Happy Birthday, Love Canal!

Posted by Jeffrey St. Clair on November 24th, 2008 | Link

It’s been 30 years since the neighborhood surrounding America’s most
famous toxic waste dump was evacuated, yet its legacy is still
unfolding

By Erika Engelhaupt
Environmental Science & Technology

Niagara Falls, N.Y. — In the middle of an abandoned suburban
neighborhood, a long grassy mound pokes up a few feet higher than the
cracked streets surrounding it. A green chain-link fence surrounds the
small hill, which is covered with wildflowers in summer — lavender
chicory and small yellow daisies. The fence has no warning sign — not
anymore — but this is Love Canal, the toxic waste dump that became
synonymous with environmental disaster 30 years ago.

Adeline Levine, a sociologist who wrote a book about Love Canal,
described to me the scene she had witnessed exactly 30 years earlier,
on Aug. 11, 1978. “It was like a Hitchcock movie,” she said, “where
everything looks peaceful and pleasant, but something is slumbering
under the ground.”

That “something” was more than 21,000 tons of chemical waste. The
mixed brew contained more than 200 different chemicals, many of them
toxic. They were dumped into the canal — which was really more of a
half-mile-long pond — in the 1940s and 1950s by the Hooker
Electrochemical Co. In 1953, the canal was covered with soil and sold
to the local school board, and an elementary school and playground
were built on the site. A working-class neighborhood sprang up around
them.

“The neighborhood looked very pleasant,” says Levine, who was a
sociology professor at the State University of New York, Buffalo, in
1978. “There were very nice little homes, nicely kept, with gardens
and flowers and fences and kids’ toys, and then there were young
people who were rushing out of their homes with bundles and packing up
their cars and moving vans.”

Love Canal was in the midst of an all-out panic when Levine arrived;
just nine days earlier, the state health commissioner had declared an
emergency and recommended that pregnant women and children under the
age of two evacuate the neighborhood. A week after that, the state and
federal governments agreed to buy out homes next to the canal.

Levine spent all day interviewing people and was soon obsessed with
their plight. Residents spoke of miscarriages, cancers, and children
born with birth defects. She spent her vacation in New York City the
next month knocking on doors and getting turned down for grants by
foundations that couldn’t imagine why a sociologist would want to
study an environmental problem. By that time, the entire country was
watching the drama of the Love Canal neighborhood play out on their TV
screens.

I was four years old at the time, and I don’t remember a thing. But
later, as a teenager in the late 1980s, I lived about 2 miles from
Love Canal as the crow flies, on Grand Island, a literal suburban
island in the Niagara River. My father remembered Love Canal, and
before he took an engineering job in the area, he asked how far away
it was. He wasn’t too happy to learn that he would be living nearly
within sight of it across the river. Even a decade after the
neighborhood’s plight hit the news, the words “Love Canal” seemed to
be stamped on our brains in shrieking orange capital letters — just
as Bhopal, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island would later be.

After the summer of 1978 came the buyout of some 900 homes; years of
legal battles and disputed health studies; the formation of the
Superfund cleanup program, which for the first time called on
businesses to pay for pollution cleanups; and a new awareness of the
dangers of living with chemical waste. Levine’s book about Love Canal
became a seminal work in a new field, environmental sociology.

But in the beginning there was just a neighborhood that didn’t even
think of itself as Love Canal. The dump only came to define the
LaSalle neighborhood after 1978, when the world learned about the
toxic waste buried there.

A CANAL CALLED LOVE. Love Canal got its name from William T. Love, an
entrepreneur and developer in Niagara Falls in the late 1800s. The
electrochemical industry was drawn to the waterfall because it
generated cheap hydroelectric power to feed its electricity-hungry
manufacturing processes. And Love had a deal for them. He would build
an industrial city, called “Model City” in the optimism of the day,
centered on a canal connected to the Niagara River. He started digging
in the 1890s.

Love’s dream collapsed after the inventor Nikola Tesla came up with
alternating-current electricity, which could travel farther by wire
than direct current and obviated the need for factories to locate near
the falls. The canal Love left behind became a half-mile-long swimming
hole. But later, Elon Hooker decided to locate his electrochemical
company near the canal, and the business eventually became the largest
industrial enterprise in town, making chemicals and plastics.

Read the rest here.