PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
(Philadelphia, PA)
Aug. 1, 2003, n.p.

© 2003, KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS. Distributed by KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE Information Services.

After 25 Years, Love Canal Still Haunts

By Amy Worden
Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT)

Superfund Site This is a 2002 view of the Superfund area near the abandoned Elizabeth copper mine in Strafford, Vermont. Twenty-five years after Love Canal, the EPA's Superfund program is about to go bankrupt.

     NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y.--From the expressway that runs across its southern edge, the site of the nation's costliest environmental disaster looks like a well-tended airstrip.

     But buried deep beneath the half-mile-long, flat-topped mound covered with manicured grass and surrounded by barbed wire are tens of thousands of tons of toxic waste, the legacy of Love Canal.

     Twenty-five years ago Saturday, the New York State Department of Health finally declared an environmental emergency in the southwest edge of this industrial city, after neighbors had complained long and bitterly of foul odors in their cellars, a mysterious sludge bubbling up from the ground, and an inordinate number of ill children. That decision set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the first permanent evacuation of a community because of an environmental emergency and the passage of federal legislation creating a multibillion-dollar "Superfund" to clean up toxic-waste dumps, and, for the first time, hold polluters liable.

     In the years to come, the words "Love Canal" and "Superfund cleanup" would be burned into the American consciousness, linked with the worst kind of environmental catastrophes.

     "Superfund would not exist today without Love Canal," said Ed Hopkins, director of environmental-quality programs for the Sierra Club. "It riveted the nation's attention on this problem and forced lawmakers to grapple with it."

     Superfund cleanups have certainly made the environment cleaner and given the government a potent weapon against polluters. But environmentalists say recent changes in how the program is funded jeopardize future cleanups and threaten to roll back years of progress.

     Love Canal was a disaster spawned of ignorance and carelessness. For decades, Hooker Chemical & Plastics dumped barrels of toxic waste, including the carcinogen dioxin, into a 60-foot-wide ditch by the banks of the Niagara River, the remains of a failed power-generating project launched by industrialist William Love in the 1890s. In 1953 the landfill was covered over and sold to the Niagara Falls Board of Education for $1.

     In the 1960s, residents, many of whom worked for Hooker, began noticing the odors in their basements and sludge coming out of the ground.

     "For years people called it 'the annoyances,'" said Lois Gibbs, the fiery homemaker who led the community's fight a decade later to force the government to respond to the crisis at Love Canal. "A barrel would emerge from the ground surrounded by black gunk and someone would complain their child was playing in the hole, so the city would dump some dirt over it."

     By the late 1970s, children were coming down with strange illnesses, pregnant women were suffering from a high rate of miscarriages and stillbirths. In addition, during a four-year period at that time, an alarming 56 percent of children were born with birth defects.

     "We were mom and apple pie and we were being harmed," Gibbs said. "We represented the American dream and the dream had broken."

     In May 1980, President Jimmy Carter declared the first of two environmental emergencies that funded the evacuation of 800 families and began the site cleanup. That same year Congress passed legislation creating Superfund, which has since pumped $20 billion into cleaning up half of the 1,500 toxic-waste sites on the national priority list, including 47 in Pennsylvania.

     "Because of Love Canal, polluters can no longer bury waste and walk away from it and assume there is no harm," Gibbs said.

     The EPA views Love Canal, like Times Beach in Missouri or the Industri-plex in Woburn, Mass., made famous in the book and movie "A Civil Action," as a Superfund success story. At Love Canal, the toxic waste and debris from hundreds of demolished buildings sit under a lined, clay cap, which will be contained in perpetuity in what is essentially a giant bathtub.

     Environmentalists are concerned about the future of the program triggered by Love Canal. The Superfund's trust fund, which once topped $3.8 billion, has been slowly drying up with the elimination in 1995 of a special tax on companies that pollute. The burden, environmentalists say, has been shifted from polluters to taxpayers.

     "Superfund is in significant jeopardy right now," said the Sierra Club's Hopkins. "This is the first time an administration has abandoned the `polluter pays' philosophy."

     EPA officials say that Superfund's budget will be maintained at least at its current $1.2 billion level and that the majority--70 percent--of current cleanup work is paid for by polluters. It is the remaining 30 percent of the Superfund sites, also known as "orphan sites" where no owner can be found, that now require government funding.

     "We are making polluters pay at the ground level," said Marianne Horinko, acting EPA administrator, who has headed the Superfund program in the Bush administration. "They are being held accountable."

     Horinko said the program was not drastically underfunded, as environmentalists charge, and said an additional $150 million the Bush administration was requesting for fiscal 2004 would help "close the gap between what we have and what we need."

     Bills have been introduced in the House and Senate to reauthorize the tax on polluters but stand little chance of passage in the Republican-controlled Congress, Hopkins said.

     Today a strip of asphalt divides Love Canal's past and its future. On the north side of Colvin Boulevard is a picture-perfect suburb, with neat rows of prefabricated homes and flag-draped porches.

     On the south side, next to the canal, is the area deemed unsafe for human habitation. Where hundreds of houses once stood is now a nature preserve.

     The new neighborhood, once part of the toxic zone, has been rebuilt over the last decade after the EPA declared the area safe. It has a new name, Black Creek Village, and hundreds of new residents, many of them young families drawn by the quiet atmosphere and affordable real estate.

     "If it's still a danger, why in God's name would it be revitalized and have kids move in only to have families go through that again?" said Sheri Gray, 34, who lives across from Love Canal with her husband, Robert, and two children.

     But others, like Geri Wendell, who lives in a new senior housing development just west of the canal, are concerned about their health. "I worry about the water all the time," said Wendell, 65, who was unaware when she moved in four months ago that she would be living next to one of the country's most infamous toxic-waste sites.

     Across the fenced-in canal is the 35-acre "uninhabitable area," a haunting landscape plagued by toxic hot spots that nature has reclaimed. There are fields of tall grasses and wildflowers where houses stood, and fully mature trees that once divided properties. Paths of broken asphalt lead to ghost cul-de-sacs, streets untended for so long that the curbs are lost in the weeds. A few homes still stand, occupied by residents who refused to leave.

     In 1999, the EPA announced the completions of its 2-decade-long, $200 million cleanup of Love Canal, but the water-treatment process, which continues around the clock, is permanent.

     "We will never walk away from this site," said Michael Basile, public-relations specialist for the EPA's Niagara Falls office.

     And the ordeal is not over for the former Love Canal families who worry about long-term health effects on their children and future generations.

     "A black cloud lays over the top of our heads, like the daughter whose mother had breast cancer," said Gibbs, who is 51 and runs the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, an advocacy group based in Virginia. "You wonder each time you go to the doctor, or your children do, that something terrible will happen."