In the mid-1970s, parents in Niagara Falls, New York were struggling to figure out why their children were getting mysteriously ill. For two years, officials from the state had been investigating the environment in Niagara Falls For years, residents had been complaining about “the odors of chemicals and fumes.” By the mid-70s, officials had determined that the smells emanated from an old ditch-turned-toxic waste dump. But while everyone could agree the dump was stinky, no one really seemed to believe it was actually pressing public concern. But then children started to get sick. For this episode of our Environmental History series, we’re telling the story of Love Canal — one of the most consequential environmental disasters in American history.
Transcript for Love Canal, or How Toxic Capitalism Poisoned a Neighborhood and How “Housewives: Fought Back
Researched and written by Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD
Recorded by Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD and Averill Earls, PhD
Sarah: In the mid-1970s, parents in Niagara Falls, New York were struggling to figure out why their children were getting mysteriously ill. For two years, officials from the state had been investigating the environment in Niagara Falls For years, residents had been complaining about “the odors of chemicals and fumes.” By the mid-70s, officials had determined that the smells emanated from an old ditch-turned-toxic waste dump. But while everyone could agree the dump was stinky, no one really seemed to believe it was actually pressing public concern. A reporter, Michael Brown, at the local newspaper the Niagara Gazette wrote a series of articles about the investigations, but for the most part, those investigations didn’t make a huge public impact.
Averill: But then children started to get sick. In April 1978, seven year-old Michael Gibbs started having mysterious rashes, seizures and suddenly developed a blood disorder. His immune system was failing in ways doctors couldn’t seem to explain. His mother, Lois Gibbs, was a stay-at home mom with no background in science or interest in political activism. But when Michael became so ill so quickly and with little explanation, Lois remembered those articles by Michael Brown about the toxic waste around Niagara Falls. Suddenly Lois realized: the buried toxic waste was directly below Michael’s elementary school, the 99th Street School, centrally located in their own little neighborhood on the east side of Niagara Falls, nicknamed Love Canal.
Sarah: For this episode of our Environmental History series, we’re telling the story of Love Canal — one of the most consequential environmental disasters in American history. But as much this story is one about the “poisoned ground” of the Love Canal neighborhood and how it affected the working class people who lived there, it’s also a story about the mothers who turned into political activists and changed the way that the United States copes with environmental disasters through their demand for justice.
I’m Sarah
And I’m Averill
And we are your historians for this episode of DIG
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Sarah: As always, we want to begin by acknowledging the scholarship that we drew on to put together this episode. I mostly used Richard Newman’s excellent book Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present. There’s a joke in academic circles about “academic genealogy,” where you have ‘academic brothers and sisters’ or “grandparents” based on your advisors. So someone who had your same advisor would be your academic sibling! Richard Newman is sort of our academic sibling! He graduated from the UB Dept of History with his PhD in the late 1990s. While most of Newman’s work has been about the history of religion and race in Early America, this book is the one that I’m the most familiar with because almost every semester, I have about 5 students read this book in my local history research class. It’s readable and accessible. In addition to Richard Newman’s book, I also used Keith O’Brien’s more recent book Paradise Falls: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe. This book was written really well and made the whole story come to life in a way that I thought was especially effective. I also used one of Lois Gibb’s books, her memoir Love Canal: My Story, which was published in 1982. I want to just give a huge shout out to the University at Buffalo Special Collections & University Archives – I’ve taken students to do research in the special collections many times, and almost every time I do, I have students who are drawn to the Love Canal story. UB has one of the largest and most comprehensive archival collections on Love Canal in the country. The archivists and librarians that work in the Special Collections are extremely knowledgeable about this history and have done an amazing job interpreting it, preserving it, and presenting it to our community. Finally, when I was wrapping up writing this episode, I watched the new American Experience documentary Poisoned Ground, which is truly fantastic. It was a powerful reminder that nearly all of the people involved in the dramatic events at Love Canal are still alive and able to share their own stories and experiences.
Sarah: One thing I really value about Richard Newman’s book is that he makes the persuasive argument that in order to understand what happened at Love Canal, you need to go back – way back, in fact, to the first time Europeans encountered the region that we now call the Niagara Frontier. If you’re not familiar with the geography of western New York – which most of you likely are not – there is one thing you probably do know: Niagara Falls, which is actually three massive waterfalls in the Niagara River that crash nearly one million gallons of water per second. The river is the outflow of the entire Great Lakes system, flowing down the Niagara Escarpment (a long, arcing slope that stretches from Wisconsin to western New York) until it dumps over the edge of the escarpment into the Niagara gorge. This landscape is really pivotal to our region – our location along Lake Erie, the river, the escarpment, the gorge – is really embedded in the culture of Western New York and the Niagara Frontier.
Averill: Before European contact, the region was controlled by the powerful confederacy of the Haudenosaunee, also often known as the Iroquois. The group consisted of five nations, from east to west: the Mohawk, the Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. While the center of their region was in the Finger Lakes region between the Genesee River and Canandaigua Lake, as the ‘keepers of the western door’ in the Confederacy, the Seneca traveled all over western New York hunting and fishing. Seneca men traveled along the Niagara River setting up seasonal hunting and fishing camps, including in the area that would later be known as Love Canal. While the Haudenosaunee were incredibly powerful amid other indigenous groups in the Eastern woodlands and in the early years of European settlement, the American Revolution was a major turning point. Like the all of the rest of the Haudenosaunee except the Oneida, the Seneca sided with the British, who had been an ally years before in the Seven Years’ War. To retaliate against the Haudenosaunee for siding with the British and to prevent this ‘enemy within’ from holding sway in the colonies, George Washington sent General Sullivan to lead a campaign through New York state to attack the tribes, with the goal of utter subjugation. The Sullivan Campaign destroyed Haudenosaunee food stores, orchards, farm land, and villages. After the war, the weakened tribes had little choice but to cede territory to the victorious Americans. The Seneca’s ancestral land in the Finger Lakes region were seized and the tribe moved to western New York in five different reservations: Allegany, Cattaraugus, Oil Spring, Buffalo Creek (in the city of Buffalo), and Niagara Falls.
Sarah: The first Europeans in the region came with the French explorer René-Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, who arrived in Irondequoit Bay in 1669. Like many other Europeans, La Salle was an adventurer keen on finding ways to extract wealth from this new land. La Salle had first sailed to North America with a Jesuit expedition to French Canada. From Seneca people living in the region, La Salle heard about a great river called “the Ohio” that connected to a great sea – this, he reasoned, might just be the long-sought passage to the Pacific Ocean and the spice-rich Asian empires. Hoping to find this “northwest passage,” he navigated the St. Lawrence River by canoe all the way to Irondequoit, which is just outside of present-day Rochester. There, La Salle became sick and was no longer able to travel further, and he went back to the safety of the French settlement in Quebec. A few years later, La Salle headed out again, this time traveling down the St. Lawrence to modern-day Kingston, Ontario, and from there along Lake Ontario until he reached the mouth of the Niagara River (near modern Niagara-on-the-Lake) then up the lower Niagara River to modern-day Lewiston is located. From there, they were forced to carry their canoes following an old Haudenosaunee carrying-place route. It was here that Europeans first encountered Niagara Falls in 1678.
