This was a new one on me, and I think it's true to say that no one else in the quiz that I took part in had heard of it either. But the controversy that arose in Love Canal in 1978 has been described as "one of the most iconic environmental battles in US history".
Love Canal is a neighborhood in the city of Niagara Falls, in New York state. The city had a population of just over 50,000 in 2010. (There is another city with the same name across the river in Ontario.)
Love Canal was conceived in the 1890s as a "dream community" of homes and industry, fuelled by hydroelectric power generated in a canal between the upper and lower Niagara Rivers. It was named after William T. Love, whose vision this was. The first factory opened for business in 1893. But despite considerable backing, Love's project was ruined by fluctuations in the economy and Nikola Tesla's discovery of how to economically transmit electricity over great distances by means of an alternating current.
By 1910, the dream was shattered. All that was left to commemorate Love's dream was a partial ditch (approximately 50 feet wide, between 10 and 40 feet deep, and a mile long) where construction of the canal had begun.
The seeds of the disaster were planted in the 1920s, when the ditch was used as a dumpsite for municipal waste and industrial chemicals. In the 1940s it was purchased by the Hooker Chemical Company (known today as the Occidental Chemical Corporation), which used it to dump 20,000 tons of chemical byproducts from the manufacturing of dyes, perfumes, and solvents for rubber and synthetic resins. The US Army used the site to dump waste generated during World War II, some of it from the frantic effort to build a nuclear bomb.
In an article for the journal of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), dated January 1979, Eckardt C. Beck wrote that "Landfills can of course be an environmentally acceptable method of hazardous waste disposal, assuming they are properly sited, managed, and regulated. [But] Love Canal will always remain a perfect historical example of how not to run such an operation."
In 1953, Hooker covered the site with earth and sold it to the city for one dollar. The sales contract included a clause that both described the land use (filled with chemical waste) and absolved Hooker from any future damage claims resulting from the buried waste.
About 200 homes and a school were built on the site. It was at this time that some of the metal barrels were damaged when the canal's clay cap and walls were breached.
Before long, the chemical waste began to seep into people's basements, and the metal barrels worked their way to the surface. Trees and gardens began to die; bicycle tyres and the rubber soles of children's shoes disintegrated in noxious puddles. Residents complained repeatedly of strange odours and substances that surfaced in their yards. City officials investigated the area, but took no action. Local residents claimed to experience major health problems, including high rates of miscarriages, birth defects, and chromosome damage (although studies by the New York State Health Department disputed these allegations).
The tide began to turn in August 1978, after Love Canal featured in a front page article in the New York Times. Within a week President Jimmy Carter had declared a state of emergency, making Love Canal the first environmental problem of human origin to be so designated. The incident became a symbol of improperly stored chemical waste.
In 1980, the US federal government set up a programme known as Superfund, to pay for the cleanup of sites such as Love Canal. In 1995, Occidental Chemical paid $102 million to Superfund for cleanup and $27 million to Federal Emergency Management Association for the relocation of more than 1,000 families. New York State paid $98 million to the EPA, and the US government paid $8 million for pollution by the Army.
The clean up of Love Canal, which was funded by Superfund and completely finished in 2004, involved removing contaminated soil, installing drainage pipes to capture contaminated groundwater for treatment, and covering it with clay and plastic. The total cost was estimated at $275 million.
Superfund has analysed tens of thousands of hazardous waste sites in the USA, and cleaned up hundreds of the worst ones. Nevertheless (according to a textbook entitled Environmental Biology, edited by Matthew R. Fisher and published in 2018), over 1,000 major hazardous waste sites continue to pose a significant risk to human health or the environment and are still in the process of being cleaned.
The bulk of the information in this note comes from Wikipedia and the two previously cited articles (Environmental Biology and the EPA).
© Macclesfield Quiz League 2019