Quite in line with media reports, then, which have picked up on very little of this governmental involvement in the Love Canal disaster, is the lawsuit filed in December 1979 by the Justice Department on behalf of the EPA, seeking to collect from Hooker $124.5 million for cleaning up the Love Canal area. Evidently, with the public so misled, the government’s lawyers thought they could get away with laying all the blame at the doorstep of the only nongovernmental body involved, Hooker Chemicals & Plastics Corporation and its parent, the Occidental Petroleum Corporation.
Although the suit also names the Niagara Falls Board of Education, the city, the County Health Department, New York State, and UDC-Love Canal (a state agency set up to purchase the homes of families evacuated from the surrounding area), not one of these governmental bodies–and here again the media have missed a step–is implicated in the responsibility for the problems at Love Canal. "The City is named herein as a defendant only to insure that the remedial measures requested by the plaintiff [EPA] can be fully implemented by the City’s action with regard to its own property." And so on and so on. For each of the governmental units named in the suit, there is a reassuring paragraph noting that it is so named only to enlist cooperation in remedial work.
The government’s case against Hooker contains a great many charges and allegations that I have seen disproven in the documentary records at the Board of Education and the office of the city engineer. Hooker hasn’t supplied me with its own supplementary documentation, but that wouldn’t be necessary except on one point that has served as a focus for many of the EPA-Justice Department charges: the adequacy of the clay cover Hooker laid over its dumpings.
Residents of the Love Canal area have contended that at least some of Hooker’s wastes were covered only with fly ash. These are recollections of what happened 30 years ago. There is evidence that there was plenty of fly ash in the area. Not only did Hooker itself use part of the Canal to dump fly ash, which accumulated in the bottom of its furnaces, but School Board records show that Hooker and probably the city also were asked to supply fly ash to fill in the portions of the Canal that were still an open trench when the Board took over the property. There is no evidence, however, that Hooker used fly ash to cover its chemical dumpings.
Hooker claims–and notes on maps at the Board of Ed dating from the early ‘50s tend strongly to support this–that the company laid four feet of clay over its fill. Furthermore, a private engineering firm, Conestoga-Rovers Associates of Waterloo, Canada, hired by the city in 1979 to evaluate the Love Canal dumpsite, has concluded that Hooker’s practices there cannot be faulted, even by the standards of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) being implemented in 1980–the only existing federal law concerning the hows and wheres of industrial dumping.
(Of course, even without a statute on the books, Hooker would be liable, subject to the relevant statute of limitations, for damage to third parties due to negligence, were its practices in fact negligent. But it would be hard for such a claim to get very far if Hooker’s practices decades ago met and exceeded regulations, generally regarded as stringent, effected only in 1980.)
Although the Conestoga-Rovers report had not yet been delivered to the city at press time, Mr. Frank Rovers has stated to Senate staff members considering toxic waste clean-up legislation that, as summarized by the Washington representative of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, on whose RCRA Task Force Mr. Rovers was serving, "The design of the Love Canal site was well within the standards of RCRA. What went wrong with Love Canal can be attributed in large part to lack of monitoring, invasion of the site itself, and lack of remedial work." And the invading construction, which raised the need for remedial work, can only be laid at the feet of the School Board, the city, and the state Department of Transportation. (The other main factor that precipitated the crisis was that in 1976 Niagara Falls experienced record rains that poured down into the by-then opened Canal, forcing large quantities of the chemicals up and out; in October of that year, there surfaced the first reports of nearby basements being invaded by chemicals attributed to Love Canal.)
The EPA’S own chief of Hazardous Waste Implementation, Mr. William Sanjour, was quoted in the New York Times on June 30, 1980: "Hooker would have had no trouble complying with these (RCRA) regulations. They may have had a little extra paperwork, but they wouldn’t have had to change the way they disposed of the wastes. " Ironically, Mr. Sanjour’s admission here was a bold and direct contradiction of a key charge leveled by the EPA itself in its suit against Hooker, filed in federal court six months earlier.
