What was Love Canal?
Love Canal, a community east of Niagara Falls, New York, made headlines in the late 1970s when investigators discovered that an entire neighborhood, including a school, had been built on a toxic waste dump. Beginning in 1947, the Hooker Electrochemical Company had used the clay-lined Love Canal as a dump for 43,000,000 pounds of chemical waste. The company then capped (installed a permanent cover) the canal and sold the property to the Niagara School Board for one dollar. Although the deed acknowledged that chemicals were buried at the site, the kinds of chemicals had not been specified. As early as 1958 residents had complained of odd odors and noticed skin rashes. Yet the extent of the problem did not become known until twenty years later, when an exceptionally heavy rainfall caused the chemicals to rise to the surface of the ground. Contaminating water, soil, and even air inside homes, the chemicals produced…
