Happy Birthday, Love Canal

Niagara Falls, N.Y.In the middle of an abandoned suburban neighborhood, a long grassy mound pokes up a few feet higher than the cracked streets surrounding it. A green chain-link fence surrounds the small hill, which is covered with wildflowers in summerlavender chicory and small yellow daisies. The fence has no warning signnot anymorebut this is Love Canal, the toxic waste dump that became synonymous with environmental disaster 30 years ago.

Adeline Levine, a sociologist who wrote a book about Love Canal, described to me the scene she had witnessed exactly 30 years earlier, on August 11, 1978. “It was like a Hitchcock movie,” she said, “where everything looks peaceful and pleasant, but something is slumbering under the ground.”

That “something” was more than 21,000 tons of chemical waste. The mixed brew contained more than 200 different chemicals, many of them toxic. They were dumped into the canal, which was really more of a half-mile-long pond, in the 1940s and 1950s by Hooker Electrochemical Co. In 1953, the canal was covered with soil and sold to the local school board, and an elementary school and playground were built on the site. A working-class neighborhood sprang up around them.

“The neighborhood looked very pleasant,” says Levine, who was a sociology professor at the State University of New York Buffalo in 1978. “There were very nice little homes, nicely kept, with gardens and flowers and fences and kids’ toys, and then there were young people who were rushing out of their homes with bundles and packing up their cars and moving vans.”

Love Canal was in the midst of an all-out panic when Levine arrived; just 9 days earlier, the state health commissioner had declared an emergency and recommended that pregnant women and children under the age of 2 evacuate the neighborhood. A week after that, the state and federal governments agreed to buy out homes next to the canal.

Levine spent all day interviewing people and was soon obsessed with their plight. Residents spoke of miscarriages, cancers, and children born with birth defects. She spent her vacation in New York City the next month knocking on doors and getting turned down for grants by foundations that couldn’t imagine why a sociologist would want to study an environmental problem. By that time, the entire country was watching the drama of the Love Canal neighborhood play out on the TV screen.

I was 4 years old at the time, and I don’t remember a thing. But later, as a teenager in the late 1980s, I lived about 2 miles from Love Canal as the crow flies, on Grand Island, a literal suburban island in the Niagara River. My father remembered Love Canal, and before he took an engineering job in the area, he asked how far away it was. He wasn’t too happy to learn that he would be living nearly within sight of it across the river. Even a decade after the neighborhood’s plight hit the news, the words “Love Canal” seemed to be stamped on our brains in shrieking orange capital lettersjust as Bhopal, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island would later be.

After the summer of 1978 came the buyout of some 900 homes; years of legal battles and disputed health studies; the formation of the Superfund cleanup program, which for the first time called on businesses to pay for pollution cleanups; and a new awareness of the dangers of living with chemical waste. Levine’s book about Love Canal became a seminal work in a new field, environmental sociology.
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