Located in Niagara Falls, New York, the Love Canal site encompasses 16 acres that were once home to working-class families; however, its rooting on poisoned land serves as a reminder of the violent consequences of improper disposal of hazardous waste.
In 1984, William T. Love purchased the land now labeled as Love Canal, with plans to build a canal connecting Niagara Falls to Lake Ontario to harness hydroelectric power. Due to technological advancements and the lacking need for this, construction was abandoned, leading to the land being sold to Hooker Chemicals and Plastics in 1942.
From 1942 to 1953, the Hooker Chemicals and Plastics company used this land as a waste site for chemicals, dumping 21,000 different types of manufacturing chemicals, including 12 known carcinogens, into the ground. Due to rain runoff, the soil seepage spread throughout the larger community, leaching through water particles into ground and surface water, and through the soil. Then, in May of 1953, Hooker Chemical and Plastics sold the site to the Niagara Falls Board of Education, who used the land to build the 99th Street Elementary School, and around 800 single-family homes and 240 low-income apartments were built for a community of primarily working class and blue color residents. This community became a home to more than 1,000 families.
Unaware of the poisoned land and its history, residents questioned the smells of chemicals coming from their basements. These reports were widely ignored until a local newspaper, The Niagara Gazette, began investigating in 1976. A newly founded community group, The Love Canal Homeowners Association, and The Niagara Gazette urged government action to continue investigating chemical smells. Around one year later, in September of 1977, the Elemental Protection Agency, along with The New York State Health Department and the Niagara County Health Department, conducted a battery of health studies, water tests, and air sampling. After two years of research, officials found over two hundred chemical compounds in the Love Canal. In May of 1980, state and federal governments declared a state of emergency.
Over 1,000 families were in significant danger from hazardous waste endangering their health and their schools, neighborhoods, and homes.
These chemicals have been linked to the death of over 700 residents, not to mention cancer, neurological diseases, epilepsy, reproductive issues such as miscarriages, and chromosome damage in nearly one-third of the residents living within the Love Canal site.
In response, grassroots organizations and state governments urged federal governmental action. In 1980, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, aka “Superfund,” was passed. The EPA states the goal of this act is to encourage faster responses when investigating hazardous waste sites, and its main purpose is to clean up sites that are contaminated with hazardous waste substances and pollutants through a series of actions, including identifying the sites, establishing liability, addressing risks posed by waste, and financing cleanup through the Superfund Trust, funded by tax dollars.
Under the Superfund program, Love Canal became the first hazardous waste site under federal jurisdiction and cleanup. Today, the Superfund program monitors the cleanup process of over 1,300 hazardous waste sites across America, spanning all 50 states.
The first step in being named a Superfund site is identification. This task is particularly challenging, due to many of these sites being situated in areas of low socioeconomic regions where residents face barriers in addressing their concerns, such as inadequate representation in the government decision-making process and lack of political power to force effective health and safety interventions. These sites are often invisible, complicating the problem by perpetuating the growth of downplayed and overlooked safety risks. This problem was seen throughout the Love Canal site disaster and continues to be echoed in contemporary models of hazardous waste sites living in concert with impoverished communities. Examples of these, via the EPA, are the Milden Site, in Appaclain Ohio, and the Warren County Landfill Site, the situation in rural North Carolina, where the health of residents was ignored for years, even decades, despite mobilization and pleas for help.
Sites are reported through citizen, community, or state reports, leading to the Environmental Protection Agency testing to determine the status of the site. If a site is positive for hazardous chemicals and needs governmental cleanup, the site will become part of the Superfund program and is to be cleaned through program funding. Sites identified as hazardous are added to an ongoing cleanup list, called the National Priorities List, or NPL.
Sites are identified by the EPA into two groups depending on their chemical severity by chemical waste or volume. Remedial sites are considered less urgent and pose a significant level of risk to surrounding communities. These sites require long-term cleanup in hopes of mitigating the risks associated with hazardous material exposure. Hidden Lane Landfill in Virginia, currently undergoing cleanup for improper disposal of carcinogenic chemicals is a current remedial site on the NPL.
Removal sites are characterized by their need for immediate action and relocation of residents, including current sites such as the Black Butte Mine Site in Oregon, a former mercury mine that contaminated the soil, surface, and groundwater with toxic metals, and the Hanford Site in Washington, a previous nuclear power plant, undergoing cleanup for leakage of twenty-seven million cubic yards of radioactive waste into groundwater and soil. Once immediate risks are identified and solved, removal sites are able to be re-tested to be re-identified as remedial sites.
The Love Canal Site was identified as remedial through the Superfund Program and was allocated extensive funding for the relocation of families and cleanup efforts. This began with the removal of hazardous liquid waste, such as contaminated groundwater, a 40-acre landfill cap, thermal treatment of sewers and creeks, and home maintenance, causing the demolition of contaminated buildings and relocation of residents. The site was removed from the NPL list in 2004; however, the site is still tested every five years to ensure chemical levels are safe for residential and commercial use.
The ultimate goal of the Superfund program is to return sites to spaces for productive land usage, such as wetlands or new hubs of industrial development. However, reintroducing these spaces to the public is controversial due to the unknown long-term effects on humans of continued interactions with chemical waste. Today, the Love Canal has been re-industrialized to house residents living in Niagara Falls, New York, a city with over 25% of residents living under the poverty line. Today, Love Canal still echoes the cycles of poverty, living in concert with environmental waste.