In the 1930s and 1940s people and businesses did not pay a lot of attention to what happened to toxic chemicals produced during industrial processes. While there have long been regulations for the handling of these dangerous chemicals, enforcement of these laws was virtually nonexistent or haphazard at best.
Large corporations, such as Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation in Niagara Falls, New York, made a variety of chemicals, pesticides and plastics. This type of company would typically seal the contaminated substances in 55-gallon metal drums and leave them someplace nearby.
For Hooker, Love Canal was a convenient place to store these metal drums.
The Love Canal neighborhood is in the southeast section of the La Salle area of Niagara Falls, New York. The neighborhood spans 36 square blocks in the southeastern corner of the city, along 99th Street and Read Avenue. Two bodies of water, Bergholtz Creek and Niagara River, define the northern and southern boundaries of the neighborhood.
Love Canal was the dream of William T. Love, an 1890’s entrepreneur who wanted to develop a planned industrial community, Model City. Love’s idea was to take waters from the Niagara River and reroute it around the Niagara escarpment in order to produce cheap hydroelectric power.
Love’s dream was not to be and Model City was never constructed. However, work on the canal to transport waters from the Niagara River did happen. In 1942, Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation purchased the Love Canal site. This is where the contamination of Love Canal began.
Between 1942 and 1953 Hooker Chemical disposed of roughly 22,000 tons of mixed chemical wastes into Love Canal, all while children swam and played nearby. Eventually, Hooker stopped using this dumping site and the land was sold to the Niagara Falls School Board for a price of $1.00.
In 1955, the 99th Street Elementary School was built on Love Canal property and was opened to students. Subsequent housing development of the area brought hundreds of families to this suburban, blue-collar neighborhood along the Love Canal.
As time passed, the neighborhood continued to flourish, as families found the idea of building a new home so close to an elementary school appealing. But, there were problems.
Many homeowners began noticing that their basements leaked. Some families started smelling strange chemical smells and seeing oddly-colored water in their basements. Unfortunately, only a few knew about Hooker’s history of chemical dumping.
A startling symptom that something was not right in the Love Canal neighborhood occurred in 1974, when one family’s backyard swimming pool rose two feet out of the ground. When the pool was removed, blue, purple and yellow chemicals quickly flooded in where the pool had been.
By 1977 and after two years of uncharacteristically heavy rain and snowfall, the former canal was turning into a marshland. With high groundwater levels, portions of the Hooker landfill subsided, 55-gallon drums surfaced, ponds became tainted, basements began to ooze an oily residue, and noxious chemical smells permeated the neighborhood.
Physical evidence of chemical corrosion of sump pumps and permeation of basement cinderblock walls was also obvious. Chemicals were now noticeably seeping into the surrounding streams and soil. City officials looked into different ways of dealing with this ever-growing pollution problem, but determined that the cost was too high and the project ended up being bogged down in red tape.
By this point, many residents were concerned. Not only were they concerned about health issues, they were worried about the plummeting value of their homes. Those who tried to sell their homes, couldn’t sell.
Something finally had to give. So, in August 1978 the results of local, state and federal testing of the air and water in Love Canal basements were made public. State Health Commissioner, Dr. Robert Whalen, made it known that Love Canal was a great and imminent peril to the health of the public.
He suggested that pregnant women and children under the age of two, whose homes abutted one end of the canal, leave their homes. Apparently, the studies provided indisputable evidence of an unusually high rate of birth defects and miscarriages.
This announcement not only enraged homeowners, it left them frightened and discouraged. Many residents made the conclusion that adults and older children throughout the neighborhood
might also be in at risk. It was at this time that the residents took things into their own hands. They organized the Love Canal Homeowners Association to inflict added pressure on officials to buy their contaminated homes.
Lois Gibbs was elected president of the Association. Gibbs, a 27-year-old housewife who lived just two short blocks away from the canal, had a tremendous gift for organizing residents and keeping the Love Canal crisis in the news.
Not long after the birth of the Associations, President Jimmy Carter declared Love Canal a federal disaster site. This proclamation freed up funds for residents of the south end of the canal to relocate. This was great for these families; however, those families living in surrounding areas were left unable to move.
This outraged many because of the mounting evidence of elevated rates of cancer and other serious illnesses. Residents throughout the community began methodically testing substances in their homes, area streams and soil. What they found was a staggering list of dangerous chemicals. Some of the compounds detected were C-56 (a carcinogenic pesticide), toluene, benzene, and even PCBs (a known toxic chemical).
Subsequent studies conducted by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry revealed a frighteningly long list of 421 chemical records for water, soil and air samples in and around the Love Canal neighborhood.
Gibbs decided to conduct a systematic and thorough health survey of all residents outside the approved evacuation area. What she found was not surprising. The survey turned up high rates of bladder and kidney ailments, miscarriages, birth defects and nervous disorders.
After six more months, the state finally agreed to pay for pregnant women and those with small children to be relocated to temporary homes, but it stipulated that these families were to return to Love Canal when their children were older. Frustrated and angered by this temporary relocation, residents continued to write letters, sign petitions and conduct public demonstrations to maintain public awareness of the crisis at Love Canal.
Finally, in 1980, the state of New York publicly confirmed what many residents had long suspected. Among the poisonous chemicals found at Love Canal was dioxin, one of the most intensely toxic substances ever created.
With this announcement, the state had no other choice and agreed to buy the nearby homes. After two years of worrying, activism and continued chemical exposure, the remaining homeowners were finally allowed to leave. This, however, wasn’t the end of the Love Canal story.
Only a decade had passed before the government put some of those very same houses on the market again. A new community of homeowners moved in despite the pollution controversy and debate about whether the Love Canal site was still dangerously contaminated with potentially deadly waste.
Today, 30 years after the pollution crisis, Love Canal is really two areas. Secure behind chain link fence, there is the capped dumpsite that once held entire streets of houses. And, just across the street and to the north is a reborn neighborhood called Black Creek Village. The Village is full of homes that were rehabilitated and sold by the state-formed Love Canal Revitalization Agency.
While the Love Canal environmental catastrophe may not be the worst hazardous waste site the world has ever seen, it is one of America’s most notorious. What transpired at Love Canal led to the development of the federal Superfund program, which aids in the cleanup of toxic waste sites that could pose significant risks to the health and well-being of those living, working and playing around these sites.
if you go to google maps, there’s a street view of this area. it’s really surreal to “walk through” this place on street view, how empty it all is, how cracked the streets are, how a low-income housing development is occupied just a stones-throw away to the west. reading all the stories, i cannot even imagine what it must have been like to be there, or even to live at that time, thinking about how my parents would react should something like this happen now, anywhere in the country. and the scary part is that because of how dumping was regulated (or not) a long time ago, it could happen anywhere.
I used to live near there, and would ride my bike through the empty neighborhoods. Lots of rabbits and critters. Some of the porch lights were still on. (early 90’s)
this site sucks
That looks a really scary creepy place on Google maps walk around. I would hate to live on 93rd street so close to the place.