Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. So I'm Josh, and
Speaker 2: there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff
Speaker 2: you should know. The I can't believe this happened, but
Speaker 2: I can totally believe it.
Speaker 1: Addition, Oh, I thought it was the Romantic Cruise in
Speaker 1: the Gondola edition.
Speaker 2: I know you'd think so. By the name of it,
Speaker 2: Love Canal.
Speaker 1: Love Canal sounds so wonderful.
Speaker 2: For sure, it does. The love can No love canal
Speaker 2: we're talking about today is not wonderful or nice at all.
Speaker 2: Even before it was filled with toxic waste, it was
Speaker 2: not so great to begin with.
Speaker 1: Spoiler, Yeah, love.
Speaker 2: Canals filled in toxic waste. As we'll see, Love Canal
Speaker 2: was an incident in American history where America came to
Speaker 2: grips with the idea that all the toxic waste it
Speaker 2: had been burying for the last century, essentially, yeah, was
Speaker 2: starting to intrude into the ground, and that there was
Speaker 2: way more than just water pollution or air pollution. There
Speaker 2: was such a thing as ground pollution, and all of
Speaker 2: a sudden, all the toxic waste sites around the United
Speaker 2: States suddenly seemed like ticking time bombs thanks to one
Speaker 2: that actually went off.
Speaker 1: That's right, and supplementary material are do we do one
Speaker 1: in super funds? I know we did one on brownfield remediation.
Speaker 2: That's the closest I think we came.
Speaker 1: Okay, that was an old one though, But you know,
Speaker 1: if you're into that kind of thing, or maybe landfills too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you're a remediation fan, check it out.
Speaker 1: But for this one, we should go back in time, correct, Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's go.
Speaker 2: Back all the way back to the eighteen nineties. We're
Speaker 2: gonna head on up north to Niagara Falls, New York.
Speaker 2: Not just the falls, but the city. There's a city
Speaker 2: called Niagara Falls, and it is where where you would
Speaker 2: stay if you were honeymooning in Niagara Falls, which is
Speaker 2: something that people did for a very long time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we also did one on going over Niagara Falls
Speaker 1: and a barrel.
Speaker 2: Totally did that. Feels like you're a fan of barrels,
Speaker 2: check it out.
Speaker 1: That feels like one of those that had to be
Speaker 1: like an early fifteen minute episode.
Speaker 2: Oh I really think it was like on par with
Speaker 2: more like five.
Speaker 1: Okay, it was a long long time ago. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: eighteen nineties. We are in Niagara. We look to our
Speaker 1: right and we see a gentleman named William T. Love.
Speaker 1: He says hello, he says hi. There. He's very excited
Speaker 1: because he said, I've got an idea for you guys.
Speaker 1: Niagara Falls is doing pretty great. Here's powering a bunch
Speaker 1: of there's a bunch of industrial mills around. But I
Speaker 1: have a vision that we can make this better. We
Speaker 1: can build a model city if we just divert part
Speaker 1: of this Niagara River over there on Lewiston Ridge. And
Speaker 1: then he pointed that away whichever way that was sure,
Speaker 1: and he said, we can double our hydro electric output
Speaker 1: if we do that. It's just four miles down river,
Speaker 1: and we can build this amazing neighborhood that has electricity
Speaker 1: and telephone lines and anything you would want. And like
Speaker 1: I said, we'll call it model city. And all you
Speaker 1: got to do is let me build Love Canal. You
Speaker 1: don't have to name it dat, right, but it'll be
Speaker 1: seven miles long, eighty feet wide, and fifteen feet deep
Speaker 1: and that's all we need to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So he wanted to set up a new fall.
Speaker 2: He wanted to create a man made or human made
Speaker 2: waterfall to generate hydro electric power which would power this
Speaker 2: amazing town that he was building. I mean, because that
Speaker 2: was quite a draw electricity, telephones, gas lines, sewer lines
Speaker 2: in the eighteen nineties, like he would have gotten free takers,
Speaker 2: and he got some investors for sure. And also, in
Speaker 2: what would become a long standing tradition, the city of
Speaker 2: Niagara Falls gave this random person carte Blanc to exercise
Speaker 2: eminent domain and take people's land to carve a canal
Speaker 2: from the Niagara River to a different part, to divert
Speaker 2: some of it, to just do some really serious stuff.
Speaker 2: And he's he got a lot of people interested. But
Speaker 2: two things happened that killed the model city plan of
Speaker 2: William T. Love. First, the Panic of eighteen ninety three.
Speaker 2: It was a huge economic meltdown in the eighteen nineties,
Speaker 2: scared a lot of investors. They wanted sure things from
Speaker 2: that point on. And then the second thing was Nikola
Speaker 2: Tesla's He came up with the method of long distance
Speaker 2: electrical transmission. The whole reason William T. Love wanted to
Speaker 2: build this electro hydroelectro plant is because you needed close
Speaker 2: by electrical generation to power stuff. Tesla said, you don't
Speaker 2: need that anymore. So at that point, William T. Love
Speaker 2: just threw up his hands and moved to I think,
Speaker 2: on some rural part of Ontario.
Speaker 1: He went north. Yeah, very interesting. Seems like he goes
Speaker 1: south after that.
Speaker 2: You would think so, but he didn't. He went north
Speaker 2: and it was like, I can't remember. It was like
Speaker 2: the name of the town was rats something. It was
Speaker 2: not a pleasant place to be. But he left behind
Speaker 2: a legacy of sorts, didn't he he did.
