The memory is relayed as something once funny to the people telling it. By the time of the narration those older witnesses are dead, leaving an industrial hazard compressed into folklore, prank and second-hand testimony.
Emission is therefore a particularly economical example of how Lost Eros accumulates history: not through a master chronology but through residents remembering contaminated childhoods badly, casually and after the institutions responsible have faded from view.
See Memory, Time, History & Forgetting and Collapse, Ruin & Systems After Failure.