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 99^th 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 99^th 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.

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The Tigris-Euphrates alluvial salt marsh has been home to the Marsh Arabs for thousands of years. Their homes are shown in Sumerian art from five thousand years ago.

The Marsh Arabs shared their home with Asian water buffaloes, wolves, and two kinds of otter. If you saw the film Ring of Bright Water, the star was an otter from this region. As many as two-thirds of the waterfowl that winter in the Middle East spend the cold months here: that’s seventy nine species, among them pelicans, flamingoes and many kinds of duck. The bandicoot rat and the Mesopotamian gerbil are only found in the marshes.

The marshes also cleaned the water which flowed into them and supported commercially important fisheries.

After the Shiites rose against Saddam Hussein, he began drying the marshes by channeling water away from them and directly into the Shatt el Arab. Most of the inhabitants were killed or fled to Iran, so that only 40,000 of the original 250,000 to 500,000 people remained. In the first four years, Saddam drained 60 percent of the marsh; today only 7 percent remains.

According to a report made by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2001, the marshlands that once covered between 5,800 and 7,700 square miles now comprised just 386 square miles. UNEP ranked the destruction of the marsh with the desiccation of the Aral Sea and the deforestation of the Amazon as one of the worst environmental disasters in history.

Because of its importance both to birds that live and breed there, and to the migratory birds which use it as a stopover, the loss of the marsh has put 40 species of birds at risk. Seven species are already extinct and the Sacred Ibis and African darter are nearly so.

Many species of fish are also at risk.

Restoration of some of the marshland is possible, but salts in the soil and dams in Syria and Turkey make complete restoration very difficult.

Photos of Marsh Arabs on Flickr
Map and pictures from National Geographic:

Most of us have heard stories of some unsuspecting child or fisherman happening upon a frog that seems completely healthy, except for the fact that it has no legs or an extra eye. At one time, these stories were deemed as oddities or unusual, freak occurrences. Now, however, malformed frogs are much more common than once thought and are real life indicators of significant problems in our environment.

It is true that some variations of morphological abnormalities are expected among the world’s vast amphibian population, including more than 4,000 species of frogs and toads. These anticipated abnormalities, however, are typically due to some type of trauma, developmental problems and mutations rather than environmental factors.

The United States is home to roughly 230 amphibian species, which includes 90 frog and toad species. Beginning in the early 90s, in several of Minnesota’s wetlands, malformation rates were found to be between 30 to 50%. With the typical, expected malformation rate between zero and two percent, this finding was cause for concern. Once Minnesota’s frog problems were unearthed, elevated malformation rates were discovered in 56 of the United States’ native species and in 48 states.

While these abnormalities are often referred to as “deformities,” most of the abnormalities found are actually “malformations.” Notably, there is a real difference between the two conditions. Deformation is the process of disfiguring or distorting an already existing body part while malformation is the process of disrupting a normally-formed body part or organ during those vital first stages of development.

The malformations most commonly reported by herpetologists involve missing legs, extra legs and paralyzed or misshapen legs. Also seen are frogs with legs that are fused against the frog’s body, webbed together with extra skin or split into two new legs halfway down.

Images of malformed frogs

Other malformations are also reported. Frogs with missing or extra eyes, as well as eyes that are unusual in size, shape and location have also been found. Misshapen jaws and incomplete tail absorption have also been documented.

Because frogs are extremely sensitive to their environments, they have long been considered the “canary in a coal mine” for environmental disasters. In the past, before better methods had been developed, coal miners commonly relied upon canaries to detect toxic or explosive gases in mines. These delicate birds are more sensitive to toxic gases than we are and would collapse long before any miners were affected. A collapsed canary made the perfect alarm for miners to get out immediately and for management to investigate the noxious problem and fix it.

As with the coalmining canaries, frogs are especially vulnerable to the environment in which they live. Frogs are especially sensitive to pollution and other environmental stressors. They live at the meeting place of two very different environments, the land and the water, and easily absorb damaging pollutants directly through their skin.

