Determine the causes of the Love Canal contamination, and explain its effects on the American public.

The Love Canal, located near Niagara Falls in upstate New York, was a nice little working-class enclave with hundreds of houses and a school. It just happened to sit atop 21,000 tons of toxic industrial waste that had been buried underground in the 1940s and '50s by a local company.

By the end of the 1940s, H[oo]ker Chemical Company  (I had to add brackets around the o's because wouldn't let me actually say h00ker) was searching for a place to dispose its large quantity of chemical waste. The Niagara Power and Development Company granted permission to H[oo]ker during 1942 to dump wastes into the canal.

As it turns out, consecutive wet winters in the late 1970s raised the water table and caused the chemicals to leach (via underground swales and a sewer system that drained into nearby creeks) into the basements and yards of neighborhood residents, as well as into the playground of the elementary school built near it.

The canal families didn't know that they were being exposed to poisonous chemicals, nor were they aware that chemical wastes were being dumped in our rivers, soil, and air. Love Canal awoke a community to the unpleasantness and unfortunate realization of how toxic wastes affect out lives, and destroy our environment.

At first the EPA estimated that people living along Love Canal stood a 1 in 10 chance of getting cancer during their lives just from breathing the polluted air. But several days later the agency admitted to a mathematical error: The increased risk was actually 1 in 100 and far less for people just a few blocks away.

Today, howver, the industrial chemicals have been removed or contained in one area that was lined with impermeable materials and capped by clay. A drainage system collects water runoff and treats it.

20 years ago

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