Twenty-one thousand tons of chemical waste, one dollar, and a clause nobody acted on.

April 28, 1953.
43.0834° N, 78.9489° W

In the early 1890s, a developer named William T. Love stood before a group of investors in Niagara Falls with a proposal. He wanted to dig a canal between the upper and lower Niagara River, long enough and deep enough to carry water past the falls and drive turbines for a model industrial city on its banks. The city would have factories, housing, rail connections. Love had financial backing. He had engineers. He had maps drawn. Construction started around 1894 on the east side of the city. Workers dug a wide trench roughly three thousand feet long before the project collapsed. An economic downturn dried up the capital. The development of alternating current, which could carry electricity over long distances without a local waterway, made the entire scheme unnecessary. What remained was a ditch, open and empty, running through flat ground at the edge of town. Nobody filled it in. Nobody fenced it off. For a generation it sat there, collecting rainwater and weeds and whatever the neighborhood threw into it. The canal kept his name.

By the 1920s the city was using the abandoned canal as a municipal dump. Ordinary refuse went in first. Then, in 1947, the Hooker Electrochemical Company, one of the largest chemical manufacturers in Niagara Falls, acquired the canal and continued filling it with industrial waste. Niagara Falls in that era was a chemical manufacturing city. Plants lined the river. Hooker was among the biggest employers in the area. Its operations produced a range of compounds for industrial and agricultural use, and the manufacturing process generated large quantities of waste that had to go somewhere. The U.S. Army used the site too, disposing of its own chemical material there during the war years.

Between 1942 and 1952, Hooker put roughly 21,000 tons of toxic chemical waste into the canal. The load included more than 200 different compounds: dioxin, benzene, toluene, chlorinated hydrocarbons, and dozens of others that would take chemists years to catalog. Some of it went in inside 55-gallon steel drums. Some of it went in loose. Layer after layer, season after season, until the trench William Love had dug for a power canal held nothing but poison from one end to the other. In 1953, Hooker capped the sixteen-acre landfill with a layer of clay and covered the clay with earth. Grass grew over it. From the surface, the ground looked like a field.

The clay would not hold.

Niagara Falls after the war was growing the way every American city near industry was growing. Families were arriving faster than the housing stock could absorb them. The baby boom was filling classrooms, and the Board of Education needed land for new schools. The Board turned its attention to the filled canal on the east side of the city. It approached Hooker about purchasing the property. Hooker told the Board the land had been used for chemical waste disposal and was not suitable for construction. The Board pressed. It raised the possibility of taking the land by eminent domain. On April 28, 1953, a Quit Claim Deed was signed, transferring the Love Canal property from Hooker Electrochemical Company to the Board of Education of the School District of the City of Niagara Falls. The price was one dollar. The deed contained a clause stating that the property had been filled, in whole or in part, with waste products resulting from the manufacturing of chemicals. It disclaimed all future liability. The warning was written into the document the Board signed and accepted.

The Board built a school on it.

Construction of the 99th Street Elementary School began in January 1954. Workers digging the foundation struck 55-gallon drums of chemical waste in the ground. Some of the drums had corroded enough that the soil around them was saturated with chemicals. The school site was shifted to avoid the worst of what the workers had uncovered, and construction continued on the new footprint without further testing of what lay underneath. The school opened in 1955, and children walked into classrooms built on top of a chemical landfill. That same year, more drums surfaced on nearby sections of the property. They were covered over and left in place.

The Board did not stop. It moved to sell portions of the surrounding canal property to residential developers. On November 7, 1957, Hooker sent its attorney, Arthur Chambers, to a Board of Education meeting to warn against allowing construction on the site. Chambers told the Board that chemical waste was buried there and that the land was not suitable for building. The Niagara Gazette reported his appearance and his warning. The Board sold the land anyway. Houses went up on both sides of the canal, within sight of the school. Streets were paved. Lawns were planted. Driveways were poured. Families moved in with their children and had no particular reason to think the ground beneath them was anything other than ground.