As human beings, we breathe through our lungs, which are obviously tucked safely inside our bodies. Our bodies provide much protection from direct contact with polluted air and contaminated water. Although some amphibians do breathe completely through their skin, the majority breathe and receive their oxygen partially through their skin, which is always open to the elements. Whether breathing partially or completely through their skin, the amphibian body is much more vulnerable and susceptible to outside factors, including diseases, toxic chemicals, ionizing radiation (UV-B) from the sun and habitat destruction.

Because of this special vulnerability, we continue to see an increasing numbers of malformed frogs along with a steadily decreasing population of frogs, and amphibians as a whole. Like the coalminers, this should be our alarm to look into and fix this problem. This complex problem, however, will not be easy to remedy because there are several possible contributing causes.

Photo Credit: Hamed Saber

Consider this. Amphibians are such effective indicators of significant environmental variations that many ecological problems may go undetected by our human eyes until significant environmental damage has occurred. The current worldwide amphibian population is declining and the number of bodily malformations is increasing. This may be an early warning to us – an early warning of serious ecosystem imbalances.

WHAT’S TO BLAME

First, consider the extensive use of pesticides across the United States. The chemical runoff collecting in the vast Midwestern farmlands is causing much damage to frog populations. Not only do excessive pesticides and other xenobiotic chemicals affect the sexual development of frogs, but it also makes them more susceptible to often fatal bacterial meningitis as well as some dangerous, parasitic fungi.

Scientists have confirmed that agricultural contaminants may be an important factor in amphibian declines in California. According to an article recently accepted by the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, a study by scientists of the U.S. Geological Survey and U.S. Department of Agriculture indicates that organophosphorus pesticides from agricultural areas, which are transported to the Sierra Nevada on prevailing summer winds, may be affecting populations of amphibians that breed in mountain ponds and streams.
USGS

Studies at the University of California Berkeley have been conducted on delicate developing tadpoles. The tadpoles were reared in a watery environment contaminated with a mixture of nine pesticides, fungicides and herbicides – chemicals commonly found in ponds located close to Midwestern cornfields.

The evidence showed that polluted tadpoles take longer to complete their metamorphosis into adult frogs. Because of this delay, they are smaller, which makes it harder for them to catch and eat their prey and turns them into easier prey for other animals. Research also showed that these frogs had increased levels of a stress hormone that causes holes to develop in the thymus gland, which likely causes an impaired immune response to disease.

Photo Credit: Stadtwald

Pesticides are just one factor causing the decline of amphibian populations. This problem is the result of a combination of factors. Excessive chemical applications, the introduction of nonnative predators and competitors, increasing levels of ultraviolet light and global warming, acid rain, mercury pollution, eradication of wetlands and overall habitat destruction are all contributing to the decline of the frog.

While it is a natural occurring process for amphibian populations to fluctuate according to environmental conditions, such as rainfall amounts, the human population is the most likely component to the amphibian malformation and population decline.

Humans have the capability to improve or correct environmental problems. We also possess the ability to exacerbate the same ecological problems at local, regional and global levels. It’s up to us!

One of Michigan’s most exclusive communities, prestigious Bay Harbor, stretches along five miles of Lake Michigan’s Little Traverse Bay scenic coastline. This impressive four-season, luxury resort community comes with all of amenities one would expect of such an upper class, high society resort community – the 27-hole Bay Harbor Golf Club (which Golf Digest magazine calls “The Pebble Beach of the Midwest”), the Olympic-caliber Bay Harbor Equestrian Club, and, the part that is supposed to set this community apart from all others, the first-rate deep-water harbor.

But, this spectacular private community, which rests between Charlevoix and Petoskey, has a dirty little secret, and it just so happens to have found its way to the surface – the surface of the waters of Bay Harbor. Throughout the past year, the Northwest Michigan Community Health Agency has issued advisories and even closed certain beaches along Bay Harbor and Resort Township’s East Park. People have been advised to avoid three stretches of beach that actually covers roughly 7,000 feet of Lake Michigan shoreline.

This 7,000-foot area along Lake Michigan’s sandy coastline just happens to be near old, buried kiln dust piles. And, it just so happens that portions of the exclusive Bay Harbor resort and park were developed right on top of the well-known, hidden heaps of kiln dust. The kiln dust mounds, which have caused highly alkaline seepage and toxic heavy metal pollution, is a waste product left behind by the old Penn-Dixie Cement Company which operated at the very site of Bay Harbor’s development for decades until the 1960s.

