We're number four! We're number four! When it comes to Forbes' rankings of the "Most Toxic Cities in America" New York City comes in at a distinctly not-first number four! We're talking about our environment, people—not our dating pool (which can be, we'll admit, pretty toxic itself). Coming in ahead of us? That'd be Philadelphia, Bakersfield, California, and Fresno, California. Take that sixth borough!
As far as a pageview-grabbing listicles go, this toxic city one isn't too bad. Forbes actually goes into some detail about how they ranked cities—in short, they used existing rankings of air quality, water quality, number of Superfund sites, the number of days the EPA said the air quality index exceeded 100 and the EPA's "Toxics Release Inventory"—even if they don't go into too much detail about each city.
So what's behind our fourth place ranking? Well, in 2009 we had five unhealthy air quality days, 4.1 million pounds of on-site toxic releases were reported (which they take great pains to point out does not "indicate the chemicals are being improperly handled or are being released in any hazardous way") and our water has some "total haloacetic acids; dieldrin; total trihalomethanes" in it (your guess is as good as ours as to what those are).
