May 11, 2022 • 47 mins
You may not have heard of Love Canal, but it remains one of the most disturbing environmental tragedies (and cover-ups) in US history. In today's episode, Ben, Matt and Noel dive into a real-life conspiracy that fundamentally changed how the country approaches the consequences of pollution. Tune in to learn how the Love Canal tragedy is partly true crime, partly parable, and partly a harbinger of future tragedies... possibly coming to a town near you.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Met, my name is Noel. They called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer
Paul Mission Control Decond. Most importantly, you are you. You
are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't
want you to know. Fellow conspiracy realists, regardless of your
political inclinations, your own personal beliefs or ideologies, one thing's
(00:48):
for sure. Captain Planet was right. Uh. The world is
burning down as we record. Good morning, by the way,
and uh we we hope that you are having at
least a tolerable time while we watch civilization slide into
a not quite inevitable catastrophe. Today's story is one that's
(01:11):
a long time and coming, both in terms of our
show and in terms of the conspiracy and cover up
coming to light. This is not a conspiracy theory. This
is a true story. Uh. This is something that probably
affects some of our fellow listeners to this day. Here
(01:31):
the facts we're going to Niagara Falls, And we kind
of have to explain Niagara Falls a little bit because
it's super confusing if you're not from the U. S.
It's a beautiful place, right, That's where Pam and Pam
and Jim got secretly married. Spoiler alert from the American Office. Sorry. Yeah,
in this case, we're going to Niagara Falls, New York
(01:53):
and it's a it's a beautiful place. I'm looking at
it on Google Maps right now, Uh, specifically looking at
just all the rivers and the giant lakes that are
that are roaming around there, the great ones, and when
it freezes on rare occasions, that looks amazing. It is
(02:14):
currently illegal to put yourself in a barrel and go
over the edge of one of those waterfalls for kicks. Uh.
People have done it, people have done it in real life, uh,
and some have survived. So Niagara Falls, if you're not
familiar with the area, it is the name for several
things in this region. First the beautiful falls, uh. Then
(02:36):
secondly two different cities both with the same name, one
in the States, one in Canada. And then there's another
place nearby, a smaller place that's just known as Niagara.
You'll see it called the town of Niagara. What we're
saying is they took the name Niagara and they just
went nuts with it. They were like this works, rents
and repeat one another one. Yes, d J. Cow. So
(03:00):
the the US city Niagara Falls, the subject of today's show,
is still you know, due to its location by the falls,
it's still a pretty popular tourism destination. Uh. It has
a fairly large population around a little north of forty
eight thousand, six hundred people. That's a fact that's going
(03:21):
to be sadly important later because once upon a time,
many many more people lived there. I love that you're
mentioning the map, Matt, because if you picture New York State,
which is one of those very weirdly shaped states, Niagara
is on the far far northwestern corner, and it's been
(03:41):
home to human beings for a long long time because
it's such a it's by such a great water source,
and like we discussed earlier, that's usually one of the biggest,
if not the biggest, determining factor for where civilizations begin. Yes,
it is not just a coincidence that those places are
called Niagara because of that Niagara River that connects up
(04:02):
to major bodies of water and uh, the I guess
let's should we talk about the exact place that we're
going in this area? Why not? Specificity is the name
of the game, guys. Yeah, if you're playing Cinema of
the Mind with us today, folks, picture yourself like one
of those investigators on a procedural drama. You're looking at
(04:24):
a at a satellite map and you go enhance and
then you know, the computer person is like, so you're
enhancing your zooming in to a neighborhood called love Canal,
that's its real name. Yeah, let's get the sex jokes
in early. Let's squeeze him in. Oh no, no, we
got we got a lot of show to squeeze those
(04:45):
in organically, it's gonna happen. But you love Canal that yeah,
of course immediately you know euphemism for uh, sexy parts.
But also I picture like tunnel of love type situations
where you're you and you're sweetie, you know, are in
a s on boat going through a tunnel um with
like you know, cupids and stuff everywhere. And I've never
actually seen one of those in the real world. I've
(05:07):
only seen them in like movies. You guys have seen
a real tunnel of love amusement. Yeah. Yeah, over time
a lot of them got replaced with like tunnel of
spookiness kind of vibes like yeah, I love his terrifying
Are you kidding? But the so there's uh, Matt, you
and I were talking about this off air castor memory back.
(05:30):
It's eight nine. There's a guy named William T. Love
Billy Love to his friends as he said, he's a
he's a railroad man. He's a forward thinker, and he says,
I want to build a community to leverage hydro electric power,
which sounds very progressive nowadays, but nine was a very
(05:53):
different time and people didn't treat uh, stuff like hydro
electric energy as the so called alternative energy sources. But
when you say a railroad man, do you mean like
railroad tycoon or like a railroad like he worked on
the rails. He was a hobo. No, I'm kidding, he
was no no, uh yeah, let's learn a little bit.
