It is as though Beaver Cleaver’s all-American neighborhood moved to the Twilight Zone.
Pastel, vinyl-sided homes surrounded by swing sets, marigolds and satellite dishes look out on the most famous hazardous waste dump in America.
Mothers pushing baby strollers don’t even look as they pass the “Danger” sign on a chain-link fence that encloses 20,000 tons of buried chemicals.
Twenty years ago, the site was known as Love Canal, a neighborhood whose evacuation launched the national crusade against toxic waste. But today, with the dump entombed in clay and new people buying long-empty houses, the name is being erased along with the bad memories.
The sign on the main drag welcomes visitors to “Black Creek Village.”
“The people that reside here just want (the controversy) to be over with,” said Jeff Principe of the federally funded Love Canal Area Revitalization Agency, which changed the area’s name.
The strange rebirth of Love Canal, which critics say has not been properly cleaned up, mirrors deep divisions over this country’s two-decade-long effort to clean up industrial waste.
Despite untold billions spent by government and industry on waste sites since Love Canal, few are satisfied with the progress, and many question whether the benefits have been worth costs that include vast tracts of land abandoned for fear of cleanup costs.
Research has not shown that hazardous waste is the pervasive threat it seemed when Love Canal residents first fled black ooze in their basements.
The National Research Council’s 1991 review, the broadest look at hazardous waste sites, found that the health harm from these places “appears to be small,” but complained about an overall lack of good research.
“Every important study I am aware of questions not that the (hazardous waste) problem exists, but how high a priority it is among environmental problems,” said Boston College political scientist Marc Landy, who believes government and industry have spent too much on the hazardous waste issue that could have been spent on more pressing environmental concerns.
Even at Love Canal, where the school was literally built on top of chemical waste, major studies found an increase in birth defects and miscarriages, but, with the exception of one heavily criticized study, did not find other serious health problems that residents suspected. Numerous observers believe that at least some of the residents left their homes needlessly.
But, Lois Gibbs, the homemaker-turned-activist who led the citizen protests at Love Canal, believes that government and industry haven’t done nearly enough to clean up Love Canal or many other industrial sites. She argues that health studies often ask the wrong questions, or ignore local concerns such as a cluster of breast cancers in one part of Love Canal.
“These (hazardous waste sites) are like red flags that say something is seriously wrong with this country,” said Gibbs, founder of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, which helps grass-roots environmentalists.
That Gibbs is still leading fights 20 years later reflects the enduring impact Love Canal has had on environmental politics, unleashing a new breed of activist personified by Gibbs, a woman once so shy of public speaking that she skipped school to avoid book reports.
Persistent, skeptical of government, and willing to use theatrics to make their point, these “mother bears” cut sympathetic figures, standing up for their children against seemingly insensitive corporations and bureaucrats. Over the years, they forced Congress to pass new laws and industry to reduce chemical use, and defeated unwanted projects across the country.
“What Lois did was show that an average person like me can prevail with enough tenacity and persistence,” said Joanne Muti, who used Gibbs-inspired tactics to win a six-year fight against a sewage debris landfill in her town of Walpole, Mass.
But some analysts believe that, in the process, the activists injected irrationality into the environmental debate. Even as Gibbs rails against toxic chemicals, she smokes cigarettes (although not around her children). And colorful demonstrations often drown out the sober review of facts.
The result, argues author Gregg Easterbrook, is that activists often exaggerate pollution’s effects and, therefore, the need for action.
“Many people would rather believe distant villains are to blame for any sickness they may contract,” he writes in “A Moment on the Earth,” which criticizes excesses of the environmental movement.
There had always been something odd about Love Canal, like the phosphorous rocks that sparked when children dropped them and the way kids came home covered in grease. But, for a city where the chemical industry is king, Love Canal seemed like countryside, and many residents didn’t even know that an old canal full of waste was buried between 99th and 97th streets.
The Blizzard of 1978, followed by a high spring water table, uncovered Love Canal’s dirty secret, dislodging toxic chemicals that Hooker Chemical had dumped into the buried canal.
People reported strange smells and liquids in basements, and seemingly high rates of illness. Gibbs, mother of two young children, began to press for answers.
By Aug. 7, 1978, when President Carter signed the emergency declaration to relocate residents, Love Canal was in a full-fledged panic; several suicides were later attributed to fear of the chemicals.
In response, the federal government agreed to buy houses well beyond the 239 homes closest to the canal. Ultimately, more than 800 families would move out, even though the EPA had scant evidence that many of them were affected.