Speaker 1: He left behind you know, they got started on the
Speaker 1: dam or I'm sorry, on the canal because I think
Speaker 1: damn when I think hydro electricity. Look at me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not seven miles, but one mile of this thing had
Speaker 1: been dug and so it's there. It's you know, I
Speaker 1: don't know if it was the full eighty feet wide
Speaker 1: and fifteen feet deep and a mile long, but it
Speaker 1: was a huge, dug up swath of earth. And so
Speaker 1: the city is like, all right, well, now we got
Speaker 1: this here, I guess. You know, kids are swimming in
Speaker 1: it in the summer and they're skating on it in
Speaker 1: the other ten months out of the year. And in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties a company came along the Hooker Electrochemical Company,
Speaker 1: which made industrial chemicals and plastics and pesticides and all
Speaker 1: kinds of stuff. And they said, I would like to
Speaker 1: buy that land because we would like to or we
Speaker 1: would like to buy that land because we would like
Speaker 1: to do what everyone else does when they have toxic waste,
Speaker 1: and that's bury it and steal drums. And that's a
Speaker 1: You've already dug the hole for us, so exactly, you
Speaker 1: did a lot of the work up front, and we'd
Speaker 1: like to buy it so we can stick our drums
Speaker 1: in there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, William T. Love inadvertently dug out a trash pit. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that the Hooker Company was like, heck, yeah, I looked
Speaker 2: up the dimensions. I think it was something like three
Speaker 2: thousand feet by ten feet deep by I think twenty
Speaker 2: or something feet across, so it covered like sixteen acres essentially,
Speaker 2: and that's a lot. You can fit a lot of
Speaker 2: waste in a ten foot deep pit. Yeah, that's sixteen
Speaker 2: acres total surface area. And they did. They ended up
Speaker 2: so because they the Hooker Company, didn't make the products
Speaker 2: that kill us. They made the ingredients that people put
Speaker 2: into the products that kill us. So like they actually
Speaker 2: created the dioxins and the PCBs and stuff that plastic
Speaker 2: manufacturers and pesticide makers used in their products. So the
Speaker 2: stuff they were throwing away as waste was as deadly
Speaker 2: as it gets, essentially like just the most toxic of
Speaker 2: toxic waste. But at the time people didn't realize that.
Speaker 2: They knew you didn't want to be around it or
Speaker 2: get it on your skin or breathe it in, but
Speaker 2: they did not realize the extent of toxicity of some
Speaker 2: of these things.
Speaker 1: No, not at all. And they ended up over a
Speaker 1: nine year period bearing close to twenty two thousand tons
Speaker 1: of this stuff in the Love canal, and like you said,
Speaker 1: every toxic compound and dioxin and carcinogen you can think
Speaker 1: of practically as in there. And like you were mentioning,
Speaker 1: it wasn't you know, it wasn't like it is today. Obviously,
Speaker 1: first of all, the fact that you could do that
Speaker 1: at all, but the way they did it, you know,
Speaker 1: if the lid popped off after it was in there,
Speaker 1: they didn't send someone down there to seal that lid.
Speaker 1: If one of the drums got cracked or something, they
Speaker 1: didn't say, oh, well, let's get down there and get
Speaker 1: that drum out of here and repair it or put
Speaker 1: the waist in a new drum. They were just like,
Speaker 1: it's probably fine. They're hosing their hands and clothes off
Speaker 1: with the hoses of nearby neighbors, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: you know, problems start happening kind of right away. You know,
Speaker 1: groundwater is rising, some of these drums are rusting, and
Speaker 1: stuff starts leaching pretty quickly. So they said, all right,
Speaker 1: we've filled this thing about as full as we can
Speaker 1: full it. Not just them, but I think like all
Speaker 1: like local the City of Niagara was dumping stuff in there,
Speaker 1: and like all kinds of people were dumping stuff, right.
Speaker 2: The Army dumped a bunch of stuff as well. It
Speaker 2: was not just hooker, but they were far and away
Speaker 2: the largest contributor to the toxic weights pit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. So this thing gets full, they said,
Speaker 1: all right, we got a sixteen acre landfill. Basically, we're
Speaker 1: gonna cap it with some clay shovel about a foot
Speaker 1: and a half atop soil on it and call it
Speaker 1: a day. And here's what we'll do, City of Niagara.
Speaker 1: We would like to sell it back to you just
Speaker 1: for a dollar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the City of Niagara Falls, like Hookers is the
Speaker 2: biggest employer there, right, So this seemed like a real,
Speaker 2: like a benefactor type situation, like this company that that
Speaker 2: was like caring for the community by employing all these people,
Speaker 2: was also showing it cared for the community by basically
Speaker 2: donating a decent sized chunk of land for the town
Speaker 2: to build a new elementary school. And that's what the
Speaker 2: town did with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is in.
Speaker 2: A certain ghoulish way, for sure. It's a laugh of irony,
Speaker 2: not right exactly, So that's exactly what they did. The
Speaker 2: City of Niagara Falls paid one dollar to Hooker, a
Speaker 2: chemical company, and it took possession of this the swath
Speaker 2: of land that contained this toxic waste pit, and gave
Speaker 2: it to the Board of Education and said build a school.
Speaker 2: And you might think that that is madness and that's nuts,
Speaker 2: and that probably the Hooker company was trying to keep
Speaker 2: all this underwrap, and apparently that is not the case. Hooker.
Speaker 2: Even in the deed you can read the deed where
Speaker 2: they transferred ownership of land to the city, it says like, hey,
Speaker 2: there's waist down there and you don't want to touch it,
Speaker 2: but you guys are taking possession of this stuff and
Speaker 2: it's now your responsibility. So they weren't like trying to
Speaker 2: pass off something that they knew was like a ticking
Speaker 2: time bomb from everything I can tell. Instead, they were like,
Speaker 2: we can't use this anymore. You guys should use it.
Speaker 2: Just don't build anything with a basement nearby.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean they did say we're not liable for
Speaker 1: anything like that was definitely in the agreement. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: they also like they literally brought members of the school
Speaker 1: board out there and they dug holes, I think like
Speaker 1: eight holes in the ground and said, look, this stuff
Speaker 1: is four feet down. You can see these these barrels,
Speaker 1: no basements, Like, don't do any underground piping, don't subdivide
Speaker 1: it for homes, like you should not do that stuff.
