Love Canal revisited 40 years later

Aug. 05--A dapper young businessman on the phone in the lobby of the Niagara Hilton (now Sheraton at the Falls) was frustrated with the faulty connection as he tried talking to his wife in Indiana.

It was the summer of 1978 and he happened to be in a place that overnight had gained notoriety for an environmental disaster.

When she asked where he was -- on his sales trip -- the static in the line interfered.

After repeating 'Niagara Falls' for the third time, he finally resorted to, "Niagara! You know, honey, the Love Canal!"

That horrific nightmare in the LaSalle neighborhood had surfaced only a few weeks before on Aug. 7, 1978, and already the world-famous travel destination known as "The Honeymoon Capital" would at least in the short term become infamous as a dumping ground for toxic chemicals.

Suddenly the phone line became clearer and the woman knew exactly where her husband was.

"It's on the front page of our paper this morning," she said, referring to the Kansas City Star.

While the Love Canal crisis erupted 40 years ago, its name lives in infamy because a community ignored numerous warnings about the dangerous chemicals that had been buried there decades ago. It took thousands of documents, endless hearings, and countless hours of government and regulatory agencies to finally resolve the issue that had jolted homeowners and disrupted their lives.

It was in the late 1970s, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 2,500 such landfills had been built across the country. Widely known as "ticking time bombs" with strange names were soon to resonate with people in scores of cities, towns and villages. The mere mention of the toxic materials was enough to stir concern: Mirex, PCBs, dioxin, and lindane.

LOVE'S DREAM

Closer to home, the neighborhood here took its name from William Love, an entrepreneur who started constructing a canal on the site in the late 19th century. He filed for bankruptcy before his grandiose project could be completed. It was designed to channel water from the upper Niagara River 3 1/2 miles north to the Town of Lewiston where it would flow into an open canal and forebay, and eventually to penstocks to produce the hydropower. Love envisioned his "Model City" as a place for industry as well as a nice place to live.

The initial announcement of Love's project -- better known in earlier days as "Modeltown" -- was under a real estate listing in the Niagara Falls Journal on Feb. 18, 1893. It stated: "A great scheme is slowly developing on the Niagara River. A Tennessee man has a plan for developing all of the village from Lewiston to Lake Ontario into a city of 200,000 inhabitants." Love, a Knoxville, Tenn., resident, asked for a one-year option on 10,000 acres to start his city which he proposes as three miles wide and six miles long. His plan was unveiled the same year as a real estate boom, with the construction of the Niagara Falls Power Company.

Love pressured Elton T. Ransom of Ransomville, a merchant who held Niagara County's only seat in the state Assembly, to sponsor a bill chartering the Modeltown enterprise. At that time, some observers referred to Love as "a western hustler and town promoter," who was acquiring options on farms in the towns of Lewiston and Porter. He did have some credentials as an entrepreneur and dealmaker; in a matter of days, he had reportedly provided a settlement in Guthrie, Okla., for some 15,000 people though much wasn't known how that was accomplished.

In Niagara Falls, Love contended his company had $2 million in capital to invest in the Lewiston project. Under a cooperative agreement with the local government, his company would lay out the streets for Modeltown and select the sites for homes and manufacturing facilities. The capital stock of the company was listed at $10 million.

No question, Love predicted, that Lewiston would become "a great manufacturing area" with the canal extending from Cayuga Creek (near LaSalle) along the Niagara River to Lewiston."

Assemblyman Ransom liked the overall Modeltown concept because it gave the county control of all the street railway, telephone, lighting and water services. It was estimated the plan would result in two-thirds savings in those costs to the taxpayers. It should be noted that Love met countless stumbling blocks in his relentless efforts to secure the lands he needed for his enterprise. As it turned out, his grandiose scheme failed, mostly due to the financial panic of 1893.

With the canal plan eventually abandoned, there wasn't much use for the open waterway although some local residents quickly looked at it as a swimming hole. Subsequently, the Hooker Chemical Co., which had acquired the land, started dumping chemical waste into the water in the 1940s, the era when the Niagara Falls-based company was producing chemicals to meet U.S. government demands for the nation's defense in World War II. Hooker continued its dumping operations until 1953, when it sealed the site and sold the property to the Niagara Falls Board of Education for $1.

