Love Canal

History

Love Canal's history is long and intricate. The name of the canal comes from William T. Love, a 19th-century entrepreneur who envisioned a canal that would connect Lakes Erie and Ontario and harness some of the hydroelectric power capable of being produced by the Niagara River. The canal was 3,000 feet long, 60 feet wide, and 10 feet deep when Love had to abandon the project because of an economic depression in the late 1890s that resulted in loss of funding. From 1942 to 1953, Hooker Electrochemical Company dumped between 20,000 and 22,000 tons of industrial wastes into the canal. When Hooker sold the 16-acre site to the Niagara Falls School Board for $1 in 1953, the deed contained a disclaimer relieving Hooker of any future liabilities that may result from the chemical wastes buried in the canal. The 99th Street Elementary School opened on the site in 1955 with 400 students. The next 20 years saw the neighborhood [Page 486]grow, with many homes and the accompanying new infrastructure built. The construction of streets, sewer lines, and utility lines meant that the canal's clay walls were breached, and soil from the surface of the canal was excavated and reused elsewhere in the neighborhood. Reports of fumes, sludge in basements, and holes in the surface of fields and school playgrounds began in the 1960s. Finally, in 1976, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) began investigating materials that had been disposed of in the Love Canal site. During the DEC's investigation, the story of Love Canal and litanies of complaints began appearing in local newspapers.

Inspections and Relocations

The canal's many changes in ownership serve as an appropriate precursor to the metaphorical “hot potato “it became among several government agencies, beginning with the DEC in 1976. Shortly after the DEC investigation began, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began collecting air and soil samples, the results of which would later be handed to residents as lists of chemical names with numbers next to them. The commissioner of the New York State Department of Health (DOH) visited the site in April 1978, declared it a public health hazard, and ordered Niagara County to begin health studies. The DOH would figure most prominently in the Love Canal disaster area because it was conducting the health studies and would make many of the announcements of evacuation throughout the next years. A pattern of miscommunications quickly emerged, and residents were often confused by what the DOH told them and the unorganized fashion by which the DOH collected residents’ blood samples: many were lost, some expired before being tested, and the DOH labs were overrun with the samples.

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