HylaBrook's Blog

Love Canal: An Adult Bedtime Story for Earth Day
Apr 24, 2008 | 10:36 PM PST
Tags: environment , Love Canal

Once upon a time, long long ago, near a city called Buffalo, was a place where honeymooners go to see the massive water falls. In the city of Niagara Falls was an industrialist named Hooker who had a chemical and plastics factory. This factory produced some very nasty toxic wastes and they had to have some place to dispose of them.

Near the factory was the partially completed transit and utility canal started by Mr. Love in the gay 90's. In 1942 Mr. Hooker arranged to use the canal for a waste storage facility. He lined it with cement and clay to contain the chemicals, at the behest of his industrial engineers who said the wastes were very dangerous and might be a time bomb. Eventually Hooker bought the land outright, and in 1947, commenced filling it to capacity. By 1952 there were 22,000 tons of waste including many forms of benzene, a lot of chemicals with "hexa" and "chloro" in their names. There was even enough dioxin to kill over 693 million people, about 3 times the population of the U.S. at that time. These chemicals were in steel drums inside the lined dump, the best practices known at the time for chemical containment. Mr Hooker listened to his engineers and stopped filling the chemical dump. He had the waste facility back-filled and capped with cement, "impermeable" clay and soil to entomb the toxic wastes "forever". The "vacant" lot was used for baseball diamonds and soccer fields.

All of this was happening at a very sexy time when the population was growing fast. School boards scrambled to build classrooms for all of the children in the baby boom. Development grew around the toxic waste site, so the school board began eying the wide open space for an elementary school building site. The Hooker Chemical and Plastics people protested and refused to sell the land to the district telling them that there were huge potential problems with having children on the site. The Niagara Falls school board would not be cowed. They threatened Eminent Domain to seize the property. Not knowing exactly how to handle this, the Hooker Chemical people sold the property for $1 with a 17 line disclaimer of liability for the consequences. The school was built on the site. During construction of the school, and later by a city utility crew upgrading sewer service to the area, the tomb for the chemicals was breached. This allowed water into the pit. The drums rusted through. The pit filled with water. The chemical soup overflowed into the groundwater on all sides of the dump. Neighbors began smelling awful smells.

Residents of the area began to notice that children and pets playing in the field around the school has skin irritations. By the 70's a high rate of birth defects, and adults with cancer were reported in the area. By 1978, under President Jimmy Carter, the area was named the first environmental Super Fund cleanup site The government began buying houses and moving families out of the neighborhood. Eventually, more than 800 families were re-located out of the neighborhood. Hooker Chemical and Plastic had been bought out by Occidental Chemical Corporation. Occidental was sued and eventually paid more than $220 million to state and federal governments to clean up the site. To this day the area is, as it should have been since 1952, a no man's land.

Lessons learned: Listen to the engineers, and make the legal department write more than 17 lines.

Who is responsible for this? Do you know how much toxic waste is generated in the production of a bottle of shampoo? Do you ever think about things like this? I can't tell you exact numbers, but the answer is not "none." Every product we buy has an impact on the environment. Care of the environment must be part of the cost of every product.
Consider this: burning a gallon of gas in your car puts 20 pounds of carbon into the air. A gallon of gasoline weighs only 7.8 pounds. Does the math make sense? Yes, numbers never lie. You have to include also the fuel costs of extracting the crude oil from the ground, pumping it to a transit terminal, shipping it across the ocean, refining it, and transporting it to the gasoline station in the equation. All of this energy intensive activity means that the gallon you use costs many gallons to get to your filling station.

What to do:

>Drive less, use public transportation more. Combine shopping and errands trips and plan a route that saves on mileage and left turns.
>Buy everything in the largest size available. The ratio of packaging to content will be lower. Carefully divide and store large packages of foods in re-usable packaging at home or you will eat more.
>Buy refillable containers and refill pouches whenever possible.
>Use personal care products and cleaning supplies sparingly.
>Choose re-usable micro fiber cloths and rags over paper towels for cleaning. Wash in energy star appliances.
>Use fewer products.
>Freecycle the remains of products you try and don't care for.
>Discard unused medications in tightly closed containers in the trash. Do not flush medications as they will go through the treatment plants unaffected and will end up in the waterways and aquifers.
>Take re-usable containers with you if you eat out. Take leftovers home in these instead of the styrofoam containers provided by the restaurant.
>Take your re-usable canvas shopping bags with you when you shop.
>Buy local products even if they cost more. The real cost may be less in the long run.


The order of the r's is: Reduce, Re-use, Recycle