Speaker 1: But apparently the school board was broke they did it anyway,
Speaker 1: So you know, the blood is on the hands of
Speaker 1: the school board as well as the city and the
Speaker 1: Hooker Chemical Company.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is one of those things where like when
Speaker 2: you read the histories of it in retrospect, like there's
Speaker 2: clear heroes, there's clear villains, there is clear you know,
Speaker 2: indifference that's just criminal, and all of that is true.
Speaker 2: It does exist, but it's definitely more nuanced than that.
Speaker 2: It's not nearly as clear cut as you know you
Speaker 2: might read in a single article about Love Canal. And
Speaker 2: that's part of it. Hooker takes a lot of the blame,
Speaker 2: and part of it is definitely fairly, and part of
Speaker 2: it is not at all fairly, for sure. But the
Speaker 2: one group that seems to have really been just basically
Speaker 2: the pits from any angle I can find is the
Speaker 2: city of Niagara Falls. The managers who the mayor, the
Speaker 2: city council. They just were not good. They were not
Speaker 2: in any kind of position to take on what was
Speaker 2: about to happen in the neighborhood that was now called
Speaker 2: Love Canal that had build up around the school.
Speaker 1: I think that's a good spot for a break, Sure
Speaker 1: it is. I mean it's kind of early, but I
Speaker 1: mean that's as good as a Niagara Falls style cliffhangers
Speaker 1: you can get. Right, people are hanging off of Lewiston Ridge.
Speaker 2: Yeah, their barrels are just dangling from their toes.
Speaker 1: All right, we'll be right back then and tell you
Speaker 1: what started happening pretty quickly after this. All right, So
Speaker 1: we mentioned elementary school. What better to do on a
Speaker 1: chemical waste stump there in Springfield than to build the
Speaker 1: ninety ninth Street school. The school, if you look at
Speaker 1: a map, was built right in the center of where
Speaker 1: this landfill was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even just taking the toxic waste out of account,
Speaker 2: the stability of the ground, it's like scary just looking
Speaker 2: at like a hokey map of it.
Speaker 1: No, totally, I didn't even think about that, like foundationally,
Speaker 1: it probably wasn't that you know, firm, you know.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: So they completed the school in nineteen fifty five. Even
Speaker 1: though they said, hey, don't subdivide this for homes, They're like,
Speaker 1: are you kidding me? People want to live near the school.
Speaker 1: So the neighborhood that was known as Love Canal had
Speaker 1: about eight hundred houses and about two hundred and forty apartments,
Speaker 1: and right away I think this was all completed. The
Speaker 1: school in fifty five. It's starting and like two or
Speaker 1: three years later problems started happening. People were coming down
Speaker 1: with physical symptoms that were horror.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think nineteen fifty eight some kids were taken
Speaker 2: to the hospital for treatment of chemical burns. Yeah, that's
Speaker 2: just a few years of the school opening. The following year,
Speaker 2: a family called the Vorhis found that there was black
Speaker 2: sludge seeping through their basement walls.
Speaker 1: Took a horror movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think that's literally part of Amityville
Speaker 2: Horror at the end, isn't there like black seeping through
Speaker 2: the walls?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think there's more than one movie
Speaker 1: that does the old black sledge trick.
Speaker 2: Well, this is where they got it was from the
Speaker 2: families of Love Canal in the late fifties. There's another
Speaker 2: thing I turned up. There were the kids in the
Speaker 2: area loved to play with fire rocks that they found.
Speaker 2: There was a kind of rock they found that if
Speaker 2: you threw it in another rock or threw it at
Speaker 2: a hard surface, sometimes they would explode catch fire. One
Speaker 2: kid puts some of these fire rocks in his pockets
Speaker 2: and ran home, and the friction caused the fire rocks
Speaker 2: to catch fire and burn the kid quite badly, And
Speaker 2: so of course people started to investigating. They're like those
Speaker 2: chunks of white phosphorus and it should probably stop playing
Speaker 2: with that.
Speaker 1: It was like that, Yeah, yeah, totally. The fire chief sent,
Speaker 1: I believe, a report to the city manager of what
Speaker 1: he said were obnoxious odors. Of course, we can apply
Speaker 1: the sick rit scriptum because he meant noxious.
Speaker 2: Sure, he also said it was irritating to the lungs
Speaker 2: and we should probably do something about this. And that
Speaker 2: was sixty four.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then all of a sudden, babies start being
Speaker 1: born that have disfigurements, that have disabilities, deafness. This one
Speaker 1: baby in the Schroeder family was born with a second
Speaker 1: row of teeth, among other things. Really alarming stuff. So
Speaker 1: flash forward, that's nineteen sixty eight. By the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: people are just living there. It looks like a regular suburban,
Speaker 1: you know, northeastern suburban neighborhood. Some of the residents may
Speaker 1: have known about this that were in the know, but
Speaker 1: probably not many of them. There was a lot of
Speaker 1: series of winters in a row with like tons of rainfall,
Speaker 1: tons of snow, tons of lakes freezing, and this all
Speaker 1: just melts into that groundwater system and carries the stuff
Speaker 1: even further through the groundwater system, and the canal itself
Speaker 1: became so saturated that like these some of these barrels
Speaker 1: started like rising up through the surface of the earth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and all the ones that were already open and
Speaker 2: had been leaking over the years were now really spilling
Speaker 2: their contents, and that stuff was being pushed up and
Speaker 2: out of the relative safety of the canal the pit.
Speaker 2: You know, now it wasn't even being held by the
Speaker 2: canal any longer. It was like in the ground. This
Speaker 2: was in people's backyards. There was a there was a
Speaker 2: ball field nearby that I saw that. It swelled and
Speaker 2: contracted like a bowl of gelatine whenever, whenever heavy equipment
Speaker 2: drove a because it was so saturated and just ready
Speaker 2: to pop. This is a baseball field. A pool popped
Speaker 2: out of the ground and was floating on toxic chemicals.
