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Love Canal: The toxic suburb that helped launch the modern environmental movement

Love Canal: The toxic suburb that helped launch the modern environmental movement

By on May 30, 2016 7:00 amShare

If you’re traveling through the suburbs around Niagara Falls, you might notice that one of them is missing. There are still roads, and you see empty driveways and old sidewalks hiding in the grass. But no one lives here anymore.

There aren’t any signs saying where you are, so I’ll tell you: It’s Love Canal, an idyllic suburb that caught the country’s attention back in 1978 when its residents realized that they were living on a toxic-waste landfill. Love Canal’s residents organized, protested, and kept their story in the media for a year. Along the way, they helped launch the modern environmental movement.

rik-shaw

A new history of that struggle, Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present by the environmental historian Richard S. Newman, reveals details that I’d never heard before. Love Canal’s evocative name? The land used to be owned by William T. Love, a real-estate dreamer of the 1890s who dug the canal in the hopes of creating a model city along its banks. Love imagined his city would be powered by hydroelectric energy poached from Niagara Falls. In contrast to the dirty, coal-powered factory towns then powering the American industrial revolution, Love’s city would boast such luxuries as clean drinking water, lines for telephone, gas, and water, as well as mail delivered by pneumatic tubes.

In 1894, local papers reported that the excavators hired by Love “have already made quite a hole and a big pile of dirt,” but that was as far as the model city ever got. Love lost a ton of money, then quit and moved west. Local kids used the canal as a swimming hole in the summer and an ice pond in the winter, until a local producer of bleaching powder, rubber, and explosives noticed it.

From 1942 through the early 1950s, that company, Hooker Electrochemical, filled in the unfinished canal with 22,000 tons of toxic waste, much of it leftover from Hooker’s work outfitting the military for World War II.

In 1952, the Niagara Falls school board approached Hooker and asked if the company would be willing to part with the land so that it could build a suburb and a new elementary school on it. Several Hooker company officials objected. Maybe the land was safe for a park, they said, but not housing. Still, in April 1953, Hooker sold the former canal to the school board for $1. The deed of sale mentioned that the site was brimming with chemical waste, and that, by signing the deed, Niagara Falls assumed all liability for any problems.

When the school board then sold the land to a housing developer in 1957, Hooker executives warned city officials against putting houses on the site. “There are dangerous chemicals buried there in drums, in loose form, in solids and liquids,” A.W. Chambers, a Hooker representative, told the Niagara Falls Gazette. All they could do was warn, though — Love Canal was no longer Hooker’s property. The developers built hundreds of houses atop the landfill anyway.

To the thousands of people who moved in during the 1960s and 1970s, Love Canal was a nice neighborhood — working-class and friendly. But weird things happened. When the kids threw rocks against the pavement they exploded like firecrackers. Manhole covers launched themselves into the air without warning. Kids playing baseball would get strange, chemical burn-like rashes when they slid across the grass. Dogs went bald.

Neighbors shared stories and slowly realized they had more than their share of miscarriages, birth defects, and cancer. In 1976, New York State health officials started testing the area around Love Canal for dangerous chemicals. The following year, a regional officer for the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency wrote a letter to his bosses in Washington, warning that the area around the canal was so polluted that the state’s only option was to buy up the 40 or 50 homes closest to the canal and tear them down. Local officials panicked, and asked for more tests.

University of Buffalo

More tests just made everything scarier: 82 different chemical compounds were found around Love Canal. They were sitting in puddles, hiding in sump pumps, and seeping through basement walls. Many, like benzene, were known carcinogens. State health officials found that women in the neighborhood miscarried at 1.5 times the level of the general population. Some 13 percent of the babies born in one section of houses near the canal had birth defects. The state health commissioner advised evacuating all pregnant women and children under the age of 2.

After years of rumors and unsettling data, news of the planned evacuation made the people of Love Canal go from afraid to ballistic. They began organizing protest groups, the most visible of which was the Love Canal Homeowners Association (LCHA) led by a local housewife named Lois Gibbs. Another organization, the Concerned Love Canal Renters Association (CLCRA) is less well-remembered. It was run by a community activist named Elene Thornton, and consisted mostly of African American residents from a nearby federal housing project. Television crews and reporters, enchanted with the idea of white housewives turned activists, largely wrote the CLCRA out of their coverage of Love Canal.

What’s also forgotten is just how vicious the situation was. At one point, residents burned effigies of Jimmy, Rosalynn, and Amy Carter (who was 10 years old at the time).