Averill: Right away, La Salle hoped that the Niagara River was the key to opening up the interior of North America for French wealth and glory. Further south than the Ottawa River, which the French used up to that point for westward travel, La Salle hoped that the Niagara held the key to getting further into the continent. Ideally, he hoped, it would turn out to be the longed for “northwest passage.” (Side note: they never found one; the only one that actually exists is essentially through the arctic far north of Canada and wasn’t discovered until the mid-19th century and not successfully navigated until the 20th century.) But La Salle saw the potential in the Niagara River, its falls, and its surrounding land. The group camped on a small island tucked up to the mainland in the river known as Cayuga Island.
Sarah: Here, they got to work building a ship that they hoped would serve not just to explore but to extract wealth in the form of trade goods, especially furs. The ship, Le Griffon, the largest ship to ever enter the Great Lakes at that time – it would be another 80 years before a vessel that big would enter the lakes. In the summer of 1679, La Salle and his crew launched, navigated the Niagara River rapids carefully, and headed out into Lake Erie. Ultimately, the ship made it to Green Bay, Wisconsin, before more or less disappearing – and to this day, no one has ever found evidence of where the Griffon may have gone down or answered how it was lost. La Salle had already moved on, instead of continuing with the Griffon, had gone on to navigate the Mississippi River, where he was eventually murdered by his own disgruntled crew.
Averill: Almost as soon as La Salle saw it for the first time, European-Americans were scheming ways that they could make money from this region, especially out of the majesty of the falls, which readily attracted visitors. The first attempts to control the landscape came when settlers tried to find ways to get around the significant ridges created by the Niagara Escarpment, which is a nearly 900 mile steep, rocky ridge that made travel difficult. European-Americans first tried pulley systems to get materials up and down the escarpment ridges, then later carved roads around the ridges to facilitate trade. After the Seneca were removed from the region and limited to reservations, and the Erie Canal allowed the population in western New York to grow, there was an attempt to dig yet another canal that would bypass Niagara Falls and allow shipping to get from Lake Erie into Lake Ontario. The canal would get vessels over the huge elevation changes with a kind of aquatic ‘steps’ in a massive lock system. This canal was never constructed – instead, Canada built the Welland Canal. But the people of the region were undaunted in their attempts to conquer the astonishing landscape in ways that would help them profit. The falls themselves, for instance, were augmented with a massive staircase known as “the Biddle staircase” that allowed visitors to descend more or less into the falls. (The Biddle staircase no longer exists, but never fear, you can still get into the crashing waters using the Cave of the Winds staircase.) Soon, the Falls were a major tourist attraction, transforming from a place to be awestruck and overcome with the beautiful terror of God’s creation to a place to get cheap thrills, whether it was watching the spectacle of a woman going over the edge in a barrel or a boat full of animals floating to their watery deaths.
Sarah: But the idea that the Niagara region could be used for yet more never disappeared. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a somewhat mysterious entrepreneur named William T. Love arrived in Niagara Falls. Love was a dreamer entranced by the potential of hydroelectric power. The region was already deeply invested in using the falls to generate energy of some kind. In the 1850s, the Niagara Falls Hydraulic Power and Manufacturing Company first attempted to use the falls to generate electricity, While that wasn’t hugely successful, it was bought out by Jacob Schoellkopf, who then made improvements and began to harness the power of the falls into real electricity. A rival company, the Niagara Falls Power Company, consulted with Nikola Tesla on how to most efficiently generate and distribute the electricity they created. Beyond hydroelectric power, western New York was booming with the industries of the Gilded Age: steel, milling, paper manufacturing, chemical manufacturing, and beer brewing. William Love was right to see it as a growing region ripe for development.
Averill: So William Love wasn’t totally irrational for thinking that the region was at the cusp of some really huge scientific and industrial breakthroughs. But Love wasn’t a scientist, or really, all that good of planner. His plan was to create a Model City: a planned, perfect, industrial utopia, powered entirely by the falls and connected to the outside world by a navigable canal that would link the upper and lower Niagara River, bypassing the falls themselves and creating a steady, manageable water source for factories and homes. Pneumatic tubes would shoot mail quickly and efficiently to homeowners. Freely available energy, provided by the power of the Niagara, would result in a purely egalitarian society. While this does sound somewhat wacky today – and it really is – this also wasn’t totally irrational. The population of the area was booming, and planned cities marked with modern conveniences and futuristic elements seemed possible. Newman points to the “White City” of the Chicago’s World Fair in 1893, a utopian vision of what a city could be. Even Tesla saw the region as the epitome of the human ability to harness the raw power of nature for progress and development. At an event in Buffalo to celebrate some of the first hydroelectric power to light up the city, Tesla remarked that while “we have many a monument of past ages; we have the palaces and pyramids, the temples of the Greek and the cathedrals of Christendom. In them is exemplified the power of men, the greatest of nations, the love of art and religious devotion. But that monument at Niagara has something of its own, more in accord with our present thoughts and tendencies. It is a monument worthy of our scientific age, a true monument of enlightenment and of peace. It signifies the subjugation of natural forces to the service of man, the discontinuance of barbarous methods, the relieving of millions from want and suffering.”
Sarah: In this context in the Niagara region, Love’s fantastical vision doesn’t actually seem all that wild. In hopes of bringing his Model City to reality, Love acquired some land south of the falls, enthusiastically promoted his scheme to investors and newspapers, and actually broke ground on the canal that would connect Model City to the rest of the region. Workers began digging. The first trench — about a mile long, 80 feet wide, and fifteen feet deep — was excavated. A small settlement grew up around the project. People believed in it to the point where they invested in bonds to help fund the project. But a series of economic setbacks, including an economic down turn in the Panic of 1893 and rising land prices in Niagara County slowly strangled Love’s dream. It took a long time for people to realize that the project was faltering because Love was such an energetic businessman, organizing events to bring in more investors and generating exciting headlines. But, as Richard Newman points out, by 1896 Love had (intentionally or not) created what would later become known as a Ponzi scheme, taking in new investments to pay off previous investors. The Model City company went bankrupt, all of its assets seized, and Love took off to move further west. All that remained of the planned “Model City” was Love’s Canal, the huge trench dug for a canal that would never come to be.
Averill: Love’s Model City may have gone bust, but the city of Niagara Falls didn’t – in fact, it was booming. And while electricity was the industry of the turn of the 20th century, a new industry developed that could use electricity in new and exciting ways: the chemical industry. Elon Huntington Hooker founded the Hooker Electrochemical Company in Niagara Falls in 1905. He was, in many ways, yet another exemplary figure of his age: an engineer, an industrialist, a man who believed deeply in the power of chemistry to improve human life. Hooker had grown up in Rochester during that city’s technological boom, kicked off by George Eastman’s Kodak company, which innovated in the mid-19th century technology of photography. Beyond photography, though, Kodak made Rochester into a haven for technological innovation, spinning off companies like Bausch and Lomb and Xerox. Elon Hooker grew up in this tech environment. So after a short career in government, Hooker turned his attention to chemical manufacturing and founded Hooker Chemical, which made chlorine and chlorine-based compounds, used in everything from water treatment to agriculture to the manufacture of plastics. The plentiful supply of fresh water, supplied by Niagara Falls, was critical to the efficient chemical production. By the middle of the twentieth century, Hooker Chemical was one of the most important industrial employers in Western New York.
