As to her charge that Hooker "didn’t deposit the waste in 55-gallon drums as they say they have," Hooker’s actual statement, as reported in the Niagara Gazette on November 22, 1957, was: "There are dangerous chemicals buried there in drums, in loose form, in solids and liquids." The rest of her statement is pure Michael Brown and has been dealt with earlier.
I asked her: "Are you aware that the Board of Education back in 1951 had drawn up a map of the Love Canal area and that it showed the assessed condemnation value of each property?" Her reply: "No." The head of the homeowners had never even gone to the Board of Ed to check its records so as to make an informed judgment about the roots of their tragedy.
When I asked her about the sewer under Wheatfield Avenue, whose installation in 1957 may well have precipitated the ultimate catastrophe, she denied my assertion that it was "surrounded with gravel." She claimed that this underground excavation was instead "backfilled with clay." The city engineer could straighten her out on that one.
In response to my question whether she’d ever heard of the American Institute of Chemical Engineer’s Task Force on RCRA and the findings of one of its members about why the Love Canal had seeped, she said, "No." But, she continued:
Let’s pretend that the Canal hadn’t been disturbed. It still would have leaked.
Q: How so?
A: Because there were farmers’ field tiles that were connected to the Canal, and these were clay pipes 6 inches to 8 inches in diameter.
Q: When were these tiles put in?
A: Probably before the Canal was used as a dump. Furthermore, there are open avenues of swale, which are underground stream beds, that were backfilled with rubbish–not a solid fill.
Q: Is this in Stephen Lester’s report [which she had mentioned earlier]?
A: I think so. If not, it’s in Beverly Paigen’s.
Beverly Paigen is not an engineer but a biologist, so of course her study had nothing to do with the structure of the Canal. Instead, it was an epidemiological study of the incidence of health problems among Love Canal area residents. (This report created a sensation–and panic–when it was released in February 1979 with the conclusion that area residents showed high rates of pregnancy disorders, birth defects, and other illnesses. Subsequently, a five-member panel of scientists reviewed this study and concluded that it is "literally impossible to interpret" and "cannot be taken seriously as a piece of sound epidemiological evidence. ")
Stephen Lester is not an engineer either. He is a toxicologist and environmental researcher hired by the New York Department of Transportation in 1979 to assist the Love Canal area residents during remedial work being done by the DOT. In the course of observing that work, says Lester, he did see clay pipes running from the Canal, which, he speculates, were probably used to draw water from the Canal to irrigate the orchards that surrounded the area before it was built up.
Did they exist along the entire length of the Canal? Had Hooker removed any such pipes or backfilled them with clay in the sections used by the company for dumping chemicals? Lester’s report has no answers to such questions; nor does the city engineer’s office, which contains no records of the existence or location of such pipes; nor do the people working at Hooker 30 years hence. But it strains credulity to believe that Hooker would have chosen this site, prepared a section at a time for dumping, and covered its wastes with clay–rather than just dumping anywhere into the Canal’s waters–and not have seen and attended to any such clay pipes. Of course, of what the Army did when it dumped toxic wastes there, we know nothing. And what would have happened had the Canal not been disturbed after Hooker owned it, we shall never know.
Love Canal may or may not have polluted its neighborhood beyond repair. But the question now is, Has it polluted the media beyond repair? Except for the Wall Street Journal’s publication of the minutes of the two November 1957 School Board meetings under the headline "What Hooker Told Whom, When About Love Canal," and the Journal’s two editorials on the facts therein, none of the national media has delved into the history of the Love Canal mess. This story has been butchered in the press. The executioners have been a motley band, led by the US Justice Department, the EPA, the New York State departments of you-name-it, Michael Brown, and Lois Gibbs. Why has their joint exercise in public deception been so overwhelmingly successful? More to the point, why hasn’t Hooker’s counterfight so far been more effective?
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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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