University of Buffalo

But it was Carter’s executive decisions that paid for people to move from Love Canal. In 1978, Carter approved emergency federal aid so that New York State could start buying the homes of the 236 families closest to the canal.

That didn’t appease the other 710 families that still had to live there. In May of 1980, the EPA announced that blood tests of 36 Love Canal residents revealed nearly a third “exhibited chromosome damage of an abnormal nature.” The LCHA responded by holding two EPA representatives hostage. When the police arrived, they found the entrance to the LCHA offices blocked by hundreds of angry suburbanites armed with two-by-fours. Gibbs called the press, and the White House. “We’ll keep them fed, we’ll keep them happy,” she said of her hostages.

The homeowners association released their hostages after five hours. Gibbs later recalled that one of them, Frank Nepal, was kind of into it. “He was telling us how he used to be involved in the Vietnam War protests,” Gibbs said. “So he thought it was kind of cool, being held hostage.”

University of Buffalo

New York and the federal government squabbled over buying out the remaining 710 families. A compromise was finally reached in October of 1980, with the federal government providing $7.5 million in grants and another $7.5 million in loans to the state so that it could begin buying homes immediately. The following spring, Love Canal was a ghost town.

University of Buffalo

The Love Canal experience also led Carter to create the Superfund program in 1980. That way, when another Love Canal happened (and there would be many drums of toxic waste unearthed in the following decades), there would be funds ready to pay for any cleanup and relocation.

Time has edited the story of Love Canal. The EPA rescinded the chromosome study in 1983, saying that it was poorly done. Gibbs’s two children, both sickly as children, grew up to be healthy adults. A long-term study carried out by the New York State Health Department found the health of former residents wasn’t that different from those of others living in Niagara County and throughout the state. Sure, they died more frequently of heart attacks, car crashes, suicide, and bladder and kidney cancer, but overall, their mortality rates fell within the average range for the area.

Former Love Canal residents continue to dispute this research. For one thing, residents who died of cancer before 1972, or moved away before 1978, were not counted in the state’s study. For another, why compare the health of Love Canal residents to another group that lived nearby? Why not make the control group people who lived in a community with no pollution at all?

The toxic waste filling Love Canal proved too big to move, so the canal was covered in clay and entombed instead. Or, as Gibbs said, it lived in “a gated community for chemicals.”

In the 1990s, some 200 homes at the outer edge of the evacuation zone were refurbished and renamed Black Creek Village. A few years later, residents of Black Creek Village began complaining of miscarriages and mysterious rashes. Not possible, replied an EPA spokesperson. The area around Love Canal was surrounded by monitoring wells and “the most sampled piece of property on the planet.” Any leak in the landfill would be detected. Because it’s so closely watched, the story goes, what was once the most dangerous suburb in America is today one of the safest.

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Love Canal: The toxic suburb that helped launch the modern environmental movement

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Let’s Knock It Off With the Ted Cruz Birther Stuff

Mother Jones

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Over the last few days, Republican front-runner Donald Trump has suggested that Sen. Ted Cruz should ask a court for a written declaration that the Canadian-born Texan is eligible to be president. That’s to be expected—Trump rose to prominence among conservatives by questioning the eligibility of the sitting president. On Wednesday, Sen. John McCain, one of the Republican Party’s elder statesmen, told a talk radio host that he wasn’t sure if Cruz was eligible to be president. That’s less expected but still easily explained—McCain hates Cruz with the fire of a thousand suns.

And now House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has joined the fray. “I do think there’s a difference between John McCain being born into a family serving our country in Panama than someone being born in another country, but again this is a constitutional issue that will be decided or not,” she told reporters on Thursday.

This is absurd. Cruz is eligible to be president because his mother was an American citizen. And as National Review explains, it’s not even an especially unusual situation:

There is nothing new in this principle that presidential eligibility is derived from parental citizenship. John McCain, the GOP’s 2008 candidate, was born in the Panama Canal Zone at a time when there were questions about its sovereign status. Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee in 1964, was born in Arizona before it became a state, and George Romney, who unsuccessfully sought the same party’s nomination in 1968, was born in Mexico. In each instance, the candidate was a natural born citizen by virtue of parentage, so his eligibility was not open to credible dispute.

It shouldn’t be a hard question for Pelosi or McCain to answer unambiguously—we’ve spent roughly eight years rehashing the constitutional requirements for the office over and over again (in part because of Trump and the kinds of people who support him). The fact that McCain and Pelosi both—for perfectly legitimate reasons—can’t stand Cruz is just not an appropriate justification for Trumpian nativism.