Speaker 2: Like pools of toxic sludge were starting to appear in
Speaker 2: people's backyards because the ground was so saturated and there
Speaker 2: was some really toxic stuff in the ground. So you
Speaker 2: put those things together. All of a sudden, people's backyards
Speaker 2: are toxic waste sites. And some, like you said, some
Speaker 2: had no idea that that was there.
Speaker 1: By the seventies, yeah, absolutely, you know, all men are
Speaker 1: Wildlife of course is dying. Trees are dying, landscaping is dying.
Speaker 1: Back people are losing their hair, pets are losing their hair.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, there's you know, breathing problems, there's numbing,
Speaker 1: there's fatigue, there's blood in people's stools, and eventually, in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy six, Niagara Gazette publishes the very first article
Speaker 1: that says, Hey, this nightmare that's happening all around us,
Speaker 1: by the way, has a reason behind it. And it's
Speaker 1: because the love canal and Hooker chemical got together and
Speaker 1: it's a toxic waste dump basically. Yeah, and a lot
Speaker 1: of these residents are like for the very first time,
Speaker 1: learning what's going on and probably going, oh, my god,
Speaker 1: you know, so much of my life makes sense now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, those fifty five gallon drums that were popping out
Speaker 2: of the creek beds makes sense now. I understand it now.
Speaker 2: But I mean it was so I think even the
Speaker 2: people who were used to had grown up throwing fire
Speaker 2: rocks at one another, and we're like used to the
Speaker 2: idea that there's some weird stuff around. Maybe even knew
Speaker 2: there was a dump site nearby. Yeah, this was now
Speaker 2: in their backyard thanks to the blizzard of seventy seven
Speaker 2: that dumped so much snow on that eventually trickled in
Speaker 2: and then saturated the ground. It brought it into the sunlight,
Speaker 2: and now there was just no denying it whatsoever. And
Speaker 2: then the Niagara Gazette, like you said, brought it further
Speaker 2: into the sunlight. So it was such an obvious problem
Speaker 2: out of the gate that the City of Niagara hired
Speaker 2: the Cowspan Corporation. They do all sorts of like freelance
Speaker 2: testing and stuff, and they investigated. They went to some
Speaker 2: of the basements that were emitting black sludge and checked
Speaker 2: the sump pumps, and they did some air testing, and
Speaker 2: they checked the sewer lines. And as the data started
Speaker 2: to roll in while they were doing this testing, there
Speaker 2: was a really dramatic moment where all of the Cowspan
Speaker 2: people got in their cars and sped away as fast
Speaker 2: as they could.
Speaker 1: In the movie, that's exactly what would happen. And then
Speaker 1: they just like they throw a file out the window
Speaker 1: and it slides to the feet of the mayor, and
Speaker 1: in that file is the data which basically says Displace
Speaker 1: is a disaster. The levels of toxic compounds is truly horrifying.
Speaker 1: We're out of here. But nothing happened. They didn't disclose
Speaker 1: the report, the findings from that report. The City of
Speaker 1: Nagar didn't, so the drumbeat keeps happening from the Nagregazette
Speaker 1: over the course of seventy seven seventy eight, they're still
Speaker 1: doing these reports. No one is still doing anything because,
Speaker 1: like you mentioned at the beginning, Hooker Chemical is still there.
Speaker 1: There's still a huge employer for that town, and it's
Speaker 1: a huge expense to clean this stuff up. So they
Speaker 1: weren't eager to bring this like fully into the light
Speaker 1: and say, all right, we got to do something about it.
Speaker 2: No, So the city had I saw what was described
Speaker 2: as an incestuous relationship with Hooker Chemical. There was a
Speaker 2: time where Hooker was suspected of leaking waste elsewhere in
Speaker 2: the city, and so they hired Hooker Chemical to go
Speaker 2: take samples and analyze it to find out if they
Speaker 2: were that kind of stuff. In addition to not wanting
Speaker 2: to tick off Hooker, they were also really worried about
Speaker 2: tourism because, like I said, like this is a time
Speaker 2: where if you honeymooned, and you you know, were working
Speaker 2: class or middle class, you would you there's a good
Speaker 2: chance you would travel to Niagara Falls and honeymoon there.
Speaker 2: So tourism was a big part of their economy. We
Speaker 2: didn't want to be like, come to Niagara Falls. We
Speaker 2: got the falls and a toxic waste dump too. So
Speaker 2: people are like, we need to keep this quiet. That
Speaker 2: was the city's position. We need to keep this quiet,
Speaker 2: we need to deny, we need to obfuskate. That was
Speaker 2: the whole thing that they tried to do, and it
Speaker 2: got as word got out, people started kind of castigating
Speaker 2: the mayor in the city council. I saw that I
Speaker 2: couldn't find the actual video, but I saw reference to
Speaker 2: an episode of The Donahue Show, Phil Donahue, and he
Speaker 2: had the mayor on Michael O'Laughlin and apparently Donahue compared
Speaker 2: him to the mayor from Jaws only cared about keeping
Speaker 2: the beaches open, which I thought was kind of apt.
Speaker 1: I can hear and visualize Donahue doing that with his
Speaker 1: righteous indignation.
Speaker 2: I can imagine Phil Hartman doing Phil Donahue doing.
Speaker 1: Man, God, what a loss. I think about Phil Hartman
Speaker 1: about once a month.
Speaker 2: I feel like, well, there you go, there's your monthly reminder.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so sad, we should do a show on him
Speaker 1: at some point.
Speaker 2: It's a good idea.
Speaker 1: That'd be kind of awesome. So they got a health
Speaker 1: commissioner doctor Francis Clifford, and he came along and he said,
Speaker 1: you're all hypochondriacs. This is just an odoriferous nuisance. Really,
Speaker 1: it's like you're just smoking a few cigarettes or something.
Speaker 1: It's really no big deal here. If you have a basement,
Speaker 1: you've got sludge and stuff. Here's a window fan on us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that that should take care of it than us later.
Speaker 1: And all of this is happening and being buried. And
Speaker 1: we mentioned promise of a hero, and in steps a
Speaker 1: remarkable human being named Lois Gibbs who lived in the area,
Speaker 1: who had a no for other than a high school education.
