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The Love Canal Facts

The Love Canal Facts
The Love Canal refers to one of the most tragic environmental manmade disasters in the world's history. The Love Canal was originally planned as a model city and dream community along the eastern side of Niagara Falls, NY. It was named after William T. Love, a man who planned to dig a short canal between the Niagara Rivers that would supply power to his model city. The economy and the discovery of alternating current led to William T. Love's dream being squashed. The canal was turned into an industrial dumpsite instead by local government and later the Hooker Chemical Company. The waste was covered and sold and in the 1950s and later homes and a school were built on the Love Canal. The toxic waste eventually began to surface and health concerns resulted in the model city being almost completely abandoned. The toxic waste began to leach into homes, pools, backyards, and playgrounds. Children often had burns on their hands after playing outside in the Love Canal area.
Interesting The Love Canal Facts:
Over 800 families had to be relocated from the Love Canal to other areas. The government reimbursed the homeowners financially for their homes as they would not have been able to sell them.
33% of the residents experienced chromosome damage, while miscarriage rates increased, birth defects increased, cancers increased, and the government bought out homeowners to enable them to move away from the contamination.
There have been more than 248 different chemicals discovered in the area of the Love Canal.
Waste that made it into the Love Canal included waste from chemical warfare experiments carried out by the United States Army.
The city of Niagara Falls, NY used the Love Canal for disposing of chemical waste. The city later sold the Love Canal site to Hooker Chemical Company.
In 1952 Hooker Chemical Company filled the waste site in. They sold the land to the city for only $1.
As residents of Love Canal became ill Hooker Chemical Company and the government denied involvement.
In 1978 U.S. President Jimmy Carter declared the Love Canal a federal emergency and relocated over 800 families.
The 800 relocated families and the Environmental Protection Agency sued Occidental Petroleum for $129 million. This was the parent company of Hooker Chemical Company.
21 tons of toxic chemicals have been cleaned up from the Love Canal but there is still much more to do.
There have been movies and documentaries made about the Love Canal tragedy including In Our Own Backyard, and Lois Gibbs and the Love Canal.
There are more than 35 million tons of hazardous water being produced every year in the United States alone. It all has to be disposed of properly to avoid contaminating the environment and making people sick. Unfortunately this is not always the case.
Other cases in the United States of contamination of the environment include Valley of the Drums (a 23 acre toxic waste dump in Kentucky), Munisport Landfill (170 acre toxic chemical landfill), and the Agriculture Street Landfill in New Orleans.


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