Original article – 

Let’s Knock It Off With the Ted Cruz Birther Stuff

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California Is Literally Sinking Into the Ground

Mother Jones

This story was originally published by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

California is sinking—and fast.

While the state’s drought-induced sinking is well known, new details highlight just how severe it has become and how little the government has done to monitor it.

Last summer, scientists recorded the worst sinking in at least 50 years. This summer, all-time records are expected across the state as thousands of miles of land in the Central Valley and elsewhere sink.

But the extent of the problem and how much it will cost taxpayers to fix are part of the mystery of the state’s unfolding drought. No agency is tracking the sinking statewide, little public money has been put toward studying it and California allows agriculture businesses to keep crucial parts of their operations secret.

The cause is known: People are pulling unsustainable amounts of water out of underground aquifers, primarily for food production. With the water sucked out to irrigate crops, a practice that has accelerated during the drought, tens of thousands of square miles are deflating like a leaky air mattress, inch by inch.

Groundwater now supplies about 60 percent of the state’s water, with the vast majority of that going to agriculture. Tens of thousands of groundwater pumps run day and night, sucking up about 5 percent of the state’s total electricity, according to a Reveal analysis of the increased pumping resulting from the historic drought. That’s an increase of 40 percent over normal years – or enough electricity to power every home in San Francisco for three years.

The sinking is starting to destroy bridges, crack irrigation canals and twist highways across the state, according to the US Geological Survey.

Two bridges in Fresno County—an area that produces about 15 percent of the world’s almonds—have sunk so much that they are nearly underwater and will cost millions to rebuild. Nearby, an elementary school is slowly descending into a miles-long sinkhole that will make it susceptible to future flooding.

Private businesses are on the hook, too. One canal system is facing more than $60 million in repairs because one of its dams is sinking. And public and private water wells are being bent and disfigured like crumpled drinking straws as the earth collapses around them—costing $500,000 or more to replace.

The sinking has a technical name: subsidence. It occurs when aquifers are drained of water and the land collapses down where the water used to be.

The last comprehensive survey of sinking was in the 1970s, and a publicly funded monitoring system fell into disrepair the following decade. Even the government’s scientists are in the dark.

“We don’t know how bad it is because we’re not looking everywhere,” said Michelle Sneed, a hydrologist with the geological survey. “It’s frustrating, I’ll tell you that. There is a lot of work I want to do.”

Some places in the state are sinking more than a foot per year. The last time it was this bad, it cost the state more than a billion dollars to fix.

Joseph Poland of the US Geological Survey used a utility pole to document where a farmer would have been standing in 1925 and 1955 and where Poland was then standing in 1977 after land in the San Joaquin Valley had sunk nearly 30 feet. US Geological Survey

In the 1920s, farmers began transforming desert lands into verdant crop fields by pumping groundwater to the surface. At the time, these farmers were not just head and shoulders above their modern-day counterparts—they were actually as much as three stories above them. But then the land started to sink.

In the 1930s, scientists first noticed the land was sinking. At the time, the cause was a mystery. A legendary hydrologist, Joseph Poland, was assigned to solve the puzzle starting in the 1940s.

He realized that underneath the sinking land, groundwater was being pumped rapidly to irrigate crops. It created massive sinkholes that stretched for miles in every direction. In the farming community of Mendota, the land sunk about 30 feet between 1925 and 1977.

The sinkhole is so vast that it is essentially impossible for residents to see that they are standing in one. Poland used a utility pole to build a temporary monument to show them just how much the land had sunk.

The sinking, which peaked in the late 1960s, wreaked havoc on the state’s rapidly expanding infrastructure, damaging highways, bridges and irrigation canals. One estimate by the California Water Foundation put the price tag at $1.3 billion for just some of the repairs during that time.

The sinking did not slow until the 1970s, after California had completed its massive canal system—the most expensive public works project in state history. It delivered water from wetter parts of the state to farmers in the Central Valley and elsewhere, relieving their reliance on groundwater. The problem was fixed—at least for a while.

In 2012, Sneed, the hard-charging geological survey scientist, received a startling report. Land was subsiding along the San Joaquin River at a rate worse than during the 1987-92 drought. It was nearing the historic rates of sinking recorded by Poland in the late 1960s. She couldn’t believe it.

“Is this even real?” she asked. “We hadn’t seen rates of subsidence like that in a long time.”

She and others began assembling what little public data was available. They got funding to analyze satellite data for parts of the San Joaquin Valley. They discovered that in one of the worst observed areas, around the town of El Nido (Spanish for “The Nest”), land was sinking at a rate of about 1 foot per year in 2012.

