In 1978 , Love Canal, located near Niagara Falls in upstate New York, was a nice little working-class enclave with hundreds of houses and a school. It just happened to sit atop 21,000 tons of toxic industrial waste that had been buried underground in the 1940s and ’50s by a local company.
What caused the Love Canal tragedy?
As it turns out, consecutive wet winters in the late 1970s raised the water table and caused the chemicals to leach (via underground swales and a sewer system that drained into nearby creeks) into the basements and yards of neighborhood residents, as well as into the playground of the elementary school built directly ...
What happened at the Love Canal disaster?
–Twenty five years after the Hooker Chemical Company stopped using the Love Canal here as an industrial dump, 82 different compounds, 11 of them suspected carcinogens , have been percolating upward through the soil, their drum containers rotting and leaching their contents into the backyards and basements of 100 homes ...
What was the Love Canal originally?
The Love Canal area was originally the site of an abandoned canal that became a dumping ground for nearly 22,000 tons of chemical waste (including polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin, and pesticides) produced by the Hooker Chemicals and Plastics Corporation in the 1940s and ’50s.
What was the Love Canal and why is it important?
It is important because the pollution disaster at Love Canal , along with similar pollution calamities at that time (Times Beach, Missouri and Valley of Drums, Kentucky), helped to create Superfund, a federal program instituted in 1980 and designed to identify and clean up the worst of the hazardous chemical waste sites ...
Is the Love Canal still toxic?
They say they found toxins “previously found in Love Canal-related sites.” Indoors, toxins can get trapped and build up. Tests there found toxin levels 10 to 100 times higher . So far, state officials have declined to test inside residents’ homes.
Who was responsible for Love Canal?
| Love Canal | Contaminants Various chemicals | Responsible parties Hooker Chemical Company | Progress | Proposed 30 December 1983 |
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What were the health effects of Love Canal?
From 1974 to 1978, 56% of the children in the Love Canal neighborhood were born with a birth defect , including three ears, a double row of teeth, and mental retardation. There were almost three times as many defects in historically wet areas. State health authorities quickly dismissed the study.
How long did the Love Canal last?
Love Canal’s notorious history began when Hooker Chemical Co. used the abandoned canal from 1942 to 1953 to dump 21,800 tons of industrial hazardous waste.
What were the long term effects of the Love Canal disaster?
The Love Canal landfill contained approximately 21,800 tons of chemical wastes. Substantial migration and contamination of soil, groundwater and basement air of nearby homes was apparent in the late 1970s.
Why is it called Love Canal?
The landfill takes its name from William T. Love, whose plan it was in the 1890s to dig a power canal between the upper and lower Niagara Rivers to provide cheap hydroelectric power for a proposed model industrial city .
How did the Love Canal affect the economy?
The state Commerce Department highlighted the chemical industry’s economic contributions . ... One Niagara Falls company, Hooker Chemical, acquired the abandoned Love canal site and dumped nearly 22,000 tons of chemical wastes there from 1942 to 1953. The city and the Army also dumped refuse there.
What can we learn from Love Canal?
We need to find ways to tell the Love Canal story so that we don’t repeat our mistakes. One key lesson is that a blue collar community with few resources can win its fight for justice and open the eyes of the nation and the world to the serious problems of environmental chemicals and their effects on public health .
Who started the Love Canal?
This circa-1940 photo shows Love Canal before it was contaminated. The canal was built by William T. Love in 1834 as a failed attempt to connect the Upper and Lower Niagara Rivers.
How did the Love Canal affect animals?
He found that animals caught near the fence had severely damaged livers , including excess fat, underdeveloped reproductive organs, lowered levels of important body chemicals and unusually low levels of the energy-producing substance called glycogen.
How did Love Canal lead to the Superfund Act?
Eventually, Love Canal became a national issue. Television news covered the protests and showed the black, toxic sludge that oozed into residents’ basements . ... Due to the actions of Gibbs and the Love Canal Homeowners Association, President Jimmy Carter signed the Superfund bill into law on December 11, 1980.
