This 40-by-20-inch horizontal panorama documents Site 666—the Republic Steel Quarry in Elyria, Ohio, whose ominous designation reflects its status as one of the nation’s worst environmental contamination sites. The two-to-one horizontal format captures the quarry’s landscape-scale contamination.

Created in 1989, the work documents one of Ohio’s most notorious Superfund sites during cleanup’s early phases. Republic Steel used the quarry for industrial waste disposal, dumping slag, oils, and hazardous materials that contaminated groundwater serving Elyria’s population. The site’s “666” designation—whether coincidentally numeric or deliberately evocative—became shorthand for environmental catastrophe.

Republic Steel’s decline and eventual bankruptcy complicated cleanup, leaving federal and state agencies to address contamination that private parties could not or would not remediate. The quarry represented the environmental costs of steelmaking that profit calculations had externalized onto surrounding communities.

The horizontal format captures the quarry’s scale—a landscape-sized dump rather than a contained industrial accident. The photo collage technique fragments this contaminated terrain while revealing the geographic extent of pollution requiring remediation.

Site 666’s cleanup required removing and treating millions of gallons of contaminated groundwater, capping contaminated areas, and monitoring for decades. This panorama documents the site during active remediation, capturing the physical evidence of environmental damage that industrial operations created and communities inherited.