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Join Wundry Plus in the Wundery app or on Apple Podcasts. It's a Saturday afternoon in 1960 in a working class neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York.

Eileen Voorhees trumps down the stairs to the basement of her small house.

She carries a bag of clothes under her left arm and runs her right hand along the banister.

The wood is solid and smooth, polished even though it's the stairs to the basement.

It's a small thing, but it's details like this that makes Eileen proud of her home.

Eileen and her husband Edwin built this house themselves, and they and their young children just moved in less than two years ago.

They were excited to find a plot of land they could afford on her husband's salary.

And the area is quickly growing, filling with other families looking for a comfortable safe place to raise their children.

But as Eileen descends the stairs, she's hit with a sharp plasticy smell that feels like it's burning her nose hairs.

She sighs frustrated because she knows the odor well.

The neighborhood was built next to an old landfill and the scent of chemicals sometimes fills the air. But it's one thing to

smell the chemicals outside. It's another to discover them inside your own home.

Lately that's been happening more and more often.

Eileen follows her nose to the bottom of the stairs and across the basement to the source of the

smell.

On the far wall she sees a gooey black tar-like substance seeping through the exposed cinder blocks of the wall.

Elaine Plunk's bag of clothes on the floor and hollers to her husband.

Edwin, come you come down here?

Yeah, what's wrong?

It's back.

Okay, well, don't panic, we'll fix it.

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