You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [76]
You Built It Where?
An old proverb says to never attribute to intent what can be explained by ignorance. Then again, in the cases of corporate greed, you can’t also rule out almost total stupidity and the power of short-range thinking.
HOOKER CHEMICALS AND THE LOVE CANAL SCHOOL BOARD
NEW YORK, 1953
Paul Kupperberg
Love was in the air in the city of Niagara Falls, New York. As well as in the soil. And the groundwater, and buried beneath the public school, and seeping into the basements of homes.
This was a gift of Love, but not the kind of love that every year brings honeymooners by the tens of thousands to the most famous and spectacular waterfall in the world. This is the legacy of the Love Canal, a neighborhood in the southeast LaSalle district of the city. The area takes its name from a small parcel of land approximately sixty feet wide and three thousand feet long, less an actual canal than the first section of a planned seven-mile waterway to route waters from the Niagara River around Niagara Falls and provide water and hydroelectric power for a planned model industrial city.
William T. Love had set out to create a literal Utopia in upstate New York, “the most perfect city in existence,” he boasted to all who would listen. A city to house a million people, powered by unlimited electricity generated by the thundering waters of the falls, bankrolled by industry taking advantage of the abundant electrical power, and with thousands of acres set aside to be “the most extensive and beautiful (parkland) in the world.”
But the model city never happened. Though ground was broken in 1893 and a small section of the canal dug, events of the day conspired against its completion.
Instead, William Love’s dream of Utopia wound up paving the way for one of the most famous man-made ecological disasters of all time.
The entire history of the Love Canal is plagued by one puzzling decision after another, starting with the one to use the big hole in the ground within the Niagara Falls city limits as a toxic waste dump in 1920 and reaching the height of absurdity with the brilliant notion to build a public school directly on top of the site. It is a story of bold negligence, with the company that sold the Love Canal site to the city making no attempt to conceal what it was doing, blithely washing its hands of the chemical waste buried a few feet underground with disclaimers absolving them of any future liability. With so many bad choices made across so many years, it’s hard to point the finger of blame for this ecological disaster at any single source.
William T. Love, at least, had undertaken his visionary venture with only the loftiest of goals in mind. In the last years of the nineteenth century, electricity was opening the industrializing United States to an entire new world of potential. The Niagara River, flowing between the United States and Canada and ending in the thunderously spectacular falls shared by the two nations, provided ample resources for the generation of electrical power: a continuous cascade of water to turn massive generators. Generating plants had been built along the river for years, providing power to the electrochemical and electrometallurgical firms that flooded into the area. But while the technology of the day allowed for the generation of cheap power, it had not yet come up with an efficient or cost-effective means of transmitting the power over any great distance. In order to have access to the quantities of cheap power, customers had to be located close to the source.
Love saw his “model city” becoming “one of the greatest manufacturing cities in the United States…Nothing approaching it in magnitude, perfection or power has ever before been attempted.” At the heart of his plan was the canal to divert water from the Niagara, “capturing the mighty force of the water as it sped into the rapids before rushing over the huge drop.”
With colorful and hyperbolic brochures, Love lured investors and backers to his