Lois Gibbs just wanted to get her son transferred to a different school. She didn’t know she was about to change American environmental law. In 1978, this mom from Niagara Falls found out something scary. Her five-year-old’s elementary school was built on a former chemical dump. According to the EPA's own history of the crisis, the site was called Love Canal. It contained tens of thousands of tons of industrial waste. That waste had started leaking into basements, backyards, and school grounds.
A dream city that turned into a nightmare
Love Canal wasn't always a horror story. It was named after William T. Love. In the 1890s, a businessman wanted to cut a canal through Niagara Falls. He hoped to power a model town. His scheme failed. All they ever dug was a short ditch. In the 1940s and early 1950s, the Hooker Chemical Company used that old ditch as a dump. In 1953, the company covered it with dirt. Then it sold the land to the city for one dollar. A school and about 100 homes went up soon after. For a while, it looked like a normal, working-class neighborhood.
The summer the ground started leaking
By the late 1970s, things had gone badly wrong. Heavy rains pushed groundwater levels up. Rusting drums of chemical waste began pushing through the soil. Neighbors noticed strange smells. Black sludge showed up in basements. Trees started dying. Kids came home from playing outside with burns on their skin. Families also began noticing more miscarriages and birth defects than seemed normal for such a small neighborhood.
