Twenty-one years ago this spring, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and others were working to transform the former Fernald uranium processing facility in northwest Hamilton County into a nature preserve. The site cleanup was nearing the finish line — the remediation would be declared complete the following year, in October 2006, with the Fernald Preserve opening a year later.
Back then, the EPA had one key indicator it was eyeing to see if the wetlands it had built were working: salamanders.
"Salamanders, basically, are a sign of an established wetland, and in this case, would show that we've put a wetland in a location where salamanders need additional breeding habitat," then-team leader Tom Schneider told me for a story for WMUB in 2005.
It was a cold, windy day in late March of that year when I joined Schneider and other specialists at Fernald to search for salamanders in the man-made wetlands. Their presence would be a sign the land was healing from its Cold War-era scars, when employees spent nearly 40 years producing uranium metal for nuclear weapons.
We didn't find any that day, but as a team member sang to the tune of a Frank Sinatra ditty, "we have high hopes, high hopes," for the future.
Schneider said, "We're looking forward to the day when we get the site cleaned up and it can be like a land lab environmental education facility where folks can bring kids out here and do environmental education on the importance of wetlands. It's going to make a great contrast with what used to be here, the environmental contamination with, you know, the environmental benefit that the facility is providing down the road."
Two decades later, that vision is a reality
These days, Fernald Interpretive Specialist Luke Thies gives tours of those same wetlands. On a much warmer day in late March 2026, he's leading an all-ages tour of visitors on their own hunt for salamanders. We tromp past a stand of pine trees planted in the 1960s as part of first lady Lady Bird Johnson's beautification project, then through a grove of newly planted deciduous hardwoods, beaches, oaks and maples, to arrive at small, shallow pond of water.
"This is our main vernal pool," Thies explains, noting the water will dry up in the summer. "[It] is probably our most populous salamander location."
He stands close to the edge, kneeling to inspect clusters of shiny clumps near the water's surface.
"If you come down this way and look in the water, you'll see the egg sacs on the edge of the water, little jelly-like egg sacs."
There are tons of them.
Unlike that day in 2005, when scientists now go looking for salamanders at Fernald, they find them.
"Our wetlands have definitely evolved over the years, and this one has really exploded in the past few years. We did a survey in 2024 and we captured 90 spotted salamanders in this vernal pool, which is huge," Thies says. "Previously, I think their best was, like, 15."
Fernald will always carry the signs of its past. The most obvious is the giant on-site disposal mound containing about 3 million cubic yards of low grade contaminated waste.
Thies doesn't shy away from that fact as he teaches people about the site. When a couple on the tour admits they grew up nearby but had never been to Fernald because "we've always been afraid," Thies smiles knowingly.
"That's the thing — there's a stigma against the site for the history of it. I want to let you know that even though that is a low-grade radioactive waste storage facility," he says, pointing to the on-site disposal mound, "it is perfectly safe. The most radiation exposure you get up there is from the sun. There's 10 feet of dirt between you and anything radioactive."
There also are groundwater extraction wells where the remaining plumes of uranium are being flushed out.
But alongside that giant mound and those wells, there's everything from beavers to bobcats, frogs to salamanders, and even species that are under threat, like the Blanchard's cricket frog, and rare birds.
Jeff Davis is an Ohio Department of Natural Resources-approved herpetologist that consults on endangered amphibians and reptiles. He monitored and studied salamander populations at Fernald for decades. Scientists at the site still use salamander traps he and his students built in the early aughts.
Now, he comes for the scenery.
"I remember when this was called the Feed Materials Production Center, and had red and white checkerboard signs at the entrances — everybody thought it was a Purina factory — and you would look out and just see all of these industrial buildings," he recalls.
"To see that gone now, and for me to come out here with my buddies and go bird watching and to see short eared owls flying around. And I think one day, I want to say we counted 12 species of ducks and geese on some of the lakes. It's incredible. Sandhill Cranes stop over here. It's pretty amazing."
From an EPA Superfund site no one wanted in their backyard to that living lab environmentalists imagined, Fernald stands as a testament to those "high hopes" for the future.
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