Local Lore: Such a Lovely Canal

There are always very interesting stories behind just about every city or small town that you visit or live in. Sometimes these stories are only known by the people that live in that city or town and it lives in their stories that they tell at the local barber shop or Mom's diner. Then there is the case of a lovely canal in my hometown that made it on the national scene and became a popular footnote on man made national disasters.

Often I have walked outside my house and have been engulfed in a cloud of chlorine gas or mustard gas possibly, who knows what they are letting into the air. Now its not that bad to have a little bit of chlorine gas in your lungs as long as I don't end up looking like the Toxic Avenger. When you start to see people wearing hazmat outfits collecting leaves with tweezers and testing the ground around you, it is time to start wondering what the hell is going on.

This is a local story about a blatant disregard for FUTURE GENERATIONS and a perfect example of how we are Doomed to Repeat, because to this day we still have one of the largest hazardous waste dumps in America sitting extremely close to a school. Well lets start off with what exactly is Love Canal and what happened there. Well one day a man named William T Love wanted to build a canal and a lovely community that he hoped would prosper in Niagara Falls. He began building a canal but found that it was too difficult to create and ended up selling the unfinished Canal to Hooker Chemicals, who decided that the unfinished Canal would be perfect for burying large amounts of toxic chemicals. Kind of reminds me of that huge glowing green puddle that use to be near Gold Circles. You know right next to the giant landfill smack dab in the middle of the city of Niagara Falls. Well back to Hooker Chemical Co., they decided that they would bury 21,000 tons of toxic waste beneath a neighborhood radius that covers 36 blocks. After supposedly sealing barrels of toxic waste underground, Hooker decided that is was time to get rid of this horrendous glowing land and the lucky consumer of this tainted land was the Niagara Falls School district and the City of Niagara Falls, which they bought for one dollar. Even though both the school district and the city knew that this land was used to store toxic waste underground, they decided to build a school, park and neighborhood.

Well once strange odors and weird looking stuff started seeping through the soil in people's yards and children started to fall ill. People began to wonder, what the hell was going on? In 1978, Lois Gibbs, a resident in Love Canal, decided to investigate the many health problems that began to spread in the neighborhood after she discovered that her son had developed epilepsy and other health problems. Some other problems that people began to see happening at alarming rates, were things like high amounts of miscarriages, nervous disorders, extra rows of teeth, cancers and toxic materials found in the milk of nursing mothers. Gibbs did everything she could to bring this problem to the public and eventually this led to the closing down of the school and park and many people began to leave the neighborhood at the loss of their homes, which they obviously couldn't sell. Love Canal and a few other man made toxic waste disasters led to the creation of the Comprehension Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) to make sure that companies that create toxic wastelands are responsible for cleaning up their mess, but most companies find ways to get around paying the amount of money necessary for really cleaning up the mess.

To this day you can visit Love Canal and look at the fenced in area that still holds tons of toxic waste and walk through the ghost town. Some people still live in this neighborhood, but most houses are boarded up and there are many open fields. Love Canal proves that in a civilization that claims to be advanced, you are still going to run into ridiculous scenarios like building an entire NEIGHBORHOOD ON TOP OF TOXIC WASTE!