Speaker 1: Was it stay at home mom? But she knew what
Speaker 1: was The writing was on her wall in black sludge,
Speaker 1: and she knew what was happening and went to the
Speaker 1: school board and was like, I don't want my son
Speaker 1: going to the school. Yeah, I want to pull him
Speaker 1: out of school. And they said no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: we can't do that because the word will get out,
Speaker 1: everyone will freak and there won't be a school anymore.
Speaker 1: And she said, well, I am, I'm a mad mom
Speaker 1: and I'm not going to take it. So even though
Speaker 1: I have no history of activism or organizing or anything.
Speaker 1: I'm going to start. I'm going to get some other
Speaker 1: parents together. I'm going to start the Love Canal Parents Movement,
Speaker 1: which would become the Love Canal Homeowners Association, and we're
Speaker 1: going to wreak havoc on your head through the breast.
Speaker 2: She said, close the beaches.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, I think Lois kids. I want to say, like,
Speaker 2: she's an example of what a person can do when
Speaker 2: they're left without choices and being ignored by the people
Speaker 2: who are supposed to be helping them. But there's a
Speaker 2: lot of people who would have just probably given up.
Speaker 2: So she is remarkable in that sense for sure. So
Speaker 2: she headed the Love Canal Homeowners' Association for a couple
Speaker 2: of years. This thing went on for so the Blizzard
Speaker 2: of seventy seven happened at the beginning of nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 2: Things really started to just kind of creep out in
Speaker 2: seventy six. This went on until nineteen eighty and the
Speaker 2: homeowners Association had to fight every day, tooth and nail
Speaker 2: to get somebody to do something about this. And what
Speaker 2: they had to do first was to show that these
Speaker 2: complaints of congenital disorders of weird cancers, rectal bleeding apparently
Speaker 2: more than one person had rectal bleeding. There, liver problems,
Speaker 2: kidney problems. That this wasn't just like some random assemblage
Speaker 2: of defective people want them put it like. This was
Speaker 2: they were being poisoned by the toxic materials that were
Speaker 2: flowing into their neighborhood from this overflowing toxic dump and
Speaker 2: the bureaucracy, the city government did everything it could to
Speaker 2: say no, your hypochondriacs, just sit down and shut up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, until they couldn't it. Finally, because of the newspaper,
Speaker 1: because of Lois Gibbs and the homeowners Association raised so
Speaker 1: much hay, they finally said, all right, the state steps in.
Speaker 1: The New York State Health Department launched an investigation in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they stepped in and they said, City of Niagrit,
Speaker 2: we got this and winked at them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. So they did all kinds of testing to
Speaker 1: the soil, to the air, did health histories and blood
Speaker 1: tests and stuff of the residents, and you know, the
Speaker 1: results were what you were kind of talking about, these
Speaker 1: birth defects, the liver problems. I think the thirty five
Speaker 1: percent of women had miscarriages, which is, you know, higher
Speaker 1: than average. They say, you know, ten to twenty percent.
Speaker 1: Some say up to twenty five to thirty percent of
Speaker 1: pregnancies into miscarriages, but nothing goes as high as thirty five.
Speaker 1: So that was a high number. And then finally, in
Speaker 1: August of seventy eight, the state Health Commissioner Robert Whalen.
Speaker 2: Robert Big Bob Whalen.
Speaker 1: Said, a health emergency is being declared. If you are pregnant,
Speaker 1: if you have kids under two, you should leave the area.
Speaker 1: And this wasn't some you know, super upper class affluent area.
Speaker 1: They couldn't just pack up and leave. So they were mad.
Speaker 1: They were like, what do you expect us to do?
Speaker 2: What?
Speaker 1: We live here?
Speaker 2: Yeah, these were people who were tied to this area
Speaker 2: by their mortgages. I saw the average income was between
Speaker 2: ten and twenty five thousand dollars, which at the time
Speaker 2: is like forty seven to one hundred and eighteen thousand today.
Speaker 2: So it's like pretty squarely middle class, but not the
Speaker 2: kind they can just be like, Okay, I'm walking away
Speaker 2: from my mortgage right, here's my house bank. I'm just
Speaker 2: going to go start life elsewhere. They couldn't do that.
Speaker 2: They were stuck there with these houses that it was
Speaker 2: becoming increasingly clear no one would want, which was a
Speaker 2: huge problem. They were facing a catch twenty two. Nobody
Speaker 2: was going to help them unless they got national attention
Speaker 2: for this. But the more attention they got for it,
Speaker 2: the more it was, the more they were sticking themselves
Speaker 2: in this place until they got the help they needed,
Speaker 2: because no one was going to come along and buy
Speaker 2: your house after a very short time when worried about
Speaker 2: Love Canal got out.
Speaker 1: That's right, But guess who did buy their house, Jimmy Carter.
Speaker 1: It finally does become national news. The national TV networks
Speaker 1: were all over it. They were doing reports from there.
Speaker 1: With all these protests happening, Jimmy Carter steps in. He
Speaker 1: declares a federal state of emergency and said, here's ten
Speaker 1: million dollars we can relocate. We're going to buy up
Speaker 1: your houses if you live within the first like the
Speaker 1: first zone basically like that's closest to the canal.
Speaker 2: Chuck, I'm sorry, and I'm sorry, I'm behalf of everyone listening.
Speaker 2: You're really not gonna do a Jimmy Carter impression offering
Speaker 2: to buy these people's houses.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, I don't know if I've ever done Jimmy Carter,
Speaker 1: I did. I was doing it when I was a kid.
Speaker 2: You have I've heard you have. I.
Speaker 1: Oh. Now I'm on the spot and I'm missing a tooth.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, maybe he can come in later.
Speaker 1: This will be the first time. Now it's that good stuff.
