Hidden Hazards Episode 1

Jada Palmer’s Hidden Hazards Digs Into the Environmental Threats Buried in the Allegheny Highlands

By Jada Palmer | Contributors: Noelle Corley and Danny Cardwell

The hills of the Allegheny Highlands look clean. Air moves through the ridges, the streams run cold, and the soil holds generations of farming and memory. But beneath that landscape, some of the most serious environmental threats in the region are invisible to the naked eye.

That’s the premise behind Hidden Hazards.

Hosted by Jada Palmer, the series investigates the environmental toxins that may be affecting the air, water, and soil of the Allegheny Highlands.

The first installment takes listeners underground, where contamination travels slowly and without warning through the soil toward the water sources communities depend on most.

Palmer walks through the primary pathways: agricultural runoff carrying fertilizers and animal waste into ponds and creeks, feeding algae blooms that choke oxygen from aquatic life. Old landfills — particularly those built before modern environmental standards — leaking toxic liquids into the ground below. Illegal dump sites.

What makes Hidden Hazards worth paying attention to is not just the subject matter. It is who is doing the reporting.

Jada Palmer’s relationship with Allegheny Mountain Radio began in elementary school. She returned as a high school volunteer, and even now as a college student she continues to show up — on the air and behind the scenes. Her work on this series is part of AMR’s participation in the Listening Post Collective Seed Phase, a community-centered effort to strengthen local information ecosystems across rural America, funded through Internews and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.