Hooker was determined to prevent, if it could, the selling of this land to subdividers. The showdown came at the Board meeting of November 21. Arthur Chambers again made his appearance, this time reinforced with a lengthy letter from the company’s vice-president, Ansley Wilcox, in which the Board was reminded in no uncertain terms of the details of the mostly verbal negotiations and unwritten promises that had preceded the transfer of this property to the Board more than four years earlier. In addition, Hooker’s position on the proposed sale was again stated. According to the Board minutes, "They feel very strongly that subsoil conditions make any excavation undesirable and possibly hazardous." As the Niagara Gazette quoted him the next day, Chambers told the Board, "There are dangerous chemicals buried there in drums, in loose form, in solids and liquids." The Buffalo Courier-Express, too, referred to Chambers’s speech about this "chemical-laden ground."
But perhaps the deciding factor in the Board’s ultimate vote wasn’t the address by Arthur Chambers so much as the letter from Ansley Wilcox. Now even Wesley Kester’s memory was refreshed. One no longer heard from him, "Now they tell us...," since, as Wilcox pointed out, they’d told it all before.
As I stated earlier, Wilcox’s letter was being heard this evening by an audience that included, besides Kester himself, other key people on the Board who had been involved in the negotiations with Hooker during 1952 and 1953. It contains the most thorough recounting of these negotiations on record anywhere, and the officials present protested not a single item in Hooker’s recounting–not that Hooker had been approached by Dr. Small and other representatives of the Board in the interest of acquiring the property; nor that Hooker had "explained in detail to Dr. Small the use which we were making of the property"; nor that Hooker had expressed its reluctance "to sell the same, feeling that it should not be used for the erection of any structures"; nor that the School Board was nevertheless "so desirous of acquiring the same" that its representatives had brought up the option of condemnation proceedings; nor that Hooker had then agreed to donate the property subject to certain restrictions upon its use; nor that Hooker had proposed and the Board had refused to agree that the Love Canal property be used "for park purposes only" and that the school building be constructed only on premises "in proximity to" the same; nor that any of these events had transpired in the way described, which indeed made Hooker look like the opposite of the negligent and shortsighted company it is now widely thought to have been. In fact, as evidenced by Wilcox’s letter, Hooker was adamant in its long-range view, noting "that even though great care might be taken" in development of the property, "as time passes the possible hazards might be overlooked [and] injury to either persons or property might result." (See end of article for full text of letter.)
The Board’s vote that evening was practically unprecedented. They split 4 to 4, with one member abstaining, and thus failed to pass Wesley Kester’s resolution to sell the land. For once, the Board did not vote unanimously; they had been shaken awake from their slumber.
As it turns out, these tumultuous Board meetings of November 1957 were just so much "sound and fury signifying nothing," anyway. Apparently unbeknownst to Hooker, on the very same two November days when the company’s representatives were urging the Board that the subsurface chemicals made the land unsuitable for underground construction, city workmen were busy at the Canal constructing a sewer that punctured both of its walls and the clay cover. From September through December 1957, work was in progress on this sanitary sewer between 97th and 99th streets beneath Wheatfield Avenue, a soon-to-be-paved street that lay right across the middle of the Canal property. This sewer pipe was laid 10 feet below the surface, on a gravel bed, and covered with gravel, providing a highly permeable violation of both Canal walls. Any loose and liquid chemicals buried in this part of the Canal could now escape, flowing along the gravel sewer-bed not only under Wheatfield but also under 97th and 99th streets, and so throughout the neighborhood. To top this all off, a manhole was dug from the top of the Canal down through the fill to this sewer system 10 feet below the surface.
Whether or not any of Hooker’s chemicals were in fact buried in this part of the Canal is not clear from public records. Hooker says that its practice was to fill various parts of the Canal, creating an earthen dam with clay, pumping out the standing water, dumping waste to within four feet of the surface, then covering the section with clay. From Board of Education maps indicating the approximate location of Hooker and city wastes in the Canal, and another map showing the location of streets and the 99th Street School, it can be estimated that Wheatfield Avenue crossed over the Canal at a spot just south of a Hooker dumping area. It is doubtful, however, that these maps are precise enough to make a positive determination. One of them carries a notation showing that the Hooker dumping spot in question–the same one that, by the same approximations, would have been invaded at its northern end during construction of the school building–was used by Hooker to dispose of "fly ash, trash, and HG1 spent cake," the latter, according to a Hooker spokesman, being an abbreviation for lindane (a chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticide more toxic than DDT).
Whether or not this sewer was laid through Hooker chemicals, however, one thing is clear from the record: Hooker was opposed to any construction through any part of the Canal, precisely because of such risks. And work on this sewer system was being done by the city of Niagara Falls at the same time as the warnings that such construction was "dangerous," "injurious," and not "safe " were appearing in the local newspapers. But nobody made the connection; it is as though the printed word had not existed. The sleepwalkers kept bumping around in the night. Hooker was protesting into an abyss; no one was there who would hear and who would make connections between the real world and the printed warnings. Yet now Hooker is being excoriated.