For more than 100 years the Penn-Dixie Cement Company and mining operations spoiled and disfigured in excess of 1,200 acres and five miles of Lake Michigan shoreline on Little Traverse Bay. The retired cement plant, which lay abandoned for 35 years after closing its doors back in the 1960s, left a desolate moonscape consisting of asbestos, coal, chromium brick, and 2.5 million cubic yards of kiln dust.

This contaminated eyesore sat unchanged until 1993 when David V. Johnson, Bay Harbor Company Chairman, joined forces with CMS Energy and began what was, and still is to this day, North America’s largest land reclamation. Together, Johnson and CMS Energy attempted to do what most true environmentalist advocate. Instead of destroying existing forests, farmable fields, and the very habitats necessary to support native wildlife, Bay Harbor was developed over a desolate, environmental blemish that no one else wanted to mess with.

The vision of Harbor Bay, which started in the early 1990s with the alliance between Johnson and CMS Energy, would definitely be put to the test as the real pollution problems became evident. At the beginning of their partnership, CMS Energy agreed to assume every bit of the liability for all initial necessary environmental cleaning as well as complete responsibility for handling the cleanup of any future environmental mishaps, should any arise.

Beginning in 1994, the bleak moonscape environment seemed to change overnight as synchronized explosions brought down the plant’s obsolete smokestacks. Just eight short months later, the barrier that separated Little Traverse Bay and Bay Harbor was removed allowing water to gush into Bay Harbor with amazing speed. Flowing at a rate of one million gallons per minute, it took just 24 hours to accumulate more than 2.5 billion gallons of water that gave birth to Bay Harbor Lake and created the brand new Nautical Center of the Great Lakes.

Because Bay Harbor ranks as one of America’s best marina resort facilities and is home to the Bay Harbor Yacht Club, Bay Harbor exemplifies the perfect, definitive lifestyle. The Bay Harbor Lake Marina has been revered because it is said to provide a safe harbor, and it has actually grown to be one of the biggest and most well known destinations for Great Lakes boaters. In fact, the Wall Street Journal once called Bay Harbor a “magnet for the world’s magnates.”

But now, just 12 years after the extreme makeover of a once desolate moonscape into a renowned resort community with all of life’s best amenities and $5 million waterfront mansions, it appears that the fantasy-like transformation was, just that, an incomplete fantasy.

As the transformation began, four towering heaps containing toxic cement kiln dust were covered by dirt and rock. These four massive piles of kiln dust were equivalent to greater than 312,000 completely filled, commercial-sized dumpsters. Once, concealed under rock, soil, and new grass, much of the once barren terrain was landscaped with new, young trees and multiple varieties of attractive, healthy plant-life. At the bottom of the biggest mound, a piping system was installed with the very important job of collecting any toxic runoff and transferring it to a nearby wastewater treatment plant in Petoskey.

Unfortunately, this trusted and relied-upon collection system failed. Then things went from bad to worse as the system was not repaired. It was simply quietly shut off for about eight months from the end of 2003 to the beginning of 2004.

Finally, state authorities tested the water in Bay Harbor and discovered a dangerous dilemma. Toxic runoff was seeping directly into the bay in disturbing amounts. As they continued their investigation, it was found that Bay Harbor was being harshly infected at many spots along the bay’s five-mile coastline as well as at the site of the idle collection pipes.

Levels of pH elevated to 13.5 were discovered in some standing water on a number of private beaches. According to the Michigan Department of Community Health, pH levels this high are just about as caustic as the average liquid bleach and drain cleaners. In fact, pH levels of 13.5 are considered well above levels strong enough to inflict irreversible skin damage.

Along the sandy coastlines of some beaches, vegetation and insects appear to have vanished as a result of the noxious seepage. But, the contamination does not stop on the beaches. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality has documented that water tests taken as far out as 90 feet offshore still show high alkalinity levels.

As the magnitude of this pollution is still being measured, there are many who suggest that the perils of this type of land and water contamination has been overstated and embellished. These skeptics allege that a lot of the red carpet, resort community’s lake front property has been evaluated and is completely free of contamination. This area, they say, includes a sandy swimming beach designated for residents along with the well known boat harbor.

