Love Canal
The Birth of Modern Environmental Regulation
Hello friends and readers! This month I’m pleased to share with you a new essay about the sad history of soil and groundwater contamination at Love Canal in the proto-regulation period of the 1970s. This story is fundamental to understanding modern environmental policy and the history of contamination here in the United States and across the world.
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Essay
Love Canal, the Birth of Modern Environmental Regulation
“Give me Liberty. I’ve Already Got Death.”
From a sign displayed by a Love Canal resident, 1978 (EPA Love Canal 2023)
To understand anything about U.S. soil and groundwater contamination in the 21st century, you have to start with Love Canal in 1978.[1]
1978 in the United States was a year of contradictions and social evolution. The country was still recovering from the ravages of the Vietnam War, Jimmy Carter was president, John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy were on the loose, Anita Bryant was campaigning against gay rights, and the first Star Wars movie had just been released. The Environmental Protection Agency was less than ten years old and the Apollo program to the moon had ended six years earlier. (NASA Apollo Timeline n.d.) The economy was struggling to recover from one recession and heading into another. The American Dream was faltering.
Love Canal, like so many other planned suburban communities, was intended to be a part of that dream. In 1978 it was a working-class neighborhood of about 800 homes and close to 250 lower-income apartments centered around an elementary school that had been constructed in the 1950s at the height of the baby boom (J. Kleinman n.d.). Back then, the United States was prosperous, GI Bill housing was abundant, and American families were growing. Cities everywhere needed more schools. In 1955 the editors of the magazine Architectural Forum wrote that, “every 15 minutes enough babies are born to fill another classroom and we are already 250,000 classrooms behind.” (Sapphos Environmental, Inc. 2014)There was a lot of pressure on state and local governments to build neighborhoods that reflected modern American values and lifestyles. People wanted wide streets with enough room to park their new cars and detached houses with yards large enough for a couple of kids to run around on while Dad barbecued and Mom finished putting Cool Whip on the Jell-O mold for dessert.
At its inception, Love Canal was a picture-perfect example of such a community. Photographs of the development show tidy rows of mostly single-story houses with bright green lawns lining either side of wide, tree-lined streets that were seem free from litter. Many of the houses had backyards adjacent to a generous public greenspace that also housed the 99th Street Elementary School. Located just north of Buffalo, New York the development was just a quarter mile from the banks of the Niagara River and less than a fifteen-minute drive to Niagara Falls; it was a haven in an otherwise crowded urban and industrial area. At the time, Buffalo was the 15th most populated city in the country; Love Canal promised a simpler, safer way of life.
It should have been great. In fact, it was practically destined to be so. The idea of the Love Canal area as an idyllic, planned community was an old one. William T. Love, the area’s namesake, first conceived of such a development in the 1890s. Initially inspired by the advent of the electrical age and perhaps Nickola Tesla’s nearby endeavor to harness the power from Niagara Falls, Love designed his own electrical generation scheme that he tied to suburban development. Where there was industry, he reasoned, there were people, and where there were people and industry, he knew, there would need to be power. He intended to provide that power and he intended to procure it from water. His plan was to divert upstream water from the Niagara River along a yet-to-be-dug seven-mile-long canal and return it to the river via a 280-foot-high waterfall. But luck and history weren’t on his side. Love’s plan hinged on two things, availability of the river’s water for the conversion of its kinetic energy into power, and the public’s reliance on direct, or DC power. Soon after he broke ground on the canal, the Federal government passed a law prohibiting water diversion from the Niagara River to preserve the iconic falls. Then, Tesla’s alternating current won the electricity wars. AC power, not DC, would be the thing.
Love pivoted. Instead of providing water and power to the area, he decided he would bring goods, using his already partially dug canal for cheap commercial transport to and from a planned development. He envisioned this development as a “Model City” lining the banks of his canal. But the cost of such an endeavor, most especially of hiring workers to dig such a long canal by hand, proved to be too much and soon that project too, was doomed. He abandoned his canal with less than a mile excavated. But the seed was planted. Someday, surely, someone would develop the area and Love’s Canal would be a wonderful place to live.
And someday, they did. By the early 1970s the school was built and the houses were in their tidy rows and the lawns were trimmed and green and it really should have been great. And for a while, it was. Kids played in sprinklers and rode their bikes to school while their moms stayed home to look after their little siblings and their dads went off to work the factories that fueled the region’s economy. Wonderful.[2] Except, everyone kept getting so sick. For such a small community, there seemed to be a lot of miscarriages and birth defects. People had kidney and urinary tract problems, headaches, and cancer; and there was a high incidence of what back then were called “nervous breakdowns.” Some people said there was a strange smell in their basements. Others had noticed a kind of slime on the walls.