Speaker 1: It was the first time that federal emergency funds were
Speaker 1: used in the United States and their history or our
Speaker 1: history for something other than a natural disaster. So it
Speaker 1: was a big, big deal that they stepped in then,
Speaker 1: along with the help of New York State, when Governor
Speaker 1: Carrey said, we're going to buy up two hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty nine of these homes in the first couple of
Speaker 1: rings around this landfill. We're going to close that school.
Speaker 1: And also maybe don't eat those veggies or the herbs
Speaker 1: you've been growing in your backyard.
Speaker 2: That was part of it. And also don't spend unnecessary
Speaker 2: time in your basement. That was the other thing they said.
Speaker 1: So all the teenage boys were just like, oh man, so.
Speaker 2: That's that's pretty cool. First, the first two rings, so
Speaker 2: people whose backyards were on top of essentially the waist
Speaker 2: pit and then the people like maybe across the street
Speaker 2: from them, like all the way around the Love Canal.
Speaker 2: The US governor is like, we're going to buy your houses.
Speaker 2: You can move now, you're fine. We're going to pay
Speaker 2: you fair market value for them. And the two hundred
Speaker 2: and thirty nine people were like yeah, okay, or two
Speaker 2: hundred and thirty nine families.
Speaker 1: But still it was awful. I mean imagine being like, well,
Speaker 1: all I got to leave my home now, Like sure,
Speaker 1: someone's buying my house, but I didn't want to leave. No,
Speaker 1: I work here.
Speaker 2: That's definitely part of it. For sure, there had to
Speaker 2: be like a pretty decent sense of relief though at
Speaker 2: least that was they weren't stuck anymore. But yeah, I'm
Speaker 2: sure they didn't want to leave their community, or at
Speaker 2: least some of them. But the problem was this. You
Speaker 2: said that there was about eight hundred houses and a
Speaker 2: whole apartment building that was in this Love Canal neighborhood,
Speaker 2: and the people who are there were like, Okay, you
Speaker 2: can't forget about us. We need help too. Like in
Speaker 2: addition to like no one wanting to buy our houses
Speaker 2: because we're so close to the Love Canal dump, we're
Speaker 2: still suffering all sorts of health maladies as well, and
Speaker 2: so the city goes back to their playbook and they're like,
Speaker 2: there's no way you guys are actually suffering health maladies.
Speaker 2: You're beyond the second ring of houses. You guys are fine,
Speaker 2: You're just hypochondriacs. And the whole thing started all over again.
Speaker 2: And I think, luckily for all the people who lived
Speaker 2: in Love Canal that were left out of the eight hundred,
Speaker 2: the fact that Lois Gibbs was among them, yeah, definitely
Speaker 2: something mark in their favor for sure, because she was unstoppable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she lived in that second zone, so she was
Speaker 1: still there.
Speaker 2: So I say we take a break and then we
Speaker 2: come back and talk a little more about what Lois did,
Speaker 2: Lois Gibbs did, and who she got some help from.
Speaker 1: Hint, hint, she didn't quit.
Speaker 2: So chuck. Now we reached the point where Love Canal
Speaker 2: starts to really become national news because the federal government,
Speaker 2: the state government, the local government, they're like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: problem solved. We moved the people who needed to, we
Speaker 2: demolished their homes. It's all good, essentially, and this whole
Speaker 2: group that was left behind that still needed help, we're like, no,
Speaker 2: we're we're going to get louder than ever, essentially, and
Speaker 2: a division grew in the community where in Love Canal
Speaker 2: they were viewed outside of the neighborhood and the rest
Speaker 2: of the city as basically labmounts, rebbel rousers, people who
Speaker 2: were just out for like easy money from the federal
Speaker 2: government and we're making up all these maladies at the
Speaker 2: expense of the tourism industry and ticking off hooker. They
Speaker 2: threatened the well being of the rest of the town
Speaker 2: just by you know, being labmouths. And it was a
Speaker 2: really seems like it would have been a really terrible
Speaker 2: time to live in Niagara Falls.
Speaker 1: Oh, I'm sure. And Lowe S. Gibbs is like, you
Speaker 1: know what, I just bought one hundred bullhorns, that's right,
Speaker 1: And they went no, no, no, no.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And she was like, and I'm saving up for
Speaker 2: the batteries.
Speaker 1: So the LHCA, headed by Lois Gibbs, brought in doctor
Speaker 1: Beverly Pagan, scientists with the Health Department of New York.
Speaker 1: They did their own door to door detailed questionnaire about
Speaker 1: people's health. They analyzed the data, they found a lot
Speaker 1: of the same problems, but what they really zeroed in
Speaker 1: on were the fact that if you lived in what
Speaker 1: they called a wet home, which was if you lived
Speaker 1: near a creek or a swale or something, versus a
Speaker 1: dry home that wasn't near a creek, then you were
Speaker 1: much worse off. Twenty percent of the children born in
Speaker 1: wet homes had birth defects compared to six point eight
Speaker 1: percent in dry homes. The asthma rate was three and
Speaker 1: a half times higher in wet homes. Suicide attempts were
Speaker 1: higher in wet zones. And this is when they were dismissed.
Speaker 1: I believe some of the authorities said it was useless
Speaker 1: housewife data, which is a real bum in the eye
Speaker 1: of Lois Gibb in the LHCA and doctor Pagan.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just two things. So for reference, twenty percent of
Speaker 2: children born in that area and the wet homes that
Speaker 2: had congenital disorders compared to six point eight percent. Both
Speaker 2: of those were way above the national average for nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy eight of two point eight percent, so almost a lot.
