Love canal thrives 25 years later
But debate over hazards continues
Cape Breton Post
Friday, Aug. 8, 2003
NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. (AP)
- Twenty-five years ago, an
underground cauldron of
chemical soup bubbled into
backyards and basements from
an abandoned canal.
Some 800 families were evacuated,
300 homes demolished.
The discovery ignited fears of
cancer and birth defects, gave
rise to the.U.S. Superfund law
governing environmental
cleanups, and forever linked
one name to toxic disasters:
Love Canal.
Today, parts of Love Canal
are thriving. Pristine houses sit
behind manicured lawns and
pots of bright red geraniums.
And in June, the state agency
charged with revitalizing the
area officially disbanded, its
work successfully completed.
Yet the debate over whether
it is safe to live in Love Canal
continues.
"It bothers me to see little
children playing in that same
area where there are still chemicals,
" says Luella Kenny, who
blames the 1978 death of her
seven-year-old son, Jon, on the
chemicals in a creek that ran
through her backyard.
But Bob Gray isn't worried.
"I don't know if I'm naive, but I
don't think they're going to
make the same mistake twice,"
Gray said.
From his front porch, Gray
can see the so-called "containment area"
for the poisons - 30
grassy hectares, surrounded by
a chain-link fence. At the centre
is the 6 1/2-hectare canal dump
site where 22,000 tonnes of Second
World War-era chemical
by products are now buried
under a thick clay cap, high
density polyethylene liner and
topsoil. Two streets, a school
and a Little League baseball
diamond once stood on the spot.
To the west of the waste site
is overgrown vacant land,
where homes were bulldozed.
Those lots are not safe to live
on, fit only for the industry that
has yet to come.
But north of the waste site,
where Gray lives now, an eerie
ghost town existed until the 239
homes that remained were
stripped and rebuilt by the
state's Love Canal Area Revitalization
Agency.
Frank Cornell, director of
the revitalization agency,
recalled one house where a
framed baby portrait was still
hanging on the wall and a 1980
newspaper lay open on the floor.
"It's as if the people were just
beamed away," Cornell said.
Many people fled in a panic
when the mass evacuations
took place in 1978 and 1980.
People who moved into the
rebuilt homes - which sold for
$50,000 US apiece - were well
informed about the area's history.
Among them were Rose
and Ellis George, who abandoned
their previous home
near the site, then later moved
to a refurbished one across
from the containment area. The
Georges, who raised seven children,
were never convinced of
the danger.
"I'm 77 and still here, right?"
Ellis George asked. "My kids
are all healthy."
Thirty-nine-year-old James
Wilson and his mother still live
there, too; his father died of
cancer two years ago. As a
child, he recalled playing with
phosphorous "fire rocks" that
sparked when thrown to the
ground, and his mother always
knew he'd been swimming in a
creek because he smelled like
chemicals when he came home.
But he said his parents stayed
there "because they'd worked
from nothing to have a house."
The company that dumped
the waste in the 1940s and '50s,
Occidental Chemical Corp.
(formerly Hooker Chemical and
Plastics Corp.), is still a major
local employer. It has paid more
than $233 million to cover
cleanup costs and medical
expenses for victims of the contamination
and still pays for 24-hour
monitoring of the site.
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