By Rose Beilman
Special to the Tribune
“Love Canal” – today, it sounds like a ride in an amusement park or a beautiful stream where couples go to get engaged.
But in our nation’s history, the reality was much more sinister.
For those who bought middle-class, affordable homes there in the 1950s and 60s, the neighborhood of Love Canal seemed like a promise come true for the American Dream: schools nearby, jobs in the city of Niagara Falls, NY, shopping within an easy drive, and an elementary school within walking distance.
What those families didn’t know, and what the Niagara Falls school district ignored in a liability limitation clause when they bought the land from the Hooker Chemical Company for a dollar, was that their homes and an elementary school were built on top of the drained canal, full of 21,800 tons of chemicals in drums, buried in the 1940s and 50s, with the intent of never having to deal with those chemicals again.
Where children played kickball on dirt-covered school playgrounds; where toddlers dug in sand pits in backyards; where mothers and fathers created vegetable gardens in the backyards, what they didn’t know was that their suburb by the 1970s was slowly poisoning them.
Benzene, a known carcinogen, was vaporizing into their basements. Dioxin, another carcinogen, was flowing through their water, and by 1979, 33% of all residents had undergone chromosomal damage, a precursor to leukemia. Also by 1979, residents had a higher incidence of birth defects, miscarriages, seizures, and cancers, among other health effects. More than 200 distinct chemicals had been buried in the drums, providing a toxic playground for the middle class families living here.
Eventually the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would declare this area a Superfund site, and the federal government evacuated and reimbursed residents from the area, shuttered the elementary school, razed most buildings in the area, and closed the neighborhood off to future development.
Without such intervention, these families – who had bought homes in good faith, while meaning to raise their families in a good neighborhood – would have been subject to continued health declines, to children’s illnesses, to higher rates of death, and to diminishing home values, all without any end in sight. It was only through the regulation and the compassion of the federal government working through the EPA that these families were able to move on past their lives in this toxic neighborhood. Many people forget this good work of the EPA in today’s age of deregulation. In taking over the EPA, current administrator Lee Zeldin has plans to do ALL of the following: reconsider mercury and air toxics standards, reconsider wastewater regulations for oil and gas development, reconsider particulate matter national ambient air quality standards, reconsider multiple national emission standards for hazardous air pollutants, and update coal ash regulations, among many, many others. All of these standards and regulations currently provide Americans with safe water, clean air, and clean soil.
On top of this, the EPA is planning cuts of up to 65%. If these all take place, in Kansas alone, we would go from roughly 700 EPA employees to 200, from 130 compliance investigators to 45, from 123 to 43 emergency response and cleanup employees, and from 70 to 24 clean drinking water examiners.
In addition, specifically, the office of research and development under the EPA faces cuts of up to 75% with plans to dissolve the research arm of the EPA. The motives are disastrously simple: no researchers, no regulation, no safety for American citizens’ water, air, and soil, but lots of money for developers and companies without the regulation to impede their profits.
Closer to home, the recent grants and research aimed at protecting children in rural America from pollution’s effects have been planned for cancellation.
It’s important to note that all of our congressmen, Marshall, Moran, and Estes voted for the appointment of Lee Zeldin as EPA Administrator, who has been at the head of these cuts. A certain irony exists in that while these deregulations are moving forward, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, RF Kennedy Jr., is on roll to make America healthy again, even while cuts to the EPA’s most important work become reality.
In the not too distant future, without the EPA looking out for the safety of our health through clean air, water, and soil, Love Canal’s dark promise could become the rest of America’s toxic reality in the next few years.