Over the next two decades, the neighborhood filled out. More houses went up. Sewer lines were trenched through the old canal boundary. Another school was built in the area. Each round of construction broke through more of the clay cap Hooker had laid down in 1953, and the fractures opened channels in the earth beneath the surface. Chemicals that had been sealed under clay began to migrate through the soil and into the groundwater. It happened slowly enough that nobody connected it to the canal at first. After a heavy rain, dark oily substances appeared on basement walls. Puddles with strange colors collected in yards and would not evaporate. A chemical smell hung in the air on warm days and settled into houses with the windows open. Basement walls stayed damp through months when they should have been dry. When residents complained to the city, the response was a load of dirt or a layer of fresh clay spread over whatever had seeped to the surface. Nobody tested the substances. Nobody traced them back to the canal. Children in the neighborhood played on the long, raised mound that ran through the center of the development, a strip of land slightly higher than the yards on either side of it. In winter they slid down its slopes on sleds and pieces of cardboard. The mound was the top of the landfill.

In 1976, two reporters at the Niagara Gazette, David Pollak and David Russell, published stories documenting chemicals seeping into basements in the blocks closest to the canal. The stories ran locally and drew little response from city officials. The following year, another Gazette reporter named Michael Brown began going door to door through the neighborhood. He was looking for a pattern. He found one. Miscarriages. Birth defects. Cancers appearing in clusters that did not fit what the statistics for a neighborhood that size should have predicted. Brown mapped the complaints against the footprint of the old canal and found that the households with the worst health problems sat closest to the buried waste. His reporting ran in the Gazette through 1977 and 1978, and then it went national.

Lois Gibbs read Brown's articles in the paper. She was a resident of the neighborhood. Her son attended the 99th Street Elementary School, the building that sat on the canal. She began knocking on her neighbors' doors, asking the same questions Brown had asked, and collecting the same kinds of answers. She organized the Love Canal Homeowners Association and pressed state and federal officials to investigate. The families she spoke with had been living over the chemicals for years without knowing what the smell in the basement was or where the stains on the walls came from.

On August 2, 1978, New York State Health Commissioner Robert Whalen declared a state of emergency at Love Canal. He ordered the 99th Street Elementary School closed. He recommended the immediate evacuation of pregnant women and children under the age of two. Five days later, on August 7, President Jimmy Carter declared a federal health emergency at Love Canal. It was the first time a president had declared such an emergency for anything other than a natural disaster. Federal funds were allocated to relocate the 239 families living closest to the canal. Their homes sat directly on top of or immediately adjacent to the sixteen acres of buried waste.

The relocation of the inner rings did not end the crisis. Chemicals continued to migrate outward through the soil and the groundwater. Families in the outer rings of the neighborhood reported the same substances in their basements and yards, the same smells, the same dark stains on concrete walls. On May 21, 1980, President Carter declared a second emergency. In all, approximately 950 families were evacuated from the Love Canal neighborhood. The 239 homes nearest the canal were demolished. So was the 99th Street Elementary School, twenty-eight years after it had opened its doors on land the deed itself said was full of chemical waste.

No criminal charges were filed against Hooker Chemical or any individual.

In December 1980, Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, known as Superfund. Love Canal was among the reasons for the law and among its first designated sites. In 1983, approximately 1,328 former residents settled a class-action lawsuit against Occidental Chemical Corporation, Hooker's corporate successor, for approximately $20 million. In 1994, Occidental agreed to pay $98 million to New York State. In 1995, it agreed to pay $129 million to the federal government.

In 1985, a forty-acre synthetic cap was installed over the landfill, and the leachate collection and treatment system was upgraded. On September 30, 2004, the EPA deleted Love Canal from its Superfund National Priorities List, declaring the cleanup complete. In the early 1990s, the northern portion of the neighborhood had been renamed Black Creek Village. About 200 homes in that area were refurbished and put back on the market.

The seventy-acre fenced site at the center of the old neighborhood still contains the buried waste. A treatment facility on the property processes contaminated water collected from the ground. More than 150 monitoring wells are tested on a regular schedule. The roughly 21,000 tons of chemical waste Hooker put into William Love's canal between 1942 and 1952 are still there, under the cap, in the same place they have always been. The homes in Black Creek Village were sold with deeds advising the buyers that chemical waste was buried in the neighborhood.