What was going on?
In 1976, what would turn out to be nobly plucky and persistent staff at the Niagara Gazette, decided to find out. They didn’t have to look very hard. That big public greenspace in the center of the neighborhood? The one right by the school? It was a chemical landfill.
After Love’s failed ventures, the canal site and its 60-foot-wide, 3000-foot-long hole in the ground sat vacant for several decades. Then, in 1942, the Hooker Chemical Company took over possession. They had been doing business in the area since 1903, like other large companies, taking advantage of cheap power from the falls. Hooker was a pretty run-of-the-mill industrial company, especially for the time. At first, they produced chlorine and chlorinated lime, the kind of stuff we know as bleaching powder and all still have in one form or another in our houses today. (Newman 2016) Later, when the First World War began, they added chlorobenzene, which was used as an ingredient in explosives, along with several dry-cleaning chemicals and sulfur chloride and sodium chlorate, which are used for bleaching pulp and as an ingredient in herbicides. During the Second World War, the company expanded again, this time into producing chemicals used in the production of rubber and plastics. (Buffalo n.d.)
None of these are pleasant chemicals. Some, like sodium chlorate, are highly toxic and considered lethal upon direct exposure. Others just give you cancer. The process of making, storing, and transporting these kinds of industrial chemicals uses, and produces as byproducts, any number of other, ancillary chemicals. That is to say, the chemical industry is a dirty business that, in an effort to make new toys and tires and trinkets (and weapons), makes a lot of waste. And all that waste has to have someplace to go. Most often, and especially in the early 20th century, companies like Hooker simply filled up steel drums with their wastes and buried them in a landfill. Enter, Love’s old canal. Massive, and already lined with clay, it was a ready-made dumping ground for a company so prolific that it had not one, but four such sites in the Niagara area to accommodate its waste. This was all perfectly legal, or at least mostly legal, because at that time, it wasn’t explicitly illegal.
But in 1972, when residents of Love Canal were starting to get sick, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act had been amended and the modern Clean Water Act, as we have come to know it, was born. The Clean Water Act was, and still is, perhaps the most powerful piece of environmental legislation that protects the water system. It establishes the rules for chemical discharges into all types of water bodies and puts limits on the amounts of industrial wastes that can be discharged into rivers and streams. (EPA 2023) Taken together, the new regulations instituted during the Nixon administration set a high new bar for the prevention of future pollution, but they did little to address contamination that was already in the ground, like that at Love Canal. And there was a lot of it.
In total, up to the late 1950s, the Hooker Chemical Company buried at least 21,800 tons of such wastes in the abandoned canal alone, capping it with what they considered to be an impermeable layer of clay (read: healthy, and safe). (Brown December 1979) (J. Kleinman 2023) But it was still just a big pile of chemicals in potentially rusting steel drums. From today’s perspective it seems like an obvious straight path from buried chemicals to sick kids, but it wasn’t back then. In the 1970s, lack of scientific study meant there still wasn’t a clear scientific or legal path to proving that chemicals from a waste dump could poison a whole community. The thinking then was, it’s not like they were putting it out into the air, the stuff was buried and gone. Wasn’t it? Besides, at the time the Hooker Company went into business, many of the chemicals they were using were so new that no one had any idea what the long-term risks to human health from exposure might be. But time had passed and by 1970s, people were beginning to find out.
At first, the evidence was anecdotal, but the Gazette’s consistent reporting on those anecdotes made it clear that (Telvock 2010) something in the ground at Love Canal was making people sick. Eventually the stories were enough to garner the interest of those brand-new regulators, and in 1977, the EPA opened its own investigation. Without a clear sense of what was happening or an understanding of the underlying groundwater system, residents became scared. Groundwater contamination was a nebulous concept. A year later, one woman from the neighborhood would tell the EPA’s regional manager, Eckardt Beck, “We knew they put chemicals into the canal and filled it over, but we had no idea the chemicals would invade our homes. We’re worried sick about the grandchildren and their children.” (History.org 2024)
How had the chemicals invaded their homes? By catching a ride with rainwater as it moved through the ground and out toward those beautiful Niagara Falls. It’s hard to imagine, but the soil and rocks beneath our feet look more like a dry sponge, filled with pores and joints and cracks than big, solid sheets of hard rock. Water takes advantage of these pores and fissures to accumulate and flow through the subsurface. In most places where there’s a lot of water, like in the Niagara River watershed, there’s the equivalent of a vast ocean moving slowing beneath our feet. Eventually, that water comes to the surface, usually at a river or stream. The Niagara River draws much of its water from the vast underground ocean in addition to the surface water it collects from overland flow. Whatever happens to be mixed in with the water goes along with it.