In contrast, however, a Michigan Department of Community Health evaluation has determined that people who come into contact with the polluted lake water or any of the contaminated shoreline seepage which contains such high alkalinity levels will likely suffer irreparable injuries to bodily tissues, particularly on the skin, in the eyes, and around mucous membranes.

In addition to the dangers of very high pH levels, mercury found in the lake’s water and seepage also presents a significant health hazard. Mercury, which can irreversibly impair the human body’s central nervous system, poses a noteworthy threat to anyone who comes in contact or ingests the chemical. The threat of mercury is especially strong for unborn fetuses and young children. As a result, mercury contamination is a primary concern for health officials when issuing health advisories regarding avoiding or reducing consumption of fish taken from Lake Michigan.

Test results have shown mercury levels in some of the shoreline seepage puddles around Bay Harbor at levels 230 times higher than the safe threshold at which all wildlife can be exposed on an ongoing rate. It is also important to mention that the levels of several other dangerous toxins also surpass Michigan’s safety standards. Some of these contaminates include selenium, copper, zinc and nickel.

Now that Bay Harbor’s ugly little secret has finally churned back to the surface for everyone to see, closed beaches, protective fencing, health advisories, and government workers in white protective suits are the norm along some parts of Bay Harbor. At least a dozen lakefront homes have been directly impacted, and the value of many undeveloped waterfront home sites will probably decrease. The force of such damaging and potentially deadly pollution is bound to flow throughout the roughly 550-home-resort community.

The unfortunate thing about the Bay Harbor pollution crisis is that it, like most other man-made environmental catastrophes, could have been prevented.

As it turns out, Michigan state environmental officials were aware of the toxic brew that was leaching into Little Traverse Bay for several years prior to the development of Bay Harbor. At the time, even though the building and development site for the upscale Bay Harbor community was to be directly over the concealed and abandoned cement-kiln dust piles, the environmental and human health risks were announced and documented as negligible.

According to records examined by the Detroit Free Press, environmental authorities with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality had been aware that the nickel, lead and copper levels that were oozing into Lake Michigan surpassed tolerable and safe limits going back to 1989. This is some five years prior to the beginning of the development of the Bay Harbor community.

For some reason, however, at that time, the environmental regulators opted to not require the developer to completely contain and satisfactorily treat all the seepage. Their initial conclusion was that the contamination was, and would remain, insignificant.
As a direct result, in 1989, the state of Michigan established that the kiln dust was to be labeled as an inert byproduct. And, in 1994, environmental officials agreed that the state would not have the right to sue Bay Harbor in the event of any future problems, including any messy environmental problems that may occur.

The federal government, on the other hand, did not make the same agreement.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency and CMS Energy have been discussing direct and immediate measures to enclose the poisonous overspill. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality will be responsible for the supervision and administration of the continuing, long-term solution.

For now, as the cleanup of Bay Harbor continues, hazardous sections have been fenced off, warning signs posted. Contractors have been draining off lethal stagnant water from along the shore, and the existing collection system is now up and running again. There are also plans all ready in the making for a new, more comprehensive collection system.

Due to their agreement for assuming all responsibility for any environmental mishaps, CMS Energy has laid aside roughly $45 million. All of this is designated for the cleanup of Bay Harbor, but no one can be sure if this huge amount of money will even be enough to cleanse and purify the water and land of this exclusive resort community.

Now this same land is being taken away by developers with the cooperation of local and state governments.

What’s being lost is not just land or money: It’s community. Five, six, even eight generations of the same families have lived continuously in these coastal communities. The neighborhoods they form are tight-knit, safe, and supportive – a rarity in modern American life.

Generations without wills or the need for them

Every state in the US requires that land deeds be transferred in writing. However this was not an option for the African American property owners during Reconstruction.

It was illegal to teach slaves to read and write, so that first generation couldn’t possibly have written wills. The Jim Crow laws that followed Emancipation then impeded black people’s access to the legal system, according to Willie Heyward of the Center for Heirs Property Preservation. So, the first generations of these land owners were unable to create written wills, and property was handed down verbally.