Sarah: Elon Hooker saw his chemical work in almost the same way that William Love saw his Model City: that science and technology had the power to change life on earth for the better. During the 1930s, probably inspired by the trend in Depression-era mural painting, Hooker commissioned a mural painter to create paintings for inside the Hooker headquarters in New York City. One of the murals depicted a man wearing a suit and hat holding his arms up, God-like, over a an unfolding technological scene full of workers, machinery, railroad tracks, and barrels of chemicals. The other depicted a man, fettered in chains, looking out over a misty future that contained orbs that look both like planets and like molecules, floating in a mountainous abyss. The mural wanted to depict the work of Hooker Chemical as working to free modern man from the ‘shackles of ignorance’ that kept him rooted in the possibilities of the moment, free to enter a mysterious future where anything might be possible. A couple decades later, Hooker would go beyond murals to midcentury ad campaigns that would advertise the forward-thinking, even scifi work being done by company, with ads that described what was possible with “chemagination.” And critically, as Newman points out, there was no indication in that there could ever be a downside to chemicals or chemical production.
Averill: Hooker died in 1938 in a car accident. But the company he founded continued to be incredibly productive, even playing a small role in the United States government’s Manhattan Project, which developed nuclear weapons during and after World War II. In fact, the war accelerated Hooker Chemical’s production significantly. We’ll quote from Newman here because he puts this really well: “From head to toe, the average GI was literally draped in chemical material: plastics lined his protective helmets and insulted his walkie-talkies to ensure smooth communication on the battlefield, phosphoric acid created rustproofing material in his guns and weaponry, rubber made his dangerous life more tolerable, cushioning the soles of his boots, securing bandages on his injured feet and hands, and insulating his gas masks; carbonized textiles made his pants and shirts durable in even the worst conditions, and finally, a bevy of acids served as building blocks for the explosives he and other grunts relied on day after day.”[1] The result was soaring profits and incredible production from the Niagara Falls plant – and literal tons of toxic waste that was created as a byproduct.
Sarah: While Hooker wanted to present its work as forward-looking, progressive, and futuristic with no downsides, the reality was that all that “chemagination” did necessarily create a significant amount of waste that needed to be dealt with. Hooker Chemical needed a disposal site, and the abandoned “Love’s Canal,” was conveniently available. It was already a sizeable hole in the ground, full of nothing but runoff and rainwater. The pit was only four miles away from the Hooker plant, which made it convenient for transporting truckloads of waste. Moreover, the canal was already lined with natural clay. Hooker Chemical believed that that clay layer would serve as a natural barrier to prevent any waste chemicals from leaking into the surrounding soil. The company began using the old canal in 1941, and later that year, purchased the land from the city.
Averill: Between 1942 and 1946, during its peak years of wartime production, Hooker Chemical deposited thousands of barrels of chemical waste into the old Love Canal. Most of the waste was thrown into the canal in barrels, but the barrels were mostly reused, so they were corroded. Other barrels were made with fiberboard that the liquid waste simply broke down and leaked through. One worker recalled that “only” four or five barrels per load delivered to the canal broke open when they were deposited into the canal. Sometimes, they didn’t even bother with barrels, and instead pumped liquid waste directly into the canal. There was essentially no concern about the potential dangers of all this byproduct. A system of color coded dots distinguished the most hazardous barrels, but nothing different or special was done with them. Workers, though, believed the waste was dangerous – one worker later remembered how once, his boots had been eaten through by the chemicals. Hooker Chemical believed that this was a carefully planned, organized, and well-executed plan of disposal; they also believed that “nature” would take care of the chemicals if they leached into the soil. By 1953, Hooker stopped using the canal and sealed it. The plan had been to close the pit with a clay cap. Later, when it became clear that the cap was not in fact there, Hooker would claim that subsequent land owners had removed it. But according to Richard Newman, later investigations cast doubt on whether Hooker actually had capped the pit at all. Very little was done to keep people out of the area. Only one section, the most northern part, was fenced. Residents later recalled swimming in the portion of the canal that was still open even while other dumping was happening in other sections of the canal.
Sarah: At the same time that Hooker was filling the old Love Canal with barrels full of chemicals, the population of Niagara Falls and Western New York was booming. Nationwide, the benefits of the GI bill drove millions of World War II veterans to apply for mortgages for single family homes. Combined with the intense social pressure of the Cold War for containment (not just containing communism, but containing the ‘nuclear family’ in its own home) and conformity led to a massive housing crisis in the postwar. This boom in population was spurred, too, by the success of businesses like Hooker Chemical, which provided a living wage to factory workers across the region. With industry eating up much of the space in the city along the river, to accommodate the growing population, housing developments began to spread south and east of the city. In the 1920s, the city of Niagara Falls had absorbed the farmland that had once been intended to be William Love’s Model City. (This area had at one point been known as Lasalle.) One particular rural area, known as Lot 60, which consisted mostly of orchards and farmland, seemed especially promising for development. In order to entice private development into building housing, the city had to establish a presence. An elementary school would help to bring young families eager for single-family homes and public schools. But since the land legally belonged to Hooker, the city had to buy it before they could start development. So in 1953, the Niagara Falls Board of Education purchased the land that had once been William Love’s canal, and then become a dump for toxic waste, from Hooker Chemical for one dollar.
Averill: The property deed signed by Niagara Falls alerted the city to the truth about the land: “[Niagara Falls was] advised that the premises had been filled in whole or in part, to the present grade level thereof with waste products resulting from the manufacturing of chemicals by the grantor [Hooker chemical] at its plant in the city of Niagara Falls, New York and the grantee [Niagara Falls] assumes all risk and liability incident to the use thereof.”[2] So the city was aware that the land they had bought was full of chemical waste. Indeed, Hooker was never secretive about what lay beneath the ground in Lot 60. Bjarne Klaussen, the executive vice-president of Hooker Chemical, took members of the school board on a walking tour of the property in 1952, then followed up with a letter that was clear about the “potentially hazardous nature of the property.”[3] None of this dissuaded the board from moving ahead with the deal, though, and by 1955, the city of Niagara Falls had already completed an elementary school – the 99th Street School – that sat directly on top of the Love Canal waste dump. Right away, the board ran into problems. The newly-laid foundation of the school sank into the dump, and construction workers had to move the school 30 yards further north to where the land was more reliable.
Sarah: The school board sold off the land surrounding the school to encourage housing development. Again, when they sold the land to private developers, Hooker warned that the land had been used for chemical waste disposal, in writing and in person. Representatives of Hooker came to school board meetings to remind the board that when they had sold that land to the city, it was potentially hazardous. According to coverage in the Niagara Gazette, A. W. Chambers (a representative from Hooker) told the board that “there are dangerous chemicals buried there in drums, in loose form, in solids and in liquids.” While they had sold it to the school board, they thought it was best suited to “a park or some surface activity,” not for development that would disturb the ground. Hooker’s in-house counsel, Ansley Wilcox, even warned that “the residues which had been buried [at Love Canal] …might well have a serious deleterious effect on foundations, water lines, and sewer lines …” and that “personal injuries could result from contact” with the waste.