That deal included a proviso that, in retrospect, was crucial: The board was required to sign a document that it would not hold Hooker responsible for any of the chemicals buried at the site. Despite an additional warning that the property should not be used for any new construction, the board proceeded to build a school directly on the landfill area and to sell adjacent lots for real estate development.

It should be noted that the negotiations that culminated in Hooker's transfer of the Love Canal property to the school board occurred over a span of several years. Unfortunately, the record shows that most of the negotiations were verbal, with little in writing. What is not in question, however, is that the board was already underway in the planning stages for the 99th Street School. In fact, it was in the works for more than two years before Hooker actually deeded the site to the board.

As an example of how advanced was the planning, the board's documents included a map dated 1951 and labeled, "School Site Study, Plan A." It not only revealed the proposed school being constructed atop the center of the canal, but it also showed the assessed condemnation values for the canal property and each of the properties bordering it. In addition, there were two letters from the school board attorney in the fall of 1952, informing the board's business manager that the process was underway to buy four lots abutting the canal.

SHATTERED DREAMS

Before long, hundreds of families were investing their savings to build new homes in that area. Prospective buyers were convinced they were at the edge of realizing a dream, having a nice home in safe surroundings for their children and a school within walking distance.

Those dreams were shattered on Aug. 7, when the Albany-based State Health Department ordered 235 families to evacuate with the assistance of federal funds available through President Jimmy Carter's declaration of emergency. It was clear that during the 1970s unusually high precipitation in the area had caused the water table within the canal to rise, bringing contaminants to the surface to spread laterally into the basements of many homes.

A Niagara Gazette reporter at the time, Michael H. Brown, on his own initiative, asked homeowners if he could check out reports that chemical waste had oozed down their basement walls and out to their backyards. At one point, Brown even collected samples from sump pumps to be tested, helping with his investigation.

In the end, his reporting was nominated for three categories of the Pulitzer Prize and drew a special award from the Environmental Protection Agency.

A number of activists addressed congressional committees in the winter and spring of 1979. Among those testifying was Annie Hillis, who spoke how her life was impacted by the chemical invasion of the neighborhood.

"I'm a wife and a mother. I also live close to a dump called Love Canal, I don't want to live there anymore. I hate Love Canal! The strange life that I lead now is filled with disruptions and distractions, sleepless nights, and a grip of fear that only those in similar situations could understand." She talked about her family's struggles with various illnesses and the constant battles with the state Health Department officials over the expanded evacuation program.

Another Love Canal resident then, Grace McCoulf, told the congressional committee that state tests had shown elevated levels of benzene insider her home. Yet, at that time, there were guidelines for the workplace, and she found that her home environment approached the actionable limits for safety.

People often ask if other Love Canals could happen. They probably could but no one is eager to predict that. Eric Zuesse, a writer for Reason magazine, contended in the 1980s, when much of the evidence had been studied several times, that a popular myth held that Love Canal was the result of a single corporation's greed and heartlessness. The actual explanation, however, was much more complex. Zuesse argues that if a serious researcher dug into the matter, Hooker might have been one of the few parties that behaved responsibly.

The company's many warnings were repeatedly ignored by the governmental bodies involved in "desecrating a chemical tomb." In retrospect, others who must share the blame: the Niagara Falls School Board, the Niagara Falls Planning Board, the city engineer at the time, and the state Department of Transportation. Misinformation from the Niagara County Health Department, the state Department of Health, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Justice also was a factor, according to Zuesse.

CONTINUING STORY

Legal issues surrounding Love Canal continue today.

Neighborhood streets north and west of the landfill were refurbished following a $230 million cleanup that involved capping the canal with clay, a plastic liner and topsoil.

Beginning in 1990, about 260 homes were given new vinyl siding, roofs and windows and resold at prices 20 percent below market value. The neighborhood was renamed Black Creek Village.

Residents began filing lawsuits in 2013, claiming they are being sickened by the same buried chemicals from the disaster in the neighborhood in the 1970s.

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