It’s easier to imagine geology and below-surface water when you know the story of the land, or, in the case of Love Canal, the story of the watershed. A watershed is any area of land where water drains to a common point. The Niagara River watershed was created as the result of ancient climate change. 20,000 years or so ago, the planet was in the grips of a mini–Ice Age, driven by normal irregularities in the Earth’s alignment with the sun (we wobble). Those sustained cooler temperatures resulted in an widespread glaciation, especially in the interior of North America where thick sheets of ice spread south from the pole. Ice is heavy. And the ice sheet that covered North America was nearly two and a half miles thick. That was thick and heavy enough to warp the underlying sedimentary rocks, rocks formed from sands and muds and dead sea creatures on the bottom of an ancient seafloor hundreds of years earlier. Those ancient rocks smushed and slid and compressed like a mattress under the ice. When the rotation of the Earth shifted again and the planet warmed, the ice melted leaving behind a series of depressions. The depressions filled with meltwater and the Great Lakes were formed. (Science Direct 2023)
Water from the Great Lakes, like all surface water, is driven by gravity to find equilibrium. That is to say, like water in an ice-filled glass flows down and through the ice to establish a uniform level at some low point, the water on Earth does the same, seeking out a balanced sea level across the planet. The water from the lakes takes advantage of topography to chart a downhill route to the ocean. Over time, that route became the Niagara River. In all, the Niagara drains water from four of the five great lakes, Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie, which, taken together, constitute nearly a fifth of the world’s fresh water supply. That means that happens to the water in the Niagara watershed matters to everyone. Here’s the trouble: By the time it passes over the falls at over 3000 gallons per second, the river has also collected water from urban areas and farms and industrial sites (Niagara Fall State Park n.d.) (New York State Museum n.d.), water from smaller rivers and streams, water that flows off roofs and paved streets into storm drains, and water that moves underground, passing through and around landfills full of steel drums and picking up chemicals and leachates as it goes.[3] It’s not just water anymore.
In 1978, after several years of heavy rains and unprecedented snow storms, groundwater levels in the Niagara River watershed were high. All that hydraulic pressure and water filled up every available pore and cavity in the soil and pushed itself underground toward the river, and toward Love Canal. When it reached the area of the old excavation, the buried material was pushed up to the surface and out towards people’s homes along with the water. Maybe the construction of the homes and the laying of utility lines had damaged the clay cap, allowing water to seep in. Maybe cracks had formed over time and been exacerbated by the freeze and thaw of all that winter water and cold weather. Whatever had changed, swimming pools were floated out of the ground from the pressure. Black sludge seeped out of the ground and formed puddles around the school. Green ooze came through walls and rusted 55-gallon drums emerged from under those postage stamp lawns. The trees and other plants started to blacken and die off. And it wasn’t just the Love Canal Property that was impacted. Newly mobile chemicals were carried via groundwater and through city storm sewers across the landscape and discharged into the Niagara River. (Getty Images Love Canal Collection n.d.)
The influx of toxins had a noticeable effect; people really started getting sick. In addition to the previous years of isolated illnesses that had been reported, residents now commonly complained of persistent headaches and asthma; kids came inside from playing with burns and rashes on their skin. It was estimated that the neighborhood incident rate of cancer pushed ten percent. Soon, it became clear that a disaster was unfolding and government officials would have to take action. Regulators agreed, and the New York Department of Health commissioner, Robert Whelan, declared the area a threat to human health. A fence was erected along the perimeter of the landfill and the State, in conjunction with the EPA, began an intensive house-to-house sampling and health evaluation effort. The preliminary results showed dangerous levels of toxins in the air in resident’s basements. In June, the Pentagon got involved and released a statement denying knowledge of any records pertaining to the disposal of U.S. Army wastes at Love Canal, a hat-tip to the Hooker Chemical company’s support of the war effort as a major chemical supplier. Eight weeks later, Whelan shuttered the school and issued orders for the evacuation of pregnant women and children. That’s when the local tragedy turned into a national scandal and Love Canal became the first environmental contamination disaster to be covered on mainstream televised news.