(Side note: I was totally thrown by the name Ansley Wilcox here, because Ansley Wilcox is a really important person in Buffalo history and I was not expecting to see the name associated with Love Canal. Ansley Wilcox was a legal scholar who moved to Buffalo in the 1870s and became really influential in the area, including serving as chair of medical jurisprudence at the University at Buffalo. But he became famous because in 1901, when William McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo, he opened up his house to the vice president, his good friend Theodore Roosevelt, who was then sworn in at his house on Delaware Avenue in Buffalo. Averill, you’ve been in this house! Anyway, Ansley Wilcox died in 1930 and only had daughters, so I was confused as to how he became involved in Love Canal – turns out, this was his nephew, Ansley Wilcox II. It took me way too long to figure that out, and has no bearing on this episode whatsoever.)
Averill: So in Hooker’s defense — and this is the defense that the company and its successors would use in court cases over the span of decades — they had warned the city about the potential toxicity of the ground at Love Canal. The company, of course, would later argue that this absolved them of responsibility for everything that followed. But ultimately, the deed did not explicitly saydo not build a school here. It did not say: the chemicals buried here include poisons that can cause cancer, miscarriage, birth defects, neurological damage, and death.
Sarah: By the mid-1970s, roughly 800 families lived in the Love Canal neighborhood. And for most of them, living in the Love Canal development was the culmination of the American dream. According to Newman, “the pretty tree-lined streets bisecting the ten-block neighborhood colloquially known for the old canal that once ran through the area contained rows of attractive and affordable housing stock. Kids walked to schools located only blocks away while their parents talked to one another like longtime friends. Many area fathers had secure, well-paying jobs in Niagara Falls’ thriving industrial and chemical sectors, lending an aura of confidence to Love Canal life.”[4] (Just as an aside here, we’re talking about lower and middle class families, families that lived on a single wage. Many of these fathers worked in the industry of Niagara Falls, many of them unionized, and so this is emblematic of this moment in post war history.) After Hooker had transferred the land to the Niagara Falls School Board, they had resold parcels to private developers to create a residential neighborhood. By 1960, 100 homes had been built to create the center of the neighborhood, and subsequent building grew from there in expanding circles complete with churches, stores, and eventually the Summit Park Mall. A highway, the LaSalle Expressway, arced around the southern end of the neighborhood, connecting it conveniently to the industrial heart of the city. It wasn’t really a suburb because it was within the limits of the city itself, but it was beautiful, spacious, conveniently located, and close to the waterfront of the Niagara River. It was also a prosperous and vibrant neighborhood, with mostly young families, comfortably large homes, few vacant properties, stable real estate market.
Averill: And yet, for decades, people also had questions about the neighborhood, too. When inspecting the LaSalle Expressway in the mid 1960s, a fire chief recalled nearly being bowled over by the stench of chemicals. When he investigated, he determined the smell was coming from an area of the Love Canal neighborhood near 102nd street. He alerted the city that it might be dangerous and need attention – nothing ever happened. But by the 1970s, there had been enough concern raised that there was an attempt to investigate the area to better understand the situation. Homeowners raised concerns about chemical burns that children got after playing near the old Love Canal site, and the Niagara Gazette reported that some residents reported material leaking into their basements. State health investigators who responded after these concerns found that dangerous carcinogens like Mirex (a pesticide and flame retardant) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs, used in a number of things like paint and paper) were present in the soil at Love Canal, but they were still very slow to act. It wasn’t until 1977 that the state actually pushed the city to remediate the area. Because of concerns raised by residents, a congressman from nearby Tonawanda named John J. LaFalce started to pressure the city to do more to reassure the residents that they were safe.
Sarah: At the urging of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), the local technology company Calspan undertook a study of the area in 1977. However, this study was done in secret and not shared with residents in the Love Canal neighborhood or in Niagara Falls. The study was very clear: the chemical waste dump at Love Canal was leaching harmful chemicals into the surrounding soil and water. But the study also concluded that the problem could probably be contained easily using a better clay cover and other remedial measures. During this period in 1977, most everyone involved believed that the dump didn’t pose too serious a risk and didn’t merit too. There was really only one person who felt the problem was potentially catastrophic and needed a more serious response: Lawrence Moriarty, the regional Environmental Protection Agency officer. Moriarty visited the neighborhood himself and from his description, it was very clear that the problem was not really a secret to any one in the area. He described rusted storage drums just laying around on the ground and giant potholes that had opened to reveal more drums underneath. In houses, basement sump pumps were filled with a black, tarry substance. “The odors penetrate your clothing and adhere to your footwear,” he wrote.[5] Moriarty wrote to the EPA in Washington to say that the chemical leachate problem wouldn’t be a quick or easy fix, and in fact might require a serious and ongoing remediation. More importantly, Moriarty suspected that more should be done to preserve the health of the residents: “Serious thought should be given to the purchase of some or all of the homes affected or at least to those willing to sell.”[6] It may even be necessary for the state and federal government consider whether they might need to buy the residents’ homes or rehouse families until the area was safe to inhabit. Moriarty thought this might only require the houses right on and around the canal, which would control the costs. Nevertheless, the city of Niagara Falls dismissed this suggestion. Instead, they opted for the minimum suggested by the Calspan report, which was mostly limited to increased drainage.
Averill: But residents’ concerns didn’t go away with this study and response. In the spring of 1978, the state of New York and the federal government started another study, this time sampling air, soil, and groundwater focused on about a dozen homes closest to the old canal. Again, the study confirmed that chemicals had leached out of the dump and into the surrounding water and soil. Then, the New York State Department of Health conducted a survey of 97 families clustered around the landfill, gathering detailed health histories of the families in the area. So by 1978, the local, state, and federal authorities had been discussing, studying, and debating how to respond to the situation at Love Canal for at least two years. But in 1978, suddenly the issue went from something that could be marked ‘confidential’ or kept within certain circles, to a huge public controversy that would ultimately reach well beyond the Niagara Frontier.
Sarah: Part of the timing in 1978 stemmed from the unique climate of western New York. The winter of 1977 was brutal. When the snow finally melted, the intense weather had unearthed barrels of waste and the massive snowfall that hit the region in the infamous Blizzard of ‘77 meant that the spring thaw created record amounts of runoff and flooding. This, combined with the geological make up of the region, meant that water flushed through the canal (not as well sealed with clay as the Hooker folks might have believed), through the soil, and into the bedrock, which allowed chemicals to enter the groundwater which was used for the region’s tap water. Chemicals leached in to people’s basements and oil slicks stood on puddles of standing water in backyards. Houses reeked of dangerous chemicals and gunk stuck to children’s boots. This all meant that in 1977 and 1978, the chemicals were more present in the everyday lives of Love Canal residents than they had been before. The same year, journalists like Michael Brown at the Niagara Gazette began running a serious of stories of about the neighborhood and its families. One story, for instance, followed the experience of two families, the Voorhees and Schroeders, who lived on 99th Street, which was more or less on the old canal. The families had nice homes with nice big backyards and easy access to the 99th Street elementary school. But in the mid-70s, they began to notice strange things – chemicals leached in their basement, which gave the entire home a rancid smell. Their above ground pool, a symbol of middle class prosperity, rose several feet as the ground swelled because of the contents of the canal shifting. Their dogs lost their fur in big clumps and died. Family members developed unexplainable rashes. Both families felt trapped – because who would want to buy their house if it was poisoned by toxic waste?
