The Love Canal Dump In Niagara Falls, New York – Could Poisons From One Of The World’s Most Notorious Toxic Waste Sites Come Back To Haunt The Lower Great Lakes Again?

A Commentary by Doug Draper

In the 1982 Hollywood movie Tootsie, one of the characters in the film had written a play about a family returning to their home in the Love Canal.

The old Love Canal neigbhourhood with one of the world’s worst toxic wast dumps in the middle. Is it leaking into the neighbourhood and into creeks flowing to the Niagara River again?

The idea of anyone moving back to the Love Canal seemed crazy and had everyone in the theatre laughing of course, since the neighbourhood bearing that name in Niagara Falls, New York had, only a few years earlier, been the setting of a toxic waste disaster that made world-wide headlines as hundreds of residents fled homes there and the first-ever ‘national emergency’ for a neighbourhood poisoned by migrating chemicals was declared by a president of the United States.

Yet in what turned out to be a case of real life imitating art, a New York State-sponsored group called the Love Canal Area Revitalization Agency was, by the beginning of the 1990s, overseeing the sale of more than 200 previously abandoned houses within one or two golf shots from the perimeter of a dump containing an estimated 20,000 tonnes of some of the most deadly chemicals produced by modern science. The homes were sold on an assurance U.S. state and federal government agencies that the dump had been securely walled off with drains, pumps and other devices, and that any contaminants detected in outer rings of the neighbourhood hosting homes that would be sold were found in concentrations that were “acceptable,” according to standards governments set in consultation with the petro-chemical industry, for human habitation.

Now we learn from a series of stories published in The Buffalo News earlier this year, that some of the people who have moved into these discount homes in the Love Canal zone have filed a $113 million lawsuit against government agencies, alleging that the dump, which contains poisons as life-zapping as dioxin (one of the most active ingredients in the God-awful defoliant used in the Vietnam War), is leaking again. Could it also be leaking , once again, to the Niagara River and Lake Ontario?

The government reps say ‘no’ to these allegations but one way or another, the governments had to know the witch’s brew in this God-awful site was going to leak out again.

 After all, the structures that were built to “contain” this underground jelly of chemical killers – and is what they are, by definition, chemicals that were deliberately produced to destroy bugs and other forms of biological life – only had a design life of about 30 to 40 years. The governments that made a pact with the devil – the former Hooker Chemical Company and later Occidental Chemical and Petroleum – knew that when they agreed to a “cleanup” of the Love Canal that involved containment or leaving the chemicals in their place over a more costly option of excavating the poisons and destroying them in an incinerator with temperatures high enough to leave little trace of them swirling into the atmosphere.

So here we are, with one of four dumps in the Niagara County, New York area, including Love Canal, Hyde Park, S-Area and the 102^nd Street site, where the chemicals are still there, buried in the ground, surrounded and covered over with structures with a design life of less than 50 years, while chemists warned at the time that the toxic brew buried in these sites are capable of remaining dangerous to humans and other life on this planet for hundreds of years if they are left incubated in the ground and unless they are destroyed.

And here we are again, with another generation of Love Canal residents serving as the proverbial canaries in a coal mine to warn us that the poisons are leaking spreading forth once again.

It is bad enough for this new generation of Love Canal residents, who made the unfortunate decision to move into a neighbourhood, for reasons that may have had to do with simply wanting to buy a home for their family at a discount price,  tthat had already been shocked and awed by a chemical pollution disaster reported around the world. It is even worse that governments that knew all about the lethal bite of a dump like this the first time around and chose to leave  the poisons in the ground, sold homes to people around.

There was, and never will be, any excuse any sane person could imagine for moving people into homes in or around this Love Canal disaster zone  this time – absolutely none! If there are strictures that could or would prevent governments from dumping 20,000 tons of horrific chemical garbage like this into an existing neighbourhood today (which there are on both sides of the Canada/U.S. border) , then why would you move people back to a place where you bloody well know that a  payload of death of his nature is buried? Why would you do that, unless you worked as a nerd at the time for a government agency?

 For the rest of us, including countless tens of millions living downstream from the Love Canal dump, the lower Niagara River, Lake Ontario, St. Lawrence River and beyond, the possible consequences are far graver.

 If dioxin and other poisons are beginning to leak out again from the Love Canal, then look out the waters of the Niagara River, Lake Ontario and St. Lawrence River for tens of millions of Canadians and Americans sharing this water for drinking, fishing and other purposes.

 I can tell you, from my reports from 20 and 30 years ago, that the dioxin, mirex and other chemicals from Love Canal, Hyde Park and these other Niagara River chemical sites were accumulating in fish, beluga whales as far down as the lower St. Lawrence River and in human cadavers tested at the time in the Kingston, Ontario area by Environment Canada.

 So the possibility of the Love Canal leaking again is no small Niagara Falls, New York story. It potentially impacts on the health and welfare of millions of Canadians and Americans downstream, as does the inevitable leaks again from the notorious Hyde Park, S-Area and 102^nd Street sites.

 It is awful – I would say disgusting – that I even have to write this story. I wonder what the late Margherita Howe, from Niagara-on-the-Lake and leader of Operation Clean, and the late Sister Margeen Hoffman, of the Ecumenical Task Force in Niagara Falls, New York, both gone now and fighters in the U.S. courts for digging up and destroying these wastes so they would never have to come back and haunt anyone again. I can only imagine what they would thing.

But here we go again, and where are the environmental groups and the government agencies that were around then, and might have cared more to cry out to the larger public.

 I was always afraid, when I covered this stuff two and three decades ago, that if it wasn’t addressed right then and there, and if people like Margherita and Sister Margeen were no longer around to cry out, our children and grandchildren will be dealing with the fallout from these awful sites again.

And here we go. Stay tune to higher levels of chemicals like dioxin and mirex working up the foodchain, once again, in Lake Ontario and waters downstream.

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