Speaker 2: That was a lot more. I was going to do
Speaker 2: some math and I was like, don't do the math,
Speaker 2: so I stopped. But the other the other thing I
Speaker 2: wanted to just call out, was doctor Pagan. She was
Speaker 2: doing this on her own time as a volunteer. She
Speaker 2: was volunteering her expertise as a cancer researcher to come
Speaker 2: up with the survey to figure out like the actual
Speaker 2: data to basically show that you didn't have to be
Speaker 2: living right on top of the dump to still be
Speaker 2: suffering health effects. And she very cleverly figured out that
Speaker 2: when they built the homes for the Love Canal neighborhood,
Speaker 2: they covered up all sorts of old cre beds, old
Speaker 2: swales that were now underground, but with the ground being saturated,
Speaker 2: they were providing their old historic functions of moving water
Speaker 2: through the neighborhood. So a plume of toxicity formed that
Speaker 2: wasn't necessarily at the dump site any longer, it was
Speaker 2: moving out into these areas that came to be known
Speaker 2: as wet homes. And so she showed, now, these people
Speaker 2: are really suffering as many effects as some of the
Speaker 2: people whose houses were on top of the dump, and
Speaker 2: they still need help. And she risked her career doing
Speaker 2: that because she was a New York State Health inspector
Speaker 2: and her organization had already basically closed the book on it.
Speaker 2: And she was saying, we need to open this back
Speaker 2: up because we were wrong, Like it's worse than we thought.
Speaker 1: Right. So after two more years they finally get the
Speaker 1: EPA down there, and this is, you know, two full
Speaker 1: years of continued protesting. EPA comes in, They visit Love Canal,
Speaker 1: they do their own blood test and chromosome test and
Speaker 1: things like that, and it showed that there was you know,
Speaker 1: what everyone else had shown. Basically, it wasn't useless housewife
Speaker 1: data or hypochondria. And they got mad. They got so
Speaker 1: mad that they took a couple of EPA officials hostage.
Speaker 1: They said they're not going to release them until we're relocated.
Speaker 1: Cooler heads prevailed. It only lasted about five hours. They
Speaker 1: didn't arrest anybody, but it was it was a big deal,
Speaker 1: brought a lot more attention to it. And in October
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty, just a few days after this hostage thing,
Speaker 1: President Carter steps in again. It says, all right, here's
Speaker 1: another twenty million dollars. New York is also going to
Speaker 1: throw in twenty million dollars, and we're going to relocate everybody,
Speaker 1: seven hundred remaining homes, everyone but two families. There's always
Speaker 1: a couple that are like now not leaving. They stayed there,
Speaker 1: but everyone else was relocated. In Congress passed the Comprehensive
Speaker 1: Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act CIRCLA terrible, right, not great? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was in nineteen eighty They call it the Super
Speaker 1: Fun Law, and that established a trust fund with the
Speaker 1: EPA to clean up waste sites in the future and
Speaker 1: establish a national priorities list, a superfund list in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three that Love Canal was put squarely on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then a decade or so later was used
Speaker 2: to clean up David Hans's mom's potting shed.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So that Super Fun Law. It came out days after,
Speaker 2: no months after the hostage standoff, right, And I was like, okay,
Speaker 2: that's pretty quick that, you know, there's surely this thing
Speaker 2: had been kicking around Congress for a while and now
Speaker 2: there was just an opportunity to push it through. Apparently
Speaker 2: that's not true. That law that created the superfund was
Speaker 2: essentially created in response to Love Canal and the protests
Speaker 2: that the Love Canal Homeowners Association were staging. They created
Speaker 2: this super fund. It like people didn't understand that toxic
Speaker 2: waste could pollute the ground before this, and now all
Speaker 2: of a sudden, the federal government has a comprehensive response
Speaker 2: plan designed within months. Essentially that gives the EPA a
Speaker 2: right to basically tax petroleum makers and plastic makers and
Speaker 2: all that and put it into this trust fund to
Speaker 2: help clean up sits in the future.
Speaker 1: Amazing, It is amazing.
Speaker 2: It's you know, federal government at its finest. It's not
Speaker 2: always great. I will be the well, probably not the
Speaker 2: first to say it, but I will say it, but
Speaker 2: this is an example of it doing right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. So. The remediation took a long time. It
Speaker 1: took a couple of decades, cost about three hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty million bucks. They flattened all those homes, of course,
Speaker 1: they did it. They sealed the landfill of the correct way,
Speaker 1: which is with a three foot cap of clay water,
Speaker 1: impermeable plastic, more top soil. They started diverting the groundwater
Speaker 1: to a facility that treats it. They treat about five
Speaker 1: million gallons of water a year. And they have about
Speaker 1: one hundred monitoring wells all over the site that collect data,
Speaker 1: you know, at all times to detect any chemical leakage
Speaker 1: that might be happening if you're wondering about hook or
Speaker 1: chemical if they were on the hook for any of this. Yes,
Speaker 1: they eventually were. They were sued by the EPA themselves
Speaker 1: in seventy nine. They settled in the nineteen nineties and
Speaker 1: ended up between the federal government and New York State
Speaker 1: repaying them about two hundred and twenty seven million dollars. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is kind of did not have to admit fault, No.
Speaker 2: No way, And you can make a kind of a
Speaker 2: case that they didn't need to admit fault. You know, well,
Speaker 2: I think enough about it.
Speaker 1: I think that means that insulates them from more lawsuits.
Speaker 2: Sure, no, absolutely, I don't think it was just based
Speaker 2: on principles or anything like that. Yeah, but that's kind
Speaker 2: of par for the course with super fun stuff where
Speaker 2: the government says, Okay, we're going to pay for cleanup,
Speaker 2: and then they go after the people who were responsible
Speaker 2: for the waste in the first place and then sue
Speaker 2: them and then over the course of a decade or two,
Speaker 2: finally get some fraction of the amount of the cleanup costs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they fret the cost essentially.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So love Canal neighborhoods still around today they call
Speaker 2: it Black Creek. And you said the houses and Rings
Speaker 2: one and two were demolished, they were actually pushed into
Speaker 2: the pit or the waste was and then covered over.