Averill: Those human interest stories helped others in the area better understand what all the rumors and mysterious scientific studies meant. Lois Gibbs, who would go on to be one of the most famous voices of the Love Canal residents, had read the newspaper articles and heard the rumors, but hadn’t given them much thought. She described her home in Love Canal “a lovely neighborhood in a quiet residential area, with lots of trees and lots of children playing outside.”[7] When she saw stories in the Gazette about families like the Voorheeses or the Schroeders, she felt pity for them but made no connection to her own life in Love Canal, which seemed totally perfect. But in the spring of 1978, Lois Gibbs’s son became suddenly and seriously ill, developing a seizure disorder and a blood disorder. Her son, Michael, attended the 99th Street elementary school. Trying to understand why her son was suddenly so desperately ill, Gibbs began reading voraciously about the history of Love Canal and suddenly realized that Michael’s school may have been causing his health crisis. Gibbs went to her brother-in-law, Wayne Hadley, a scientist in the biology department at the University at Buffalo, and asked him about what she’d been reading in the Gazette about families like the Voorheeses and Schroeders: could chemical waste in the ground have made Michael sick? Hadley responded simply: “yes.”
Sarah: Gibbs was not alone. On the next street over, Anne Hillis’s son, a kindergartener at the 99th Street School, also became desperately ill in the spring of 1978. She recalled that the school called her to tell her that he son wasn’t feeling well. Soon, he was in the hospital with acute gastroenteritis, followed by years of more nebulous ailments like mysterious allergies, asthma, and repeated respiratory infections. Like Gibbs, Hillis began to make the connection between the rumors about the testing that had taken place at the 99th Street school and her own family. Luella Kenny, who lived on 96th Street, enjoyed a big backyard near Black Creek, a small stream that ran through the area. Every spring when the creek flooded, Kenny’s children liked to splash in the runoff. But in the spring of 1978, Kenny’s youngest son Jon Allen suddenly became severely ill and was diagnosed with nephrosis, a serious kidney disorder. Over the next months, his condition seemed to resist treatment and developed convulsions and hallucinations. In October 1978, Jon Allen passed away.
Averill: In the wake of Jon Allen’s illness, Luella Kenny began putting the pieces together, too. Kenny was a cancer researcher at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo. She understood the role that toxic chemicals could play in cancer and other illnesses, and she had noted the unusual things in the area like noxious odors and slime in the creek. But at the same time, science demanded real proof, and Kenny knew that studies in the area hadn’t resulted in the city or state issuing any warnings – surely it couldn’t actually be causing harm?
Sarah: Now, those individual observations – about the weird smells in someone’s basement or a miscarriage or a sick child – started to come together as residents started to share their experiences with one another. As Newman writes, “This lead to a breakthrough in perception about the problem at Love Canal. For, as residents now argued, only by looking at the Love Canal landscape through the prism of family and environmental health – rather than the abstract lens of technical discourses about chemical leachate – would politicans and health officials understand the deep sense of dread that pervaded the sick neighborhood in the summer of 1978.”[8]
Averill: The other thing that happened in the summer of 1978 was that these mothers became activists. After her conversation with her brother-in-law, Lois Gibbs went to the journalist Michael Brown. She wanted to know more. Brown gave her some of the reports he had collected during his research. Suddenly she was reading scientists’ descriptions of “viscous sludge” around the 99th Street school and chemicals clearly identified as carcinogenic and toxic PCBs. After that, Lois became single-minded about the problem at Love Canal. With her brother-in-law’s encouragement, she had undertaken a door knocking campaign through the neighborhood, going from house to house to ask people about their experiences and to sign a petition that she would use to try to get someone to help. She had a speech: “Hi, my name is Lois Gibbs. I live on 101st Street and my son goes to the 99th Street school. And after reading all of these reports in the newspaper, I feel like the school is really unsafe. So would you be willing to sign my petition to shut down the school?” Although she was terrified some would slam their doors in her face, what she found was the opposite: people desperate to be heard. She met people like Debbie Cerrillo, who confided to Gibbs that she had suffered persistent gynecological issues and five miscarriages, and that her children had bloody noses and rashes. Their family dog, Casey, had died young of bone cancer. Debbie signed the petition. Even people who hadn’t been personally affected – yet – signed. Liz Retton, for instance, was a newlywed with a brand new baby who had only lived in Love Canal for a few years. What she was learning about her new neighborhood filled her with anger and dread.
Sarah: Lois Gibbs, energized by the reality that many of her neighbors were in support of her undertaking, went home and starting writing letters to congressmen and senators. She introduced herself was “a homeowner in the City of Niagara Falls near Love Canal.” She had learned from Michael Brown that there was an upcoming hearing in Albany about the situation in Love Canal on August 2, but that was roughly a 4.5 hour drive from Niagara Falls. In the future, she wrote to her congressman John LaFalce, state authorities had to have these conversations in Niagara Falls, where the people who had the most at stake could actually attend. She signed the letter not just from herself, but from the “Love Canal Homeowners Commitee.”
Averill: But Gibbs would need more than letters and petitions. Her brother-in-law, Wayne Hadley, connected her with Richard Lippes, a young lawyer who took on social justice cases and was already invested in environmental causes as a member of the Sierra Club. Hadley also connected her with a cancer researcher from Roswell Park Cancer Center, Beverly Paigen (Pay-gen), who had worked with Lippes in the Sierra Club and considered herself a dedicated environmentalist. With these two behind her, Gibbs took her fight to the public.
Sarah: On August 2, 1978, the Love Canal situation – as those who lived through it would later attest – exploded. A few minutes ago we mentioned that the state Department of Health was undertaking a health survey of 200 families on the two streets directly surrounding the old canal. The survey found the rate of miscarriage was 1.5 times higher than the general population. (Louella Kenny had experienced a miscarriage, for instance, in 1967.) In one section of the Love Canal neighborhood, closest to the worst part of the dump, a staggering 35% of women had had at least one miscarriage. There was an elevated number of birth defects, including cleft palates and club feet, with the highest incidence again closest to the area where the most toxic chemicals had been buried. But none of these details had yet been made public.
Averill: On August 2, the New York State Department of Health convened a meeting to discuss the findings of the report. The state officials had heard from Lois Gibbs and knew about her huge petition, so they were expecting a sizeable turnout – but Lois’s warning that Niagara Falls residents wouldn’t be able to make the trip to Albany apparently went over their head, because in reality, there were less than 30 people in attendance. Lois Gibbs, though, was there, along with a couple of neighbors from Love Canal. Whalen revealed the results of the study, including that they had identified more than 80 chemical compounds, seven of which were cancer-causing in animals and one (benzene) that was already known to cause cancer in humans. After that, Whalen declared a state of emergency in Love Canal and that pregnant women and children under the age of two who lived on 97th and 99th street and on the northern border of the canal area evacuate the area as soon as possible. People living near those streets should also avoid spending much time in their basements and should not consume vegetables grown in home gardens. Beyond that, the city of Niagara Falls would delay opening the 99th Street School in the fall (just weeks away) while they undertook “corrective construction activities.”
Sarah: Gibbs was stunned. Where were evacuated people supposed to go? The area was toxic to the point that pregnant women and small children should leave, but only on certain streets? And the rest of them should just … stay there? It was more than she could take. She screamed at Whalen from the audience: “You’re murdering us!”