The tradition of verbal bequeaths continued in the African-American community. Rather than honoring a verbal will, the State considers land left by those without a written will (those who are “intestate”) to be equally owned, by all heirs.

Thus, there are many tracts of “Heirs’ Properties” in the South in which the last recorded deed is from the Reconstruction period. Some of these properties can have over a hundred heirs associated with them.

Turning Bottom-land to Gold

The introduction of air conditioning and mosquito control has turned these properties into the type of gold that makes developers drool. Since the mid-50’s, coastal islands and marsh-front properties have been converted to high-end housing, resort and commercial properties, displacing the long-standing African American communities.

The SC Government has so favored developers that they have changed the laws defining land ownership. For instance, persons who possess a piece of land, pay taxes on it, and were verbally deeded it by an ancestor do not have “clear title” to that land in South Carolina. This lack of clear title leaves the land vulnerable to court-forced sale, if even a single heir chooses to raise the question of ownership.

Once a court orders the sale, the developers are standing in line at the auction with more cash in their hands than the heirs could ever hope to raise.

Techniques of Taking The Property

Unclear Title

So long as there is no clear title to a property, a single heir can force its sale. In all heirs’ property cases a ruling from a court is required to “clear” the deed. Quite often, there are too many heirs, or the plat is too small, for equal and reasonable division. So, the court orders the property to be sold at auction, and profit is split between the heirs.

Build Something Really Nice Next Door

Property taxes in places other than California are assessed based on the value of the house and land. This value is based on subjective factors – how much would people be willing to pay for it? A $10,000 house surrounded by other ten thousand dollar houses will be assessed at ten thousand dollars. However, if someone builds a single $1 million dollar house next door, the property value of the $10,000 will go up – a hundred fold.

So while the property tax on the ten thousand dollar house was just a couple hundred dollars and easily paid, the property tax on the same house next to a mansion is in the tens of thousands and beyond the reach of the average South Carolinian.

Tax ‘em Out

While many States consider land ownership to be a basic and inviolable right, South Carolina acts aggressively to remove land from people who cannot pay property taxes.

South Carolina will sell off a person’s land if they are ten months late in the payment of taxes. Other states give people several years to pay back taxes and some even have laws preventing tax sales. For instance, in Ohio, a lien may be placed on a property for delinquent taxes, but the land cannot be forced into sale.

The taxes on heirs’ properties were quite reasonable for a very long time. However, as the value of the land has gone up, thanks to air conditioning, mosquito control, and mansions placed on neighboring properties, the tax bills have also increased.

It can be difficult to keep track of a single tax bill, which is applied to large tracts where dozens of families live. If the person who has taken responsibility for paying the taxes dies or moves away, the bill is often forgotten.

It is also possible for any person to go to the County offices and change the address on any tax bill.

Would the developers do this and then enjoy the confusion as the land goes into tax sale?

It would explain a few incidents.

South Carolinians are only given nine months to pay their property tax bill. After that, they must pay what is owed, plus the taxes that will be due next year to prevent the sale of their land in the tenth month.

For example, in 2005 taxes are due on January 15 and delinquent properties are sold on October 3. Developers, with loads of cash in hand, will be ready to snatch up the valuable properties at auction, pricing heirs out of the picture but still often buying at well below market value.

Even though the governing agency is only allowed to sell as much land as is necessary to cover the delinquent taxes, they have traditionally sold the entire plat.

Regulate ‘em Out

In other places, the local government has lent the developers a hand by creating regulations that surpass the means of the Heirs’ Property owners. For instance, in Mount Pleasant, sewer hookup is now required for all new houses and renovations. But the City did not run the sewer line close enough to the Heirs’ Property sites to allow for hookup at a reasonable cost; They actually went around one Heirs’ Property site to put sewer lines to a new sub-division.

So now the property owners must pay tens of thousands of dollars to “tap in” to the system. If unable to pay, they can not modify their homes, build new homes, or even repair the existing septic systems when they break. In effect, they are forced to sell the land, to someone who has enough money to pay for the sewer connection.

What Is Being Done

The Center for Heirs Property Preservation is fighting hard to preserving these unique communities in Charleston and surrounding areas. They are providing community education by doing things like leaving pamphlets at government offices and community centers and teaching Heirs Property seminars. There has been a Public Television special about Heirs Property.