Speaker 2: So the houses are down there, the parts of them,
Speaker 2: and they rehabbed and updated the houses that were left over,
Speaker 2: and after the EPA said Okay, we've cleaned this place
Speaker 2: up enough, you guys can move back in, the neighborhood
Speaker 2: just got life breathed back into it again. And weirdly,
Speaker 2: just like with as new people moved in and the
Speaker 2: Love Canal neighborhood starting in the fifth ties and sixties,
Speaker 2: not all of them were told that they were living
Speaker 2: on a toxic waste stump and that a lot of
Speaker 2: the information was lost for people. The same thing happened
Speaker 2: the second go around. There was a New York Times
Speaker 2: article that found like, there's people living there that have
Speaker 2: no idea the history of this place, and that there's
Speaker 2: still a toxic waste dump down there. Because that's something
Speaker 2: worth pointing out, Chuck. They didn't remove the toxic waste,
Speaker 2: They just covered it up better, oh yeah than it
Speaker 2: was covered up before.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So there have been lawsuits, There have been people
Speaker 1: that still complain that moved back into Black Creek of
Speaker 1: you know, some of the same issues there. I think
Speaker 1: twenty lawsuits with seven hundred plaintiffs kind of in recent years,
Speaker 1: and just last year in twenty twenty three, a state
Speaker 1: judge dismissed a couple of the really big, high profile
Speaker 1: cases for lack of evidence, which you know doesn't bode
Speaker 1: well for lawsuits to follow. Obviously, as far as you know,
Speaker 1: testing goes and whether or not there are really like
Speaker 1: is still a real problem there. It's sort of conflicting
Speaker 1: evidence inconclusive. I guess mortality rate is slightly elevated, but
Speaker 1: within the normal range. Cancer rates are actually lower six
Speaker 1: percent lower, but birth defects are twice as high as
Speaker 1: other communities nearby.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that sounds really weird, Like why would cancer
Speaker 2: rates be lower? Apparently they're like the sample size of
Speaker 2: this study is not huge, so we're not crazy about
Speaker 2: the results essentially. But yeah, I guess it didn't turn
Speaker 2: out quite as bad as people had thought, which is good.
Speaker 2: But I mean tell that to the families who had
Speaker 2: babies born with you know, congenital disorders and or died young.
Speaker 2: You know, I mean, there's there was a lot of
Speaker 2: damage done to people living there unfairly, and that's ultimately
Speaker 2: the saddest legacy of it. There's a triumphant legacy to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but there's that.
Speaker 2: Will never, that will never put a clay cap over
Speaker 2: the tragedy that I happened there too.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I hope there's a statue of Lois Gibbs somewhere.
Speaker 2: I don't know that there is. But she went on
Speaker 2: to found the Center for Health, Environment.
Speaker 1: And Justice, which is amazing.
Speaker 2: She got so many letters from her you know, national
Speaker 2: high profile as a result of this, that she went
Speaker 2: and was like, Okay, I'm going to start an organization
Speaker 2: that helps small towns deal with this on their own
Speaker 2: without her help. I'm Lois Gibbs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, She's like, I can make some real money off
Speaker 1: of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's so loaded. She wears floor length mink coats
Speaker 2: and shows up in gold plated roles to all these
Speaker 2: these neighborhood meetings.
Speaker 1: No, not my lowest Gibbs. I'm looking at pictures over now,
Speaker 1: out there shouting in front of a building. I love it. Yep.
Speaker 2: If you want to know more about Love Canal or
Speaker 2: Lois Gibbs or Beverly pagan or anything like that. You
Speaker 2: can look all over the internet. There's a bunch of
Speaker 2: great stuff to read. And since I said it's time
Speaker 2: for listener mail.
Speaker 1: I actually got one more thing, so pre listener mail.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, okay, it felt like the perfect episode to
Speaker 1: plug a friends project. One of my oldest friends, Dave Barnhardt,
Speaker 1: is a documentary filmmaker who takes on projects that you
Speaker 1: know need attention, like gun violence and things like that.
Speaker 1: And he did a documentary called Flint, the Poisoning of
Speaker 1: an American city of Flint, Michigan, of course, and you
Speaker 1: should check it out. It's you go to Flint Poisoning
Speaker 1: dot com is the website for the documentary. And David's great.
Speaker 1: He's doing he's doing good work and he's a good guy.
Speaker 1: So check out the trailer and see where you can
Speaker 1: watch it.
Speaker 2: Great shout out man, I'm glad you did that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I think Flint deserves its own Episodeah for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah we should follow up on that.
Speaker 2: Uh if you already already said that, is it time
Speaker 2: for listener mail?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I just I just thwarted.
Speaker 2: Well, Jerry just put the chime.
Speaker 1: Hey guys, I want to let you know how much
Speaker 1: my family loves stuff. As you know, my boys Evan
Speaker 1: and Alex and my wife Rachel listen to you every
Speaker 1: chance we get. It's the first thing we do in
Speaker 1: the morning on the way to school. The kids want
Speaker 1: to see if there's a new episode, and they think
Speaker 1: you're the smartest people in the world. So imagine how
Speaker 1: they are impressed when I their lowly dad found a mistake.
Speaker 1: In your snake oil podcast, nice, you guys mentioned that
Speaker 1: patent medicines or medicines protected by patents, which gives a
Speaker 1: manufacturer exclusive right without having to disclose what's in it.
Speaker 1: That's actually the opposite. Pattent's grant a limited right to
Speaker 1: exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling
Speaker 1: the invention or importing it. But in exchange, you have
Speaker 1: to disclose the invention in a way that would enable
Speaker 1: one skilled in the art to make or use the invention.
Speaker 1: In other words, if a medicine is patented, you'd have
Speaker 1: to say exactly what's in it and how you made it,
Speaker 1: otherwise you wouldn't get a patent. And you guys know
Speaker 1: this because you actually said that in your how Ip
Speaker 1: Works episode, right, Yeah, And that is from David. And
Speaker 1: you know what, David, I looked into that more and
Speaker 1: you're right. But I also found out that ninety percent
Speaker 1: of these patent medicines didn't even have patents. They were
Speaker 1: just called patent medicines, all right. So that's from David Greenfield.
Speaker 2: Thanks a lot, David, much appreciated. If you want to
Speaker 2: get in terms of this, like David did, you can
Speaker 2: just send an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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