Averill: Gibbs went home and started organizing. She called a meeting for her neighbors just two days after the Albany meeting. At this meeting, she and her neighbors worked to create the loose organization that she had called the Love Canal Homeowners Committee, though now called the Love Canal Homeowners Association, which would be headquartered at a home in the neighborhood. Gibbs was elected its president. The LHCA had two big positions that they were insistent the officials pay attention to. One, that the entire neighborhood, not just the homes on the streets immediately on and around the old canal, needed to be evacuated, and the New York State government needed to absorb the expense of the lost property values. Second, they believed that Love Canal represented not just an environmental disaster but also a public health crisis.
Sarah: Just outside of the Love Canal neighborhood was a housing complex called Griffon Manor, filled with mostly Black renters. The complex was technically outside the boundaries of Love Canal, which meant that the studies and evacuation orders didn’t apply to them. Neither did the Love Canal Homeowners Association consider the Black renters members of their community with a rightful place in the organization. When renters tried to get involved in the environmental activism at Love Canal, they often received racist pushback. One official told Lois Gibbs not to include the Black residents because they had “criminal records” and might be dangerous. At some heated meetings, LCHA members used racial slurs. Most LCHA members, even when they didn’t react with overt racism, believed that renters didn’t have the same stake in the issue as the homeowners and therefore they simply didn’t have a place in the movement. A group of Black mothers formed their own group, the Concerned Love Canal Renters Association made up of individuals like Agnes Jones, Vera Starks, Elene Thornton, and Sarah Herbert.
Averill: As the LCHA demanded attention and Lois Gibbs talked to the press, the attention of officials at the local, state, and federal level was on Love Canal. Congressman John LaFalce secured a multimillion-dollar rescue package, carved out of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, which contained provisions for funding for environmental clean-ups. The four million dollars would help to pay for the remediation of the neighborhood. When LaFalce made the announcement in Niagara Falls, the Niagara Gazette captured a photograph of the congressman where Debbie Cerrillo, an officer in the LCHA, was in the frame. Newman points out that this image really captured the new reality of the situation at Love Canal: that citizen-activists of the Love Canal neighborhood were now the major force driving the government response to the environmental crisis. Just days later, another major announcement came: President Jimmy Carter declared Love Canal a federal emergency, a declaration that opened up significantly more funds. It was, Newman writes, “the first time that a human-made disaster qualified for federal emergency status under the Federal Disaster Relief Act….If nothing else, this meant that the roughly 240 families living on the 97th and 99th Streets would be removed at government expense.”[9]
Sarah: By late September, the Love Canal neighborhood, especially the inner ring of 97th and 99th street closest to the old canal, was largely abandoned. The New York state government had spent $5 million dollars buying out homeowners inside the relocation area, with another 85 houses to go. The city of Niagara Falls had a new housing crisis as Love Canal residents tried to find places to stay – hotels in the tourist-centric city were packed. The homeowners in the outer rings of the neighborhood were increasingly despondent – they felt trapped, feeling unable to stay in the toxic environment but also unable to sell their homes. Now, things became even more elevated as the state came into the neighborhood to start the clean up process. Workers would dig massive tranches around the old canal, line them with tile and clay pipes to collect the noxious chemicals and sluice them off into a holding tank. In the process, the disturbed chemicals were released into the air. Should children be kept indoors? What if they caught fire? What if the trapped gasses and flammable liquids exploded? The state tried to reassure residents that the remediation would be harmless, even if they could smell the chemicals. Robert Huffaker from the state board of public health said to the residents at an information meeting: “It will smell like hell. It will smell like Hooker. But it won’t hurt you.” Residents were enraged. The LCHA threatened to halt the process with protests and attorney Richard Lippes threatened to take the state to court. Finally, the state agreed to a safety plan that would include waiting buses, idling on street corners in the neighborhood, ready to zip residents away if the remediation became suddenly dangerous.
Averill: Life in the neighborhood felt bleak. The area around 97th and 99th street felt like a warzone, enclosed by a chain link fence with signs that read “Admittance by Permit Only.” The 99th Street School, inside the enclosed area, was permanently closed, and children were bussed out to the Cleveland Street Elementary school, which had been closed by the school board years before and only reopened to accommodate the Love Canal children. But the neighborhood was not fully abandoned – hundreds of residents remained in the outer rings. Gibbs, the LCHA, their attorney and scientist allies were all convinced that the toxic waste had not just affected the inner ring streets, but also the surrounding area. On February 8, 1979, the state did expand its evacuation order to include pregnant women and small children between 97th and 103rd streets. But residents needed hard evidence to get the state and federal government to act more broadly. That evidence came in the form of the ‘swale theory,’ developed by Beverly Paigen from Roswell Park.
Sarah: This theory helped to document that there was a correlation between negative health outcomes and areas in the neighborhood where water collected. Pictures of the neighborhood show that there was often a lot of standing water, especially when the creek rose in the spring. When there was a lot of water (after heavy rains, during the spring thaws) runoff water would move through these ‘swales’ that functioned essentially like streams, moving toxic water from the center of the canal area to the outer rings of the neighborhood. Gibbs later wrote, “we took out our health map with a different symbol for each disease group: central-nervous system problems, including hyperactivity, migraines and epilepsy; birth defects and miscarriages; and respiratory disorders. Suddenly a pattern emerged!” Birth defects, she said, mapped perfectly, appearing in houses that stood back to back, for instance, or houses on the north end of the canal all had respiratory illnesses. The state was resistant to the theory, though, even when Gibbs and Paigen expanded their survey to create a more definitive map. Paigen flew to Albany to present their hypothesis, complete with data and maps, to representatives of the NYS Dept of Health. After a long meeting, Paigen arrived back in Buffalo only to pick up a newspaper and see that the health department officials had gone directly to the press and dismissed the study as “useless housewife data” not gathered in a “scientific manner.” When they met with Governor Carey, he protested that New York State’s health department was “one of the best” and couldn’t have overlooked these additional health effects.
Averill: Frustrated with the slow and skeptical response from the New York State government, members of the LHCA testified before Congress in the winter and spring of 1979. The residents’ testimony is sharp and emotional, demanding that Congress to take them seriously. Here’s an example from Anne Hillis’s testimony taken in late March. (This is accessible at the UB Special Collections website.) “State officials announced on February 8, 1979 that all children under 2 and pregnant women should be moved out of the area. If it’s not safe for them, what about my child – he’s not 2 years old, but he was 2 once, he was born here and he’s sick, he was when he was 2, now he’s 10, and he’s still sick. And what about pregnancies? Many women cannot get pregnant because they’ve had hysterectomies due to excessive bleeding, tumors and cancer at young ages. I, myself, am in this group…We are not guinea pigs. We are humans. Humans with human needs1 We want hope, for our children, we want simple things like a spring garden, even this has been denied us since the State has said the vegetables may not be safe for human consumption….Our City, Our State has done nothing to help the people in the areas outside of the 99th and 97th Streets, if our Federal Government does not help us, we are all doomed at Love Canal. My God help us and our Country, for we need help, desperately.”
