was poisoning its air. "I thought it farfetched," recalls Stoler. "Now I wonder if Brunner shouldn't have been a bit more hysterical." Nash who traveled from the Stringfellow Acid Pits in California to Burnt Fly Bog in New Jersey, was particularly disheartened by the Lone Pine landfill in New Jersey. "I had to wear a pair of protective boots," she says. "Around me were rivulets of toxic ooze. There was an acrid scent of solvent in the air." Washingside of the story, concludes, "It is a complicated technical problem, as well as one fraught with emotion, just the kind of situation that guarantees anger and frustration." October, 14. 1985, TIME.