You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [77]
William T. Love and his city were soon forgotten.
Except for the big hole he had left behind. Over the years, rainwater collected in the great ditch and it found new life as a recreational area, with swimming in the summer and ice skating in the winter. Not a bad fate for a parcel of land that was once intended to sit at the heart of Utopia.
But in 1920, the land was sold at public auction and turned from playground to dumping ground, becoming a municipal and chemical disposal site. In 1927, the city of Niagara Falls annexed the village of LaSalle and the Love Canal. Then, in 1942, the Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation (now Occidental Chemical) bought the Love Canal site. Section by section, Hooker Chemical drained the canal, lined it with a thick layer of clay, and began using it as a dump for hundreds of barrels of electrochemical byproducts, not to mention a toxic stew of municipal waste products. By 1953, Hooker Chemical had filled the twenty-to twenty-five-foot-deep pit to maximum capacity with an estimated 22,000 tons of toxic waste. A thick clay cap, several layers of dirt, and a layer of sod atop the filled canal was the only shield between the lethal chemical cocktail and the growing Niagara Falls community.
Contrary to contemporary attitudes, it wasn’t unusual at the time for communities to willingly accept a chemical waste dump in a residential area. The chemical industry was held in high regard in the 1940S, celebrated for the medical and lifestyle advances it was making possible. A large number of Niagara Falls residents were themselves employed by the many chemical companies around the city and were proud of their association with an industry that brought the future home today. No one believed that so forward a thinking industry would engage in practices hazardous to the public health. In addition, few in those days realized that there was even a link between exposure to chemical waste and such health problems as cancer, birth defects, and liver damage. Indeed, Hooker Chemical’s experts were convinced that the clay lining and cap of the canal would be more than adequate to contain the mess it had left belowground.
In May 1953, the most unbelievable chapter in the Love Canal story took place when the Niagara Falls Board of Education bought the contaminated parcel of land from Hooker Chemical.
There were those who claimed, as early as 1948, to have discovered a link between discarded insecticides and cancer. One such scientist, Dr. Robert Mobbs of Boston, scoffed at Hooker’s later claims that, in the 1940S, they had no reason to suspect these wastes were hazardous. “They ignored, minimized, and suppressed the facts,” Dr. Mobbs charged. If Hooker Chemical was, as they were to claim, unaware of the hazards, why then did they go to such great pains to include a carefully worded disclaimer in the deal that gave the covered site to the Niagara Falls Board of Education for the price of $1? Not that the board wasn’t thrilled to get the land: the postwar baby boom had left the city in desperate need of new schools. Parents in the LaSalle district in particular were pushing for a school closer to home. On the face of it, Hooker Chemical’s offer seemed like a dream come true. They just made sure that, going forward, their hands would be clean of blame and that the board of education would assume “all risks and liabilities,” and that “no claim, suit, action or demand of any nature whatsoever shall ever be made (by the Board)…for injury to a person or persons, including death resulting therefrom, or loss of or damage to property caused by reason of the presence of said industrial