Reading this EPA-Justice Department lawsuit, one senses how desperate its drafters must have been to implicate Hooker on whatever grounds could be dredged up. In paragraph 23 it’s charged that "two storm sewer systems...were built in 1952 before Hooker sold the Canal property to the Board." It is not claimed that the two sewers in question penetrated the Canal walls; the fact is that these systems–Colvin-100th Street and Frontier-l00th Street–didn’t even come close. Interestingly, the suit does not mention the real villain-sewers, constructed in ‘57 and ‘60, which would, of course, have implicated party or parties other than Hooker.
In paragraph 35 we find that "vegetation in the vicinity of the Love Canal is suffering from stress." The Love Canal homeowners might wilt upon hearing that one, as though their own travails were not enough to bring Hooker down if Hooker is guilty.
Paragraph 108 informs us that "Hooker never applied to the Secretary of the Army for and does not have a permit authorizing the deposit of wastes into navigable waters at the Canal." This is one of the few allegations in the suit that Hooker doesn’t contest as false. Did you know that there are "navigable waters at the Canal"? Can you imagine sailing a ship upon this chemical dump? Well, of course, nobody’s ever done it, nor even tried it. In fact, the Canal never was navigable, even before it became a dump in the early ‘40s; it wasn’t even being dug for that purpose when its construction was abandoned in 1910. "Navigable waters" indeed.
But in the court of public opinion, Hooker is already adjudged guilty. Playing into the hands of the feds on this has been that intrepid "investigative reporter" Michael Brown, whose book, Laying Waste, has been praised to heaven, despite the fact that its tale of Love Canal is unrecognizable to anyone who has examined the actual documents. Jessica Mitford said, "This extraordinary and terrifying book is one of the best examples of tenacious, dedicated journalism I’ve ever read." Senator Moynihan pronounced the book "strong, clear, credible, and humane." Ralph Nader said, "Laying Waste takes the reader on a macabre journey from the notorious Hooker Chemical Company waste dump at Niagara Falls to… " and called the volume "an advance briefing" on America’s future of "cancerous, toxic cesspools left by callous corporations." Sen. Bill Bradley applauded it as "a clear call for the massive effort necessary to clean up the horrors." Paul Ehrlich praised it as "a vitally important book." Jane Fonda said, "I hope every American is awakened by this book." So let’s dip a bit into Laying Waste.
On page 8 Brown says, "At that time [1953], the company issued no detailed warnings about the chemicals; a brief paragraph in the quitclaim document disclaimed company liability for any injuries or deaths that might occur at the site." He doesn’t quote from the deed and mentions it again only once, curtly.
Would you know from his description of the "brief paragraph" (which I quoted in full earlier) that this is the longest paragraph in the entire deed, running 17 full lines of type, or that it speaks of these chemicals as being capable of causing injury and death? Furthermore, there’s an innuendo here that is simply not true: that there is no evidence that Hooker had verbally warned the Board repeatedly and in strong terms about the chemicals. Ansley Wilcox’s letter, which is reproduced here, but which Brown never even mentions in his book, is strong documentation to refute this innuendo.
On page 9 Brown says: "When I read [the Love Canal] deed I was left with the impression that the wastes would be a hazard only if physically touched or swallowed. Otherwise, they did not seem to be an overwhelming concern." That’s his other reference to the deed, and it’s equally misleading. Brown’s introduction of "touching" and "swallowing" into the deed’s restrictions are his own concoctions. Neither they nor any equivalents are in the deed, and even Brown’s inference of them is drawn entirely from thin air. And although "injury" and "death"–which are in the deed–may "not seem to be an overwhelming concern" to Michael Brown, they did to relevant parties at the time, contrary to what Brown claims.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
|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.
nfl jerseys|11.26.10 @ 8:32PM|#
ydy
pariuri sportive|3.29.11 @ 5:14PM|#
you have a great stile of writing
hyper prive glitter- louboutin|8.10.11 @ 10:53PM|#
hyper prive glitter- louboutin Love Canal long long ago when i was a child. hyper prive glitter 120mm - Christian Louboutin.
Canada Goose salg|11.25.11 @ 8:29AM|#
canada goose saleg jackets.thank you.