Sarah: Congress also heard testimony that winter and spring from former Hooker employees. In one explosive moment, Al Gore, at the time in Congress and serving as a chair of the hearings, questioned Jerome Wilkenfeld, a former Hooker employee that at the time worked for Occidental Chemical, which by this point had bought out Hooker. Wikenfeld testified that Hooker had known as early as 1958 – just five years after selling the land to the Niagara Falls Board of Education – that the site was not adequately sealed and that chemicals were leaching into the surrounding groundwater. Gore revealed a memo, written by Wikenfeld himself, informing the Hooker executives that four children in the Love Canal neighborhood had been burned when drums of a chemical used to make poison gas had emerged from the ground near the 99th Street School. In the memo, Wilkenfeld wrote that the executives responded by saying, “We should not do anything unless requested by the school board.”[10] When Gore asked Wilkenfeld why Hooker did not feel as though they should inform the public about the chemicals, Wilkenfeld responded: “We did not feel we could do this without incurring substantial liabilities for implying that the current owners of the property were doing an inadequate care on the property.” So Hooker’s excuse for not informing the community that they lived on top of toxic chemicals that could cause immense harm was that they wanted to protect the Niagara Falls School Board from potential liability. This was in keeping with the deed they had signed back in 1953 when Hooker had tried to wash their hands of responsibility by including the clause that any problems that stemmed from the dump would be the problem of the school board and the city of Niagara Falls.
Averill: As the crisis in Love Canal unfolded, other communities started to express concern about the other end of Love’s canal in nearby Lewiston on the lower Niagara River. That area had also been used for burying chemical waste in the 1950s. Niagara County started testing and eventually determined there were at least 38 dumps in the county. How much more existed across New York state? Spurred by investigative journalism from the Buffalo Courier Express, the state undertook a survey of toxic waste dump sites and found that the state was literally littered with them: 200 in Niagara and Erie counties alone, five in Allegany county, 22 in Oswego county, 13 in St. Lawrence county, 12 in Saratoga county, 8 in Renssalear, 4 in Steuben, five in Yates. All but 8 counties out 62 contained at least one toxic waste dump. Clearly this was an issue that went far beyond Love Canal. And it wasn’t just New York State – also in 1979, the EPA was investigating a similar toxic waste dump near Louisville, Kentucky that ended up nicknamed “the Valley of the Drums” because it was so loaded with drums of chemicals that filled the open dumping area. Literally 10,000 drums of dangerous chemicals were just strewn around, on the ground, leaking black sludge.The EPA estimated in the late 1970s that there were something like 32,000 more dumps across the country. The costs of remediation, evacuation, buying out homeowners,etc., would be astronomical.
Sarah: As the hearings in Congress were taking place, Congressman John LaFalce had been cooking up legislation that would come to the aid of those affected by such toxic waste dumps, making it the responsibility of the federal government. His hope was for a bill that would allow people to file claims in federal court if they were exposed to disposed chemicals with instant payouts of up to 50k, as well as strengthening the enforcement against companies that polluted.Those instant payouts would come from a pot of money he started referring to as a “super fund.” But LaFalce didn’t have enough sway in Congress on environmental issues, and it soon became clear that it wasn’t going anywhere. At the same time, though, the Environmental Protection Agency had been at work developing their own legislation. With so many toxic waste dumps across the country, some of them posing an immediate health threat like Love Canal, who should be responsible for paying for the huge costs of cleaning up and buying out homeowners? The legislation the EPA was developing would create what they also started calling a “superfund” – a huge pot of money that would always be available to call on in the case of these kinds of disasters so that citizens wouldn’t need to wait for new legislation and appropriation each time.
Averill: But there was huge push back on the potential “superfund.” It would place regulations on corporations and limit their ability to do business, potentially hurting the economy. It would also be an enormous amount of money that made some other government agencies like the Office of Management and Budget nervous. The EPA seemed to be stalled on the legislation until Tom Jorling, one of the assistant directors of the EPA,and some representatives of the Office of Management and Budget met with Jimmy Carter in the Oval Office for a budget meeting. To the EPA’s surprise, a representative of the OMB shared with Carter that he disagreed with the OMB’s opposition to the superfund, and that he believed it was too important not to be approved by Congress. If Carter supported the law personally, they suggested, it would have a higher chance of being passed. Carter agreed, and requested Congress pass the EPA’s ‘superfund’ legislation. The Superfund law – actually named the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) was eventually passed and signed into law in December 1980. The law would be funded by polluters themselves – corporations were taxed preemptively but also allowed the EPA to sue companies that had created the dumps to pay federal clean-up costs.
Sarah: In May 1980, tthe EPA learned about the results of yet another public health study in Love Canal, this one focusing on potential chromosomal damage. This study, the EPA hoped, would provide evidence for the agency to sue Hooker Chemical to help with recovery and remediation costs. The study showed that there was an elevated rate of abnormalities that were linked to cancer, birth defects, miscarriages, and other problems. This was an astonishing result. It was a small, but telling, study. EPA officials immediately understood that it was a potential powder keg: one of them said, “when this gets out, people are going to go crazy.”[11] The EPA wanted to move carefully and use the study as leverage with Hooker to try to get them to agree to fund the evacuation of the families remaining in the neighborhood. They figured they might have the weekend to get Hooker’s response and inform President Carter about the study, in hopes that he would respond by declaring a second emergency in Love Canal. But while the EPA was working behind the scenes and trying to get President Carter to act swiftly, the news leaked and newspapers around New York ran front page headlines declaring that the chemicals had caused chromosomal damage and that the residents had not been informed.
Averill: Residents, understandably, were livid. The EPA was aware that there was this enormous danger to the residents remaining in the neighborhood, and they hadn’t told them? The EPA frantically reached out to Lois Gibbs, hoping she would help them connect with the families whose blood had been tested for the study – people who did not even yet know they carried genetic abnormalities. Gibbs spent the night connecting people with the EPA, listening to them panic about what the test results might mean for them and their families. EPA officials flew to Western New York, where they planned to hold a meeting at Congressman John LaFalce’s office and meet with the affected residents. The EPA officials told the crowd, and the television cameras, that they were working to verify the results, and once they had done that, they would work to relocate the rest of the entire neighborhood, including Griffon Manor. That would take until at least Wednesday. Lois Gibbs shouted from the crowd, “Why Wednesday? We’ve been dealing with ‘next Wednesday” for two years! Why not today? My daughter got sick within the space of 48 hours recently. Next time, it will be somebody else. There is no reason for residents to be there one more night!” Gibbs sent a telegram later that day to the White House begging the president to intervene: “Please act immediately. Please save our suffering babies. Please let my people go!”[12]
Sarah: Just a few days later, on May 19, 1980, two of the EPA officials came to the Love Canal neighborhood to meet with residents and discuss the study results. Frank Napal and Dr. James Lucas, went to the Homeowner’s Association office. Tensions were very high – the eruption of Mount St. Helens the day before had taken the nation’s (and the president’s) attention from Love Canal, and Carter was off to see the damage when he had so long avoided coming to Western New York despite repeated trips to New York State during the years of the crisis. While the LCHA waited for the two officials to arrive, Lois Gibbs told them her plan: to barricade the door and keep the men essentially hostage inside the building. (Astonishingly, this was all caught on camera!) I’m going to quote author Keith O’Brien here: “Only Barbara Quimby and Debbie Cerrillo, two mothers from the neighborhood, remained in the office with Gibbs. Most people didn’t want to risk getting arrested. The Gibbs informed Napal that he was a hostage, and when Lucas arrived, she gave him the unsettling news, too. The men heard a two-by-four click into place outside the door of the house. “It shouldn’t be more than two days,” Gibbs said. “Would you like a seat?”[13] Gibbs then called the White House and the EPA’s headquarters to let them know what the LCHA was doing – astonishingly, the White House put her on hold for so long she hung up, saying “Excuse me, but it’s a little stupid to place somebody on hold when they are holding somebody hostage!”