This marked the first time in history that the Canal walls had been penetrated. Maps in the city engineer’s office show that there were no sewers into the Canal before this one. But another was soon to be built. This was a storm sewer, under Read Avenue. It was put in between May and September 1960 and penetrated only the west Canal wall, running from a catch basin sunk into the Canal, out to 97th Street. Again, the sewer-bed was gravel.
The drawings of these sewers are available for public inspection at the office of the city engineer in the town hall. One member of the public who, it seems, never cared to look at them–nor at the voluminous printed records and correspondence regarding Love Canal that are also available at the Board of Education–is Michael Brown, the author of the Pulitzer-prize-nominated book on the subject of waste dumping.
In addition to these publicly recorded breaches of the Canal walls, there were two other, though lesser, man-made incursions upon the surface of the Canal: one a French drain that the School Board had placed around the school, the other an illegal catch basin put in by a 97th Street homeowner. Both of these were noted by Stephen Lester, who, under the auspices of the New York State Department of Transportation, served as a consultant to Love Canal area residents during remedial work on the Canal. Of course, like the sewers put in by the city, Hooker had nothing to do with these constructions.
Following Hooker’s successful defeat of the Buildings and Grounds Committee’s proposal to sell Love Canal property to developers in 1957, the Board I sought every means possible to transfer liability for the property to somebody else. They wanted to dump the Canal like a hot potato. First, they tried to palm it off onto the local Junior Chamber of Commerce for a playground area. But the Jaycees wouldn’t move ahead without liability insurance, which, it seems, no firm was willing to supply. So that deal fell through. Then, on June 2, 1960, the Board "dedicated to the City" the section of Canal property that lay north of the school. Hooker’s restrictive provisions were included in the deed.
All that remained to unload now was the southern section. This was put up for public auction in December 1961. On the bidding sheet was duly imprinted the last paragraph of the deed from Hooker, with all those ghoulish warnings, and with one revealing addition: the indemnification clause to protect Hooker was now expanded with the mention also of the Board of Ed, so that the Board would pass liability along with the property. The difference this time was that the new owner would be receiving the property in dangerous condition and, in spite of the warnings in the deed, without any mention of all of Hooker’s admonitions concerning suitable use of the property.
When the sole bid was opened, the Board found that they had been offered $1,200, which they voted, unanimously, to accept. The fellow who bought the land–a former firefighter, now a motel-keeper, by the name of Ralph Capone–ended up paying $5,400 in local paving assessments and $1,500 in property taxes, even though the city, every time he tried to get a building permit to develop 50 or so houses, confronted him with regulations that, as he later put it, "would have cost me millions." Then in 1972 the city ordered him to do $100,000 worth of work on his plot "to correct…strong chemical odors permeating from ground surface" and to alleviate "potentially hazardous conditions" there. Finally, after spending a total of $13,000 on the property, he gave up in 1974 and sold this bundle of headaches to a friend for $100.
Capone says that when he bought the property for $1,200 he had considered himself lucky. The release clause on the bidding sheet and in the deed had struck him as having been just so much lawyerese, hardly meriting a second wink. As he recently put it, in an interview with the Niagara Gazette’s Paul Westmoore, "Back then I never would have believed a public body would have sold land it felt was dangerous." In fact, however, the Board had known quite well what it was selling; and the minutes of the Board, under the date of January 4, 1962, show the following reaction to Capone’s bid: "Three members of the committee visited this plot of land on 99th Street and checked from one corner to the other. We all agreed that, if we could sell the property , it was the thing to do.
It is on the question of apportioning blame for Love Canal that the media have fallen down the most. Practically every level of government has been involved over the years in violating either the Canal’s walls or the protective clay cover that Hooker says it had laid four feet thick on top of its wastes. Even the New York State Department of Transportation, which now shares major responsibility for remedial work on the Canal with New York’s Department of Health and the federal Environmental Protection Agency, ripped into the Canal in 1968, at the southern end where Hooker had done most of its dumping. In the construction of an expressway and the moving of Frontier Boulevard northward, chemicals were contacted, and Hooker was requested to, and did, cart away 40 truckloads of chemical wastes. Just as Hooker had worried in 1957, as time passed the possible hazards of construction on the property had been put totally out of mind.
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|6.21.10 @ 12:05AM|#
many years ago, I saw a pictorial in a magazine on Love Canal and was completely blown away when i saw the pix of empty houses, food half eaten, baby clothes on lines, family pictures and toys, etc just laying there intoxic animation......the silence of those photos was earth shattering.
I wrote passionately about this and other issues in college and have thought about lois gibbs and all the others who had to livr through this.
I finally -after 20 years visited the site and was overwhelemed by the reverance i felt for those who actually lived in this development_the odd fire hydrant, the fenced in areas, the weed infested sidewalks that families ran, walked and fell on, the paved circular entrances to where homes and families started their dreams..the occ wheeping willow and maple tree planted for pleasure now look foreign and harmful.I only hope that the families were compensated well and that they were able to move on to a new life and be healthy of body and spirit.for me, all these years later, it was overwheleming.
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