(06:14):
Uh he was. You could call him an entrepreneur. I
wouldn't put him in tycoon class, but he was one
of those forward thinkers. If TED talks were around at
this time, he would have given a TED talk on
how to build a city. Uh, it would probably been
a great ted talk, but the facts would have not
(06:35):
been especially supportive of his ideas. He was he dreamed big,
is what we're saying. It's very American dream style. Well,
he had a great idea, so you kind of have
to It helps if you look at a map while
we're talking about this, maybe you should. If you imagine
Lake Ontario, and then from there the Niagara Falls kind
(06:55):
of moving southward and kind of sneaking around a bit.
Billy loves idea was to instead of having to use
the water that's already flowing down Niagara Falls in that
main channel, was to connect up another part of the
Niagara River that kind of goes around this thing called
the Grand Island, and uh, cut through the earth and
(07:18):
make a new canal that would connect up to that
lower part or that the kind of channel of the
river to Lake Ontario, and you would use that water
flowing through to generate electricity. Is pretty brilliant, A great
grand idea. Yeah, and it bypasses the falls, so it's
kind of like we're gonna make our own thing. Uh.
(07:39):
With what's the futurama joke with black Jack and hookers,
and hooker will come into play. Yeah, that's foreshadowing. So
the he calls this place model City, New York, and
his idea is ambitious, but it's also pretty brilliant because
at the time, one of the big problems with electricity,
(08:01):
however generated, was how to transmit it efficiently over long distances.
So this is why hydro electric stuff made sense. He thought,
I will build this way to generate hydro electric power,
and then industries are going to come to me. Manufacturers
will build plants along the canal. And as work began
(08:22):
on this in, he's moving as quickly as he could. Uh.
There were manufacturers who had already kind of bought in, Uh,
investors who had put some money on the table for it.
Other other businesses are like sniffing around because it seems
like a good deal, but they were beset poor Willie
(08:43):
Loving Company by a number of disasters. There's a thing
called there's a children's book called Camember of the kid's name,
but it's like that no good, very bad, terrible something
day Alexander and the no good, terrible, very bad day,
and he's just having a real bad name. Yeah. Yeah,
And and love is having like an extended version of
(09:06):
this for a while. So first there's a thing called
the Panic of eight economic disaster. Most investors are just
trying to survive. They can't be part of this crazy
future town. Uh. And then environmentalists come into play, and
they will appear a couple of times in the story.
In nineteen o six and early environmental group lobbies Congress
(09:31):
to pass a law meant to protect the natural state
of the Niagara River in the falls, and so they're
successful in their lobbying, and Congress eventually banns the removal
of water from the river, which means if you're a guy,
any old guy who happens to be digging a canal
powered by water coming from the river, you just sort
(09:54):
of became a criminal if you keep doing. Yeah. But
but hey, we can work around that. We're powerful, we
can get more investors. These are not problems that we
can't solve. But then guess what happens immediately after that
another panic, This was this time in n Yeah, another
economic panic. So remaining investors who have still you know,
(10:19):
maybe they have some cost fallacy up to this point.
Maybe they're like, Okay, I'm just gonna hold on, and
they have to let go around this time too. In history, uh,
good friend of the show Nicola, Tesla figures out how
to transmit electricity over log distances with alternating current. Uh.
(10:40):
You can learn more about Tesla and or YouTube videos
and earlier episodes. Learn about elephants and other animals being
shocked sometimes to death and electricity. You've got to break
a few elephants, or hopefully you'll have to break a
few Edison's God, that guy's effect on anyhow anyhow. Yeah,
(11:03):
this is bad. This is bad for our boy. Willie
Love in the Dream is dead. You know what I mean.
It's like that song in Lams and all that was
left to commemorate his ambition. It's very like that poem
Ozamandious look upon my works, you mighty. Uh. There's a
partial ditch where it started digging the canal before all
(11:27):
his dreams went to pot. Uh. It's it's huge. It's
you don't imagine a little like ditch you know that
you've seen on the side of the road. This is big. Yeah,
it goes for city blocks. It is you know, it
would have carried a significant amount of water. It is
slowly filling with water over time. The season's past snow, rain, sleet, hail,
(11:50):
and local start treating it like like a watering hole,
which is fine because it's big enough that it's not
going to disappear, right it's uh, it's going to be
a semi permanent fixture for these folks. So if you're
growing up in the area at this time, you might
swim there in the summer. If we go back with
the idea of dating, you might get some skates and
(12:13):
uh and take your honey out there when the water freezes.
So it's just now it's like a local attraction. And
the city authorities quietly for about ten fifteen years, they've
been thinking of ways to better use this land. Skate
park is fine, local pond to swimming is okay, but
(12:35):
what else can we do with it? Keep in mind
Niagara Falls, New York. The city is growing growing at
this time. So they say, okay, we're gonna turn this
into the town dump. You got a lot of people,
which means there's a lot of trash. We're gonna put
the trash here, just regular trash at this point, you
know what I mean, just like as far as food
(12:58):
scraps and and really our guests or is based on
the technology at the time. That's what that's why we
can say, you know, just normal trash, because we live
in the era of incredibly dangerous trash. So yeah, I
mean there's this, uh, there's this garbage mountain here in Atlanta,
um off of Moreland. You can see it literally from
(13:19):
you know, like a mile away, and that's where they
keep the recycling. But yet it never seems to get smaller.