Averill: Eventually, the LCHA women were able to get ahold of a regional EPA official and allowed Napal to explain the situation – he was safe, there were no weapons, it was merely a stunt. Napal decided at one point that he could just walk out the door, but Gibbs reminded him that outside the doors was a mob of angry Love Canal residents. She framed the whole thing as the LCHA simply protecting the two men from the angry mob gathered outside. It got even more tense. When Dr. Lucas, a little more unsettled than Napal, described to his bosses at the EPA the “suspects” holding him hostage, Lois GIbbs pulled the phone cord from the wall and said to him, “Relax, I don’t think you’ll be here long enough to damage your chromosomes.” Eventually, through attorney Richard Lippes, the FBI told the LHCA that they had just a couple of minutes to release the men before they descended on the office, Gibbs and her colleagues let the men leave the house. But she also said, “if we do not have a disaster declaration Wednesday by noon, then what they have seen here today is just a Sesame Street picnic.”[14]
Sarah: To be clear, Gibbs and the LCHA didn’t really have a plan – they didn’t even know what they would do on Wednesday. It was essentially a bluff. But on May 21 – the Wednesday that Gibbs warned the federal government about – President Jimmy Carter signed a second emergency declaration order. Deputy EPA Administrator Barbara Blum stood before a row of cameras and read out: “Today, the federal government and the state of New York are setting in motion an action plan to temporarily relocate over 700 families in the Love Canal area of Niagara Falls.” While she was careful to say that the test results were only preliminary and more work would need to be done, they did “suggest very significant health risks.”[15] In Niagara Falls, Lois Gibbs strung the phone cord out the front door of the LCHA as she talked to the EPA on the phone – while Blum spoke in the EPA press conference, a representative from the agency repeated what she said to Gibbs, who repeated the news to the waiting LCHA crowd.
Averill: In the following months, Love Canal families received buy-outs for their homes – though that was also marked by red tape. Hundreds of the remaining families left the neighborhood, selling their properties to the state-run Love Canal Area Revitalization Authority (LCARA). The work continued, though, to remediate the area. Occidental Chemical ultimately had to pay out $250 million dollars for their negligence, including $27 million that went to the residents of the neighborhood. “You could give me all the money in the whole world,” Louella Kenny said in a recent documentary, “it’s not going to bring Jon back to me.” Inside the fenced area of the center of the neighborhood, everything including the 99th Street School, were demolished. But by the early 1990s, LCARA determined that the homes and land in the outer ring to the north and west of the center of the neighborhood were safe and could be resold. By the late 1990s, basically all of those outer ring houses had been sold and were filled, again, with young families. Their purchase agreements included a provision that homeowners “acknowledge the receipt of documents relating to Love Canal’s toxic past.”[16] Many cheered on the resettlement of the area, including, amazingly, The Niagara Gazette, which ran an editorial that said that ten years was plenty of time to search for potential problems. “Let’s get on with the sale of homes,” the editors declared. The neighborhood changed its name to avoid association with the negative history – it now “Black Creek Village.”
Sarah: But if you look on Google for “Black Creek Village,” it’s very clear that no one in the area calls it that. Indeed, on Google Maps, the area is clearly labeled “Love Canal,” and “Black Creek Village” doesn’t seem to exist. Today, if you drive through the area, you will find the northern end of the neighborhood, on the north side of Cayuga Street, is a typical suburb with postage stamp yards, above ground pools, and tree lined streets. On the other side, only a handful of houses remain, such as on 96th street – where a playground now exists, in sight of the chainlink fence that stops people from entering the old canal site. 98th and 99th street no longer exist. On the east side, 100th, 101st, and 102nd street are still there but are overgrown with weeds and house only facilities for construction businesses. This was an incredibly dramatic period, but somehow, astonishingly, it has sort of disappeared in western New York – the only marker was raised in the early 2000s, far from the actual center for the Love Canal site,that displays the timeline of the response to the disaster. And in teaching in WNY for over a decade, I have found that virtually none of my students – even the ones from Niagara County – have ever heard of the environmental disaster.
Averill: The work of the LCHA and the mothers-turned-environmental activists had an important legacy. The Superfund legislation has done immense good, for instance, But at the same time, the other results of Love Canal – the desire to prioritize the economic good of the city over the safety of its residents, or the quick attempt to more or less erase the neighborhood and its toxic reality from the local memory of the area, as just two examples – speak to how difficult environmental change really is in the United States and beyond. The Superfund has suffered as Congress has declined to reauthorize the tax levied on polluters. Since 2001, the vast majority of the funding for the Superfund has come not from those causing the damage, but from taxpayers. The result has also meant that the number of sites that have benefited from the fund has steadily decreased. In 2021, under Joe Biden’s presidency, Congress reauthorized the tax on corporations, which gave a much needed boost to its funding. But more recently, Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” cuts the EPA funding by more than half, making it the smallest EPA budget since 1986 and cutting 1300 jobs at the agency. This enormous budget cut will affect every aspect of the EPA’s work, including the Superfund. While EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has said that site cleanup is still a priority, he has said that the excise tax on corporations will make up for the budget cuts – but that tax is under attack by industries like the petrochemical industry, the tax is only authorized through 2031, and it has not brought in nearly as much as was estimated. Further, cuts to staffing at the agency mean that the EPA can’t do the kind of scientific research that was so vital (if slow) during the Love Canal crisis.
Sarah: But I don’t want to end on too negative of a note, because I think that Love Canal has another legacy: it reminds us that average citizens, like the women of the LCHA, can bring about change by insisting that people in positions of authority, from scientists to administrators to elected officials, take their rights seriously. And I think that’s a more hopeful note to end on.
Averill: Thank you for joining us today. As always, we invite you to follow us on BlueSky and Instagram at dig_history. If you have a comment or question or want to share some kind words with us, you can always email us at hello@digpodcast.org – we love listener mail! If you’re an educator, we’ve got a compendium of episodes you can use in the classroom – and free teaching resources, including full lesson plans! – on our website, digpodcast.org. You’ll also find full bibliographies, the scripts for all of our episodes, resources, and a link to our swag store at digpodcast.org. Thanks for listening.
Bibliography
Gibbs, Lois. Love Canal: My Story. SUNY Press, 1982.
Newman, Richard. Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present. Oxford University Press, 2016
O’Brien, Keith. Paradise Falls: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe. Penguin Random House, 2022.
Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal. The American Experience, 2024.
Notes
[1] Newman, 76.
[2] Newman, 88
[3] Newman, 88.
[4] Newman, 99
[5] Paradise Falls, chapter 7 (no page numbers)
[6] Newman, 105.
[7] Newman, 100
[8] 113
[9] 127
[10] Paradise Falls, no page number, chapter 40
[11] Paradise Falls, chapter 48
[12] Paradise Falls, chapter 49
[13] Paradise Falls, chapter 50
[14] Paradise Falls, chapter 50
[15] Paradise Falls, chapter 52
[16] Newman, 247
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