CONFIRMED
Love Canal: The Neighborhood Built on a Toxic Dump
Love Canal was an ordinary working-class neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York — streets of modest homes, an elementary school, families raising children. It was also built directly on top of one of the worst chemical waste dumps in American history. Beneath the lawns and the playground lay some 21,000 tons of toxic chemical waste — pesticides, solvents, dioxins, and dozens of other hazardous compounds — that the Hooker Chemical Company had buried in an abandoned canal through the 1940s and early 1950s. When the dump was full, Hooker capped it, and in 1953 sold the land to the local Board of Education for a single dollar, including in the deed a warning about the buried chemicals and a clause disclaiming all liability for what might happen. The school board built an elementary school on the site anyway, and homes rose all around it. For two decades the buried chemicals were largely out of sight. Then, in the 1970s, after years of construction had breached the clay cap and unusually wet weather raised the water table, the poison began to come back up — oozing into basements, surfacing in yards, pooling on the school playground, burning children's skin, and killing gardens. Residents who had noticed for years the strange odors and the unexplained illnesses — the miscarriages, the birth defects, the cancers — finally began to connect them to the ground beneath their feet. Led by a young mother named Lois Gibbs, the residents organized and fought, and in 1978 their crisis forced a presidential emergency declaration, the evacuation of hundreds of families, and the creation of the law that still governs the cleanup of toxic sites across America. This is the story of the neighborhood built on a poison, and the people who refused to be ignored.
