Renita Mwangachuchu

Mr. Michael Plotnick

Engineering 100
October 1, 2013
Responsibility & the Love Canal Disaster
Love Canal is a town that is now present-day Black Creek Village in Niagara
Falls, New York. The development was established in the 1950s. It is now, and was
then, sitting on top of about 20,000 tons of toxic waste.
The canal itself was a project started by William Love around the 1890s. He
wanted to erect a new Model City that would house over 1 million citizens. His plan
for the canal was to supply the city of his dreams, in the surrounding area, with a
direct current (DC) power source from his planned hydroelectric plant. He bought a
bit of land right off of Niagara Falls to channel the current & power the plant. At the
time his project was underway, he first had to deal with the economic depression
that hit New York at that time. The Adams Hydroelectric Power Plant was built in
1895 by Niagara Falls to generate power using an alternating current (AC). This
made his project obsolete. He found himself unable to finish, & ended up with a
chunk of land with a very big hole in it. He abandoned this dream city, and the hole.
It soon began to fill up with water, & the locals used it as a swimming hole when it
was hot, and an ice skating rink when it was cold.
Its documented that the military and city of Niagara Falls started using the
old canal as a dump site starting around the 1920s. Soon after, around the 1940s,
the Hooker Chemical company bought it up and became the sole user of the land.
This chemical manufacturer was known to be messy. They ended up stockpiling
about 20 million tons of toxic chemical waste in that 4,600 foot long water canal.

When the land was all about filled up with buried waste, they covered it with a very
thick layer of clay and allowed a grassy field to grow over it.
The Niagara School Board approached the Hooker Chemical company with a
plan to build a school over this massive chemical waste dump. At first the company
refused, telling them the area was unsafe for any type of development, especially
not a site for a school of children. Apparently, these warnings were not enough. With
the population of Niagara Falls rising, the school board needed to find land to build
more schools upon. They responded to the companys declined offer by threatening
to condemn the land under eminent domain. Perhaps the company just didnt feel
like paying for lawyers. Perhaps they found it unnecessary to present a case in
court. For whatever their reason, Hooker Chemical gave the land away to the school
board for merely $1.00, stating in the contract that they were to never be held liable
for whatever occurred therein after. A caveat in the agreement plainly stated that
there were chemical wastes, though it did not seem to indicate how much or how
great the risk of death & disease was as a result.
Eventually, schools were developed, and surrounding neighborhoods had
been placed dangerously close to the canal. The clay covering had been breached
by construction workers. Extremely toxic waste began to work its way up above
ground. Residents noticed a black tarry like substance collecting in their basements
& gutters. The waste appeared to cover the playgrounds that school children played
on. They would go splashing in toxic puddles after itd just rained and come home
with burns on their little hands and faces. Mothers noticed their children developing
one disease after the other, like asthma, epilepsy, and other long arduous ailments.
The sickness seemingly appeared out nowhere, for no reason at all. When it was
exposed in news articles that the town could have been contaminated, the

government officials denied it. Authority figures stated there was absolutely nothing
wrong with the schools and that the town was just fine. When it was discovered just
how bad the situation had gotten, the federal government had everybody
evacuated. A Superfund was erected to compensate home owners so theyd be able
to move out. The contaminants were making its way into the ground water and
spreading out at an alarming rate. Drastic measures to control the damage began
immediately after.
Hooker Chemical is the main responsible party since they deposited the
chemical waste into the land & then let the land go. It was a chemical company with
employees who knew to the full extent what dangers hid below the allotment of
land. Hooker Chemical should have fought to keep the land in their ownership. They
should have fought against the claims for eminent domain & hired whoever they
needed to ensure that the public would never come into contact with their waste.
Instead they shrugged off the responsibility in an I told you so manner. Even if it
meant a lot of effort on their part, they could have at least assigned mandatory
consultants to the school board to ensure the clay seal stayed intact and how the
school should be built in the agreed upon places at a safe enough distance from the
dump site.
The Hooker Chemical company made sure that they followed every safety
statute to the T. They did it when they buried the waste as well as when they
covered it. They even spelled it out in the clearest of terms exactly where the waste
was, how the seal was situated, and where it was safest, but still not recommended,
to build upon. These designations were clearly ignored by construction workers of
the development company that bought the land from the school board as well as
everyone else who moved into the area. This is what contributed a lot into the

seepage of the toxic waste out of the containment itd been in. There was still an
obvious case of diffused responsibility when they failed to check up on & enforce
these parameters. They were following the law, but they were not serving the public
when they let the school board do as they pleased with the toxic landfill.
The city of Niagara Falls is also equally as responsible for not doing their
research and ensuring the safety of the public they served. Even when faced with
complaints from concerned citizens, they continued to operate under the
assumption that the area was perfectly normal & that there was nothing to be
concerned about. Under the guise of serving the public by building new schools,
they put the public in danger by ignoring the warnings and selling the land off to
developers. They were serving themselves, & not the public they were obligated to,
when they pushed on with the development in the Love Canal.
Even today, very little is known by the city dwellers of Black Creek Village
about the original Love Canal disaster. Their development is a safer distance, to the
north, of the original disaster site. Theyve been told by certain members of
authority that the small amounts of dioxins present have something to do with plant
growth. They stay oblivious to the casually thrown warnings about the land they
currently live on. Occidental Chemical (formerly Hooker Chemical) & the Niagara
Falls government need to work together to ensure that the citizens and whoever
else is involved with the land are made fully aware. They need to be able to make
fully informed decisions. They need to know that their decisions involve a certain
degree of risk. It is not the publics sole duty to inform themselves. It is the duty of
those who put them at risk in the first place.