They are additionally providing legal and mediation services to embattled Heirs Property owners, and helping to clear the titles. Also they work to change State laws that disadvantage Heirs Property owners.

In one ingenious approach, according to Willy Heyward, they are helping families create autonomous entities to manage and own land in potentially disputed heirs’ properties. Once this entity is formed — a Partnership, Limited Liability Corporation, or other form of Corporation — each heir is given shares in it equal to their stake in the land. Developers cannot then get a single heir to force a sale; the majority of the share holders must agree to what will be done with the property.

A State-appointed task force that includes members of the Center for Heirs Property Preservation and Charleston School of Law is looking at ways to protect property owners’ rights. One law they are working on would require mediation amongst heirs prior to, or instead of, going to court, in order to avoid a forced sale.

Even the world-famous Spoleto Festival USA is getting involved. Their Evoking History project for the 2006 Festival involves the members of the Phillips Community – one of the Heirs’ Properties that is being threatened by developers.

In the end, it all comes down to how well groups of heirs, some numbering over 100, can cooperate to save their communities. The sad thing is that they have to fight against both developers, and their own government.

Sources

http://ccfgives.org/heirsproperty.htm

http://www.lri.lsc.gov/abstracts/abstract.asp?level1=SPA&level2=Housing&abstractid=030017&ImageId=1

http://www.pfdf.org/innovation/innovation/innovation.asp?innov_id=567

High Resolution Images

The smaller body of water on top is Lake St. Clair, the biggest smallest lake in the Great Lakes system. In other words, it’s the biggest great lake that’s not a Great Lake. As such it probably doesn’t get enough respect. It should– in the upper right you can see the largest delta system in the Great Lakes, and by extension and in fact, the largest freshwater delta system in the world.

And it’s dying. It certainly doesn’t look healthy. We’ll return to this in a moment.

One side of the above image is the United States. The other side is Canada. Can you guess which is which? People with a primary school education shouldn’t be guessing. Yep, that’s the USA to the north, with Canada just over the river to the south offering low sales tax and good deals on pharmaceuticals, among other things.

Okay, same question. This one is a little more difficult. In this case, that’s canada on the right, and the United States territory to the left of the river. It’s a trick question of course, because that area west of the river is actually an indian reservation.

So all of that cultivated land produces runoff that includes quite a lot of the chemical fertilizer, made from natural gas with anhydrous ammonia as an intermediate step. It washes out of the soil and into that great freshwater delta system.

Normally a delta and the surrounding wetlands purify and detoxify the nitrates in the water and act as a living filter, like the Florida Everglades. With all of that artifical fertilizer draining into the river and through the delta, the concentrations exceed the tolerance of the plant and animal life in the wetlands. As a result, they die, which you can see here.

In addition, the extra nutrients in the lake create an anerobic "dead zone" in the deep parts of the lake, which are shown here in black. Microbes in the water multiply to consume the nutrients, using up all of the oxygen in the cold, deep waters of the lake. Anything that gets caught in this water winds up dead. This is the "Dead Zone" problem that has been popping up more and more lately.

The Michigan portion of the delta has been urbanized, while Ontario has set aside much of the wetlands as the Walpole Indian Reservation. Wetland loss from urban and recreational encroachment continues to be a problem on the U.S. side; and in Ontario, many of the wetland areas have been wiped out by agricultural drainage. source

Not that the agriculture is the only problem, of course:

Agriculture is the predominant land use within the river’s watershed. But, intensive development has occurred in and near the cities of Port Huron and Sarnia. The heaviest concentration of industry (including a large petrochemical complex) lies along the Ontario shore near Sarnia. Several communities along the St. Clair rely on the river as their primary source of drinking water. Industries — including petroleum refineries, chemical manufacturers, paper mills, salt producers and electric power plants — need high quality water for their operations as well. Ships carrying cargo between the upper and lower Great Lakes ply the St. Clair River.
St. Clair River RAP priorities include contaminated sediment remediation on the Canadian side of the river, elimination of CSOs and SSOs on both sides of the river, elimination of spills to the river from "Chemical Valley" downstream of Sarnia, Ontario, and ensuring proper notification when spills do occur. US Environmental Protection Agency