And if you look at it, it's like they clear
a path to the tops of these dozers can go
up there and just dump stuff on there. And I
just don't buy that it's all recycling. Just anyway, that's
a story for another day. Like the landfills. Landfills are
(13:40):
a hell of a thing. It's like someone was just
like some brilliant fellow was just like, hey, what if
we just put all our trashes in a hole on
the ground and forget about it. That'd be cool, right
with Grandpa, right exactly? So this is this is yeah, sorry,
but like you, you guys are pointing out a really
important thing, the idea of something being out of sight,
(14:03):
out of mind, and that is a huge part of
this conspiracy. So they're they're using it as the town
junk keep for a while landfill and they do this
for about two decades in the late nineteen forties. This
is where the Hooker comes into play. Hooker Chemical Company.
That's right, we're not we're sex positive on this show.
(14:25):
We're never going to call sex workers, uh, those kind
of terms. There is an actual Hooker Chemical company and
they came to town and they said, uh, let's make
a deal. Yeah, oh, in a deal they didn't make.
By the way, this is the second Ellen I've ever
come across who was a founder of a company. Correct
(14:47):
me if I'm wrong here, guys, But the founder of
the Hooker Chemical Company was Elon Hooker and found He
founded it in that area in Niagara, like on the
shores of the Niagara River, according to Politico dot com
in nineteen o five. And a lot of this company
is active in a lot of chlorination technologies, so they're
(15:08):
working with various chemicals that definitely have needful industrial uses
but are not super good. Well, this was the era
of that, right where it's like, oh, magical chemical that
does a dirty job, let's just throw it on everything
and caution to the wind, and then find out a
(15:29):
decade later that it gave everyone cancer. What can is
best is not do folks. Yeah, this is where our
story begins. It's a story almost a century in the making.
It remains one of the most disturbing, sadly prescient tales
of slow burned disaster in US history. This is a disaster,
like the Yellow King, It exists beyond time. It doesn't
(15:52):
just exist in the past. It functions as a harbinger.
As we'll see, it's a fable, a parable that could
be repeated beat four beat through any number of towns
in the United States. Today, we're gonna pause for a
word from our sponsor, and then we'll dive into some
very polluted waters. Here's where it gets crazy, all right,
(16:19):
it's the nineties fifties. Everybody imagine the Transatlantic voice. People
are doing, you know, weird dances and stuff. Uh, the
cars look really nice. Business is good for America, especially
post World War two economic boom, and that means business
is good for the town of Niagara Falls. Their population
is exploding, don't the only thing that's exploding. Yeah, exactly.
(16:47):
On top of the waters may seem placid, but beneath
there's a flurry of activity, chemical activity. Yeah. So there's
a boom on a couple of levels. You've got you know,
when you've got industry coming in, people spending money, is
going to be a population boom. People want to move there.
In the forties and fifties, because of that, the town
was doing very well and the population expanded to over
(17:08):
a hundred thousand people by nineteen sixty, about a hundred
and two well not about exactly a hundred and two thousand,
hundred nine, according to census data from the from the
from the year. UH. The Hooker Chemical Company was participating
hand over fist in these boom times. They're so successful
in fact, that they had a bit of a problem,
(17:28):
and it's a byproduct of a good problem. Uh, making
lots of money because of selling lots of chemicals. But
what are we gonna do with all this industrial waste? Yeah,
I mean it's a real thing. Because you know, when
these chemical companies were really had their boom in general,
chemical companies in the early nineteen hundreds up until about
this time, and then continued forward, the thought was, will
(17:52):
take all these chemicals, will make other chemicals, and we'll
use those, you know, to make products. And a lot
of those chemicals have byproducts, or stuff you can't use afterwards,
or stuff that's generated from creating a third chemical out
of two or more, right, um, And so much of
it was being generated that they just had to dump
(18:12):
it just This is still one of those eras of
Western history where a lot of companies were before they
threw stuff away, they tried to figure out whether there
was some other method of transforming it into a product
that could be sold. That's the reason American bacon is
different from Canadian bacon or what American excuse me, what
(18:36):
people in the US called bacon is different from what
people in Canada and the rest of the world called bacon.
It's also the reason there are things like cream of tartar, right,
literally stuff scraped off of barrels. That's how I found that,
and they sell it in grocery stores across the planet today.
So they went through the Hooker Company went through different
(18:58):
iterations of trying to find a use for this waste.
Like you said, they couldn't and they had this surplus,
and so they came to Niagara Falls, perhaps doing a
Monty Burns steeple with their hands, you know. And from
two to nineteen fifty three at least this company, with
(19:20):
the knowing approval of the local government, use the canal
as a chemical waste dump and use it. They used
it to great extent. Uh. If you look at it now,
you will see that over this time period they dumped
anywhere from twenty to twenty two thousand