Love Canal: the neighborhood that wrote the Superfund law

It started with a dream that fell apart. In the 1890s a man named William T. Love wanted to dig a canal between the upper and lower Niagara rivers and build a model city around the cheap power it would make. By 1910 the whole scheme had collapsed, leaving a partly dug ditch in the ground. By the 1920s that ditch had a new job: chemical dump. Hooker Chemical filled it for years, capped it with earth, and in 1953 sold the lot to the city for one dollar.

Then people moved in. About 100 homes and a school went up over the buried waste in the late 1950s, and for a generation nobody thought twice. But the chemicals didn’t stay put. They percolated up through the soil and into basements, and by the late 1970s residents were seeing high miscarriage rates, birth defects, and benzene in alarming amounts. On August 7, 1978, Governor Hugh Carey announced the state would buy out homes, and President Carter approved landmark emergency aid that same day for something that wasn’t a flood or a storm. Ninety-eight families left that month; 221 in all.

Love Canal became the case that pushed Congress to create the Superfund program, and in 1983 the EPA put it on the initial cleanup list. Crews laid a 40-acre cap, flushed tens of thousands of feet of sewer line, and pulled contaminated soil from the old 93rd Street School. The work finished in 1999, and the site came off the cleanup list in 2004.

It isn’t forgotten, though. Even now, people inspect that cap and run the treatment plant, year after quiet year.