“The decisions were being made by politicians who were seeking reelection and those same politicians had a very limited amount of information to work with and they chose to err on the side of safety,” said Susan Bloss, director of the Love Canal Area Revitalization Agency.
Unfortunately, the congressional response to Love Canal, the 1981 Superfund law, was so far-reaching in its effort to “make polluters pay” that many cleanups quickly devolved into fights over who was liable.
By 1996, a congressional study showed that one-third of the $28 billion spent on Superfund went to lawyers and others not directly involved in cleanup.
As a result, the list of Superfund sites ballooned while cleanups went forward at a sometimes glacial pace.
On the positive side, the strictness of Superfund–Love Canal cost Hooker’s corporate descendant, Occidental Petroleum, more than $233 million–moved industry to curb pollution. From 1988 to 1996 alone, chemical discharges have dropped 46 percent, according to EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory.
However, fear of getting drawn into a hazardous waste dispute scared developers away from land that even potentially contained hazardous waste. The environmental insurance industry estimates there are up to 500,000 of these unused industrial sites nationally, so-called “brownfields,” only a fraction of which are heavily contaminated.
“Superfund is a poorly designed law,” said Boston College professor Landy, calling the stigma on industrial property “the single worst thing. You have to think about a particular community and what is blighting the neighborhood. What are we going to do to bring it back into productive use?”
The EPA answered critics in 1995 with an overhaul of Superfund that threw thousands of lightly contaminated sites out of the program and made redevelopment of industrial property a top priority.
Since then, the pace of cleanup has quickened: of the 1,353 sites on the Superfund list, cleanup construction is complete at 520, though only 162 have been cleaned up enough to be crossed off the list altogether.
The program now has some striking successes, such as the former Industri-plex tannery site in Woburn, Mass., which will soon host a Target department store and a transportation center.
At the same time, EPA officials built up greater trust with the neighbors of hazardous waste sites, by shelving plans to burn toxic chemicals in New Bedford because of citizen opposition, for instance.
“We make sure we talk to the people who live near the site because they’re the people who know things we couldn’t know,” said Paula Fitzsimmons, director of policy in New England’s EPA office of site remediation and restoration.
But Love Canal, the preeminent Superfund site redevelopment, remains controversial. Former residents, who sold their homes to the EPA when they moved out, have been fighting EPA since 1988 when the agency determined that the northern section was safe for people to move back. EPA said the chemicals were contained and so thoroughly ringed with monitoring wells that they would quickly know if something leaked out.
“It’s sickening. They don’t know what’s in there,” said former resident Luella Kenny, whose 7-year-old son died of a kidney disease called nephrosis that she believes was caused by chemical exposure at Love Canal. “The thing that really bothers me is the children.”
Today, Love Canal has become such a hot real estate market that one developer is building new houses within view of the dump site. And the Love Canal revitalization agency no longer offers a discount on the houses it sells in Love Canal.
“It’s a nice quiet neighborhood,” said Floyd Garrow, a 72-year-old retiree whose well-tended back yard ends at the fence around the chemical dump. “That doesn’t bother me at all.”
The rush to Love Canal matches the waning concern Americans have for hazardous waste. Once a top environmental concern, hazardous waste had fallen to eighth place among environmental issues in a 1997 Roper survey.
“It is so hard to raise money these days for this issue,” said Gibbs, whose Virginia-based group is seeking affluent backers. “Even direct mail falls flat on its face.”
Yet, Gibbs is working in a changed world from the late 1970s when Love Canal was fresh in the public mind.
Industrial pollution generally doesn’t seem to be the health menace people once feared as studies increasingly show that environmental factors may affect 15 percent of cancers or less. Out of more than 200 recent studies of perceived disease clusters in Massachusetts, state epidemiologists have found an environmental link in only about 15 or 20, according to the state Bureau of Environmental Health Assessment.
Suzanne Condon, the bureau’s director, said there may be more environmentally induced disease than researchers have found so far, but the public is also learning that pollution is just one cancer cause.
Still, broad statistics don’t mean much for places where hazardous waste has taken a heavy toll, such as Woburn, where children died as a result of exposure to contaminated well water. Likewise, EPA has had to evacuate 16 neighborhoods near Superfund sites so far.
“Try telling someone next to a Superfund site that they should be more concerned about air pollution,” said EPA spokeswoman Lauren Michael. Lois Gibbs would never do that.