“It’s incredible,” Sneed said, expelling a puff of air as if she still couldn’t believe it. “We looked away for a long time. And when we looked back, whoa—it had gotten real bad.”

The El Nido subsidence bowl was sinking so fast that the satellite couldn’t keep pace.

No one has monitored it since. But Sneed and others contacted by Reveal said they expect it now could be sinking by 2 feet per year. That would be an all-time record.

Chris White, general manager of the Central California Irrigation District, said that last year, a farmer near El Nido sent him a photo of a gas pipe that had protruded more than 18 inches from the ground in less than a year as the land sank around it.

White said Californians now might have the opportunity to witness firsthand the devastation Poland chronicled in the 1960s.

“There is that potential,” he said.

Sneed is practically begging to expand her limited research. A hodgepodge of about 350 ground-elevation monitors—many leftover from the 1960s—are all she and other researchers have to track tens of thousands of miles that are sinking. This includes vineyards in Sonoma and Napa counties, areas around Paso Robles and Santa Barbara, and agricultural regions encircling Los Angeles, all which have shown signs of sinking, according to a California Department of Water Resources report.

To draw awareness to the problem, Sneed replicated Poland’s 1977 photo. Her photo captures the early stages of today’s worsening subsidence problem, she said. But she and others expect that it will get much worse.

US Geological Survey scientist Michelle Sneed shows where a farmer would have been standing in 1988, before a six-year drought triggered sinking in California’s San Joaquin Valley. It also shows how sinking accelerated in 2008. US Geological Survey

Many businesses and state agencies appear to be unaware of the problem.

Sneed and her boss at the US Geological Survey, Claudia Faunt, have tried reaching out to various government agencies and private businesses to warn them and inquire about the extent of damage being done to infrastructure.

“We tried calling the railroads to ask them about it,” Faunt said. “But they didn’t know about subsidence. They told us they just fixed the railroads and categorized it as repair.”

Thousands of miles of highways snaking through the state also are being damaged, she said.

“They go to repair the roads, but they don’t even know it’s subsidence that is causing all the problems,” Faunt said. “They are having to fix a lot because of groundwater depletion.”

A spokeswoman for the state Department of Transportation said the agency does not track costs related to subsidence and was not aware of any current bridge repairs resulting from it.

But Faunt pointed to the Russell Avenue bridge that crosses the Outside Canal in the Central Valley. It sank during two previous droughts—one in the late 1970s and then again between 1987 and 1992. Now with the current sinking, the 60-year-old bridge is almost totally submerged by canal water.

Down the road about a mile, Russell Avenue crosses another irrigation canal, the Delta-Mendota Canal. That bridge is sinking, too, and now is partially submerged in water. Plans to replace it are estimated to cost $2.5 million, according to an estimate by the Central California Irrigation District.

The wall of a canal (left) cracks as the earth around it sinks. The top of a well (right) is pushed up and out of the ground as the ground around it sinks. US Geological Survey

The bridge is part of an $80 million list of public and private repairs already needed near the El Nido subsidence bowl because of sinking, White said.

Last year, the state passed its first law attempting to regulate groundwater, but farmers won’t be required to meet goals until 2040 at the earliest. And the information on who is pumping what will be kept private.

The Russell Avenue bridge once passed more than 2 feet above the water, but it has been sinking as a result of groundwater pumping and now is nearly submerged in the canal. US Geological Survey

“A doomsayer would say we will run out of water,” said Matt Hurley, general manager of the Angiola Water District, near Bakersfield. “But I don’t believe we’re heading there. We’ve been given a good opportunity with the sustainability law.”

But Devin Galloway, a scientist with the geological survey, sees devastation of a historic proportion returning to California. He says that even if farmers stopped pumping groundwater immediately, the damage already done to aquifers now drained to record-low levels will trigger sinking that will last for years, even decades.

“This could be a very long process. Even if the water levels recover, things could continue to subside,” he said. “This is a consequence of the overuse of groundwater.”

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California Is Literally Sinking Into the Ground

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As Cleanup Plan Is Set for Gowanus Canal, Violations Continue

A $500 million plan will focus on the decades-old toxic muck at the bottom of the canal, though nearby businesses are still being cited for sometimes treating the canal like a waste dump. Source article:  As Cleanup Plan Is Set for Gowanus Canal, Violations Continue ; ;Related ArticlesU.K. Utility Shares Fall After Pledge to Freeze RatesAtomic Goal: 800 Years of Power From WasteEconomix Blog: The Cost of Climate Change ;

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As Cleanup Plan Is Set for Gowanus Canal, Violations Continue

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