Love Canal Superfund Site (Niagara Falls, New York)

 place with historical importance, abandoned settlement, EPA superfund

Envisioned by developer William T. Love towards the end of the 19th century as an ideal location to create a large-scale diversion canal to harness the Niagara River for power generation, the Love Canal was designed and seemingly poised to create an enormous hydroelectric power generation facility which at its maximum capacity could have diverted the entire flow of the Niagara River through its banks. Intended to provide power to a “model city” of industry lining its banks the whole way to Lake Ontario, Love’s planned canal initially attracted several interested investors but found itself on the wrong side of both the US and Canadian Governments, the transmission capabilities of its planned power facilities’ Direct Current machinery and the financial panic of 1893.

Further stymied by Congressional legislation that severely curtailed the amount of water that could be diverted from the Niagara River for power production, Love nevertheless successfully redesigned his ambitious canal plan to include locks and shipping channels in addition to the original hydroelectric production plans, offering an all-American connection between Lakes Erie and Ontario and points beyond to rival Canada’s Welland Canal. Having garnered enough new financing for his revised design, Love finally broke ground on his canal in the spring of 1894. Overseeing the construction of the canal’s first mile and laying out the groundwork for the initial sections of Model City, Love left the project in the hands of subordinates to pursue other development opportunities but soon found he and his canal project bankrupt. Abandoned in its partially-completed state by 1896, the Love Canal eventually filled with water leaking through its earthen cofferdam and became a popular swimming and ice skating location for the local population.

Remaining largely unremarkable for the next two decades, the Love Canal was eventually purchased by the City of Niagara Falls and became the city’s primary municipal garbage dump starting in the 1920’s. So employed for the next twenty years, the canal was in a partially-filled state when it was purchased by the nearby Hooker Chemical Company for use as an exclusive dumping site for industrial wastes generated by their Niagara Falls plant. After draining the canal and installing a clay containment liner at its base, Hooker began dumping 50-gallon drums of various industrial wastes into the canal in 1942. Continuing to heavily utilize the site for the next ten years, Hooker declared the canal dumpsite full in 1952 after dumping over 21,000 tons of chemical wastes at the site, and after covering the entire area with a layer of dirt to ensure all dumped materials were between 20-25ft below the surface, Hooker idled the land.

Approached by the rapidly expanding City of Niagara Falls in 1953 with an offer to buy the land over the Love Canal dumpsite for residential development, Hooker Chemical repeatedly refused to sell the canal site to the City, citing safety concerns and even going as far as drilling boreholes into the soil to demonstrate that there were toxic chemicals lying underground. Eventually faced with the threat of the land being seized by the City, Hooker eventually sold the land around Love Canal for $1 to the City of Niagara Falls, their deed of sale making clear mention of the land’s hazardous potential to the public and disavowing the company of any guilt should future residents become ill. Wasting little time in developing the land over and around the former canal, Niagara Falls built two schools directly on top of the dumpsite and allowed residential developers to build homes atop and around the canal over the subsequent years, largely ignoring reports by construction workers and residents of encounters with clear evidence of dumped wastes.

Construction of homes, sewers and roadways in and around the Love Canal dumpsite continued into the 1960’s, and with it came several breaches to the clay lining installed by Hooker in the 1940’s which allowed previously contained liquid wastes to seep out of the dumpsite and into the neighborhood’s soil and groundwater. Despite increasing reports by residents of strange-smelling black pools of liquid appearing in their yards, parks and basements, little was done by the City of Niagara Falls until the construction of the LaSalle Expressway across the canal’s former mouth at the Niagara River caused the situation to reach a crisis point. With the hard-compacted road bed cutting off what had become a “natural” drainage path for accumulated rainwater which had found its way into the breached dumpsite, heavy rains and snowmelts started causing huge ponds of toxic waste to come through the basement walls and floors of Love Canal residents’ homes and form large puddles on the ground throughout the community, while formerly-buried barrels of solid and liquid waste began to “float” to the surface of the former landfill cap and began popping through the grass surface in increasing numbers.

Public outcry over the indifference of the City of Niagara Falls government caught the attention of reporters from the Niagara Gazette for the first time in the mid-1970’s, and after several articles were published detailing the conditions in the neighborhood and highlighting the unnaturally high incidence of birth defects and other health problems affecting Love Canal residents, the State and Federal government finally began to take comprehensive action in late 1978. Declaring the entire area surrounding the former Love Canal to constitute a federal health emergency, President Jimmy Carter exercised the powers of the recently-minted Environmental Protection Agency to begin buying out the contaminated homes of Love Canal residents who had been forced to remain on their properties while New York State and Hooker Chemical, now known as Occidental Chemical, fought in court to determine liability for the public health disaster. Eventually the US Government would relocate over 800 families from their homes above and surrounding the Love Canal, and after a lengthy court battle Hooker Chemical was found to be negligent, but not reckless, in its handling of its ownership and sale of the Love Canal.

Environmental remediation efforts aimed at securing the release of toxic wastes began at Love Canal in 1979 and would continue for several years before being declared complete, with the majority of the abandoned homes and both schools built in the area being demolished. The canal dumpsite itself was the subject of extensive remediation, with the entire Hooker Chemical dumping site being exhumed, resecured and placed into a new 16-acre containment structure with a plastic and clay liner that now lies 25ft below the surface. Groundwater and surface runoff from the site is now processed in a leachate treatment facility to both monitor for and remove any chemical traces before it is allowed to proceed into the Niagara River. Removed from the Federal Superfund listing in 2004, the Love Canal site remains sealed-off as a contained and monitored dumpsite and future development of the areas above and immediately surrounding the dumpsite is prohibited.

library.buffalo.edu/specialcollections/lovecanal/