It was like standing in front of a concentration camp or perhaps Chernobyl. Eerily silent. Fencing all around, barbed wire at the top. No people. Just two geese waddling around the deserted park surrounding the West Calumet Housing Development in East Chicago. No cars on the streets. Houses empty. Like seeing the results of a neutron bomb that just kills people and leaves the buildings intact.
In another day, even that sight would be closed off by the new green shade fence that was being laid across the chain link fence, hiding the decontamination work going on inside.
As you drive into the development, you pass the Carrie Gosch Elementary school that has also been closed, the children sent off two weeks before their fall semester began. 
The school is empty and has been for the past year and a half.
It stands there, devoid of students, teachers. A flag still flying over the building. The grass trimmed. A monument to the destruction of the environment. A structure that never should have been built in the first place, over land where a lead factory once spewed forth toxic materials.
Ironically, just before you reach the school, a water tower rises above the area, proclaiming “East Chicago, For Our Children.” 
“Where did they go, why did they go away…?” Anthropologist Loren Eiseley asks in his poem mourning the loss of the dinosaur.
But we know why those who lived in these homes “went away.” They left because the local government and the EPA considered their land too toxic to live on. Now the local government is demolishing their homes, their school; digging up their land and replacing it with clean soil.
Where did they go? We will explore where they have moved in the coming months.
We will also follow the steps the government takes to clean the land and then to find a use for it.