The legacy of Love Canal

By Lois Gibbs Copyright 1998 Boston Globe August 7, 1998

Twenty years ago, when the public first heard the words Love Canal, I was a young mother living in Niagara Falls, N.Y., just three blocks east of the Love Canal dump site, which contained 20,000 tons of more than 200 different chemicals. I set out to investigate whether my neighbors' children were as sick as my children were. As I went door to door, I was shocked to hear stories of birth defects, miscarriages, cancers, and the leaking of multicolored chemical ooze into basements. My fears were confirmed - our families were at risk.

On Aug. 2, 1978, the State of New York declared an emergency at Love Canal and ordered my children's school to close. Recommendations included evacuating pregnant women and children under the age of 2, forbidding children to play in their yards, and asking residents not to eat food from their gardens. Five days later President Carter declared Love Canal a federal disaster area and provided funding to evacuate the 239 families living closest to the canal.

A fence was erected around the abandoned homes and the dump site. Outside this area lived another 700 families. Undertaking our own community health survey, because the Health Department refused to do one, we found that 56 percent of children born within that area suffered from birth defects. Families also reported an increase in miscarriages, stillborn babies, cancer, and other diseases. It took more than two years before the remaining families were given the resources to leave. On Oct. 1, 1980, President Carter signed the bill that provided funding for relocation.

The Love Canal crisis awakened the nation to the hazards of exposure to chemicals in our environment and spurred the passage of the 1981 Superfund legislation to clean up contaminated sites like Love Canal. Today, 20 years later, 65 million people, or one in four Americans, still live within 4 miles of a Superfund site. While the Superfund program is far from perfect, its mandate - to clean up contaminated sites - is essential. But the tax on chemical and oil companies that largely funds these Superfund cleanups expired in December 1995. As a result, $ 4 million a day is not being collected from the polluters, and industry has saved about $ 3.6 billion.

These funds are lost while industry proposes to "fix" the Superfund law by weakening cleanup standards and eliminating the "polluter pays" provision. This provision is the primary incentive for corporations to manage and dispose of their waste safely. To protect the public, the Superfund law must be reauthorized with stronger cleanup standards, and the tax provision must be reinstated.

Love Canal sparked a new and growing movement of people concerned about chemicals and health - a movement as much about human rights and justice as it is about public health and the environment. While traditional environmental efforts are led by lawyers, scientists, and lobbyists, this network consists of homemakers, farmers, blue-collar workers, ranchers, urban, suburban, rural, and low-income people, and communities of color.

These people do not believe that environmental and public health threats they face are due to random placement of industrial complexes or waste disposal facilities. Communities at risk believe their neighborhoods were targeted, chosen deliberately by corporations to be sacrificed in the name of economic growth and profits.

There is clear evidence of this in the 1984 Cerrell Associates report done for the California Solid Waste Division and the 1992 Epley report done for North Carolina and the nuclear industry. These reports confirmed that communities are chosen for waste disposal sites or industrial plants based on their demographics, not science. The reports defined "communities least likely to resist" as low-income rural communities, uninvolved in social issues, with older average residents who have a high school education or less. For example, in "Cancer Alley" Louisiana - a primarily African-American, low-income, and already heavily polluted area - a massive vinyl chloride plant has been proposed.

People who are fighting for environmental justice reject the idea that they must be burdened with pollution simply because their communities were seen by industry as a path of least resistance.

Twenty years after Love Canal, there is still much we don't know about the health effects of the 77,000 chemicals in commercial use today. Human health effects have been studied in only about 10 percent of these compounds. But we know enough to prevent future exposures. And we must demand that polluters continue to pay to clean up existing polution. Taxpayers should not have to pay to undo the damage caused by corporations who profit from pollution at the expense of our health and our environment.

Lois Gibbs is executive director of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice and author of "Love Canal, The Story Continues."

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