Things started to move quickly after that. A week after the initial evacuation orders, the Governor of New York, Hugh Carey, announced the state intended to purchase all of the houses in an area termed “Ring 1” that surrounded Love’s old canal. Later, that purchase was extended to houses in both Rings 1 and 2, a total of 238 homes. Then President Jimmy Carter announced that along with the home purchases, the Federal government would be providing Federal Disaster Assistance to impacted families. How and why some houses had been declared uninhabitable while others, sometimes just across the street were considered unimpacted, was not clearly communicated by what was then still a brand-new environmental regulatory system. Amidst the confusion emerged another void in the system; there was no means for residents to petition for a second opinion or to have their properties reevaluated by an independent third party because there was no formalized appeals process. Everything was brand new, including much of the science. To residents and many outside observers, it all seemed arbitrary. While some people had their homes condemned over health concerns, other residents were simply told not to use their basements. Adding to the contentious process and lack of trust was the swift and decisive actions of the government, which left little room for public input. Swift and decisive were not necessarily characteristics for which State and Federal agencies were (or are) known; it raised suspicions. Why the uncharacteristic rush? Liability, that’s why.
You see, back in 1955 when the Niagara Fall School Board acquired the property, it had purchased the entire area for one dollar. A single dollar. Along with that astounding bill of sale, the school district had agreed to stipulations made by the Hooker company, including a disclaimer of responsibility for future damages due to the presence of buried chemicals that was written into the deed of sale. A disclaimer of responsibility. For future damages related to buried chemicals. And then they built a school on it. (Weisman 1979)
The possibility that the school district and the Hooker Chemical Company before that may have known the land was contaminated and hazardous to public health and had sidestepped accountability from the very beginning alarmed residents and onlookers. Even with all the damning evidence, the ooze and the illness, no one was willing to take responsibility and it seemed there was no legal mechanism to force them to do so. The whole process was made more complicated by the low-income nature of the impacted community, which hindered their ability to conduct the necessary independent scientific investigations or retain proper legal counsel. The impacted residents were faced with the monumental task of setting a precedent, as there were no legal guidelines for the determination of responsibility. And they had to do it fighting against a regulatory environment which favored industry and was, if not wholly biased against, certainly insensitive to their plight.
Then, near the end of 1978 it became clear that the rapid response on the part of the government was also something of a financial railroading. The funds which had flowed so freely in the early days began to dry up and the appeals for help from the remaining residents went unnoticed. But they didn’t give up. Sick, displaced, or unable to leave and scared, the people of Love Canal organized, protested, stayed in the media eye, and recruited medical and legal advocates. They formed a homeowner’s association so they could organize their efforts and staged protests when agencies failed to issue evacuation orders for houses even after independent researchers, most notably Dr. Beverly Paigen, a cancer researcher out of Roswell Park Memorial Institute, issued warnings of further health impacts. Another group was formed, the Ecumenical Task Force. The group identified five baseline goals that still inform environmental advocacy today: to provide direct aid to Love Canal residents, to assume the role of advocate in applying political pressure on behalf of Love Canal residents, to gather and interpret appropriate data, to seek reconciliation through justice, and to advocate for complete neutralization of toxic wastes.
They fought their asses off for transparency and accountability. And in many ways, they won, but there would be only a small measure of accountability, mostly in the form of money.[4] (Bergeron 2021)In the spring of 1979, the Senate held hearings on the Love Canal disaster. There, residents testified that they believed the State failed to act in an adequate, timely action in the face of overwhelming evidence. Evidence was also produced that showed the Hooker Chemical Company knew about the dangers the buried chemicals posed as early as 1958 and had even documented those dangers in an internal memo that described a group of children that had been burned by ground materials in the Love Canal area. (Association 2022) (State of New York Office of Public Health 1978)
In the end, 421 different toxic chemicals were identified in the ground of the Love Canal neighborhood, including 200 tons of lethal dioxin. In the short-term, more than $20 million in settlement damages was awarded to residents, but the battle over the cleanup dragged on. Finally, nearly 20 years after the Gazette first began its investigation, in 1994, the Hooker Chemical Company agreed to pay the State of New York $98 million toward the cost of the cleanup and relocation. A year later, it agreed to pay the federal government an additional $129 million. (EPA 1979) (Center for Health n.d.)
The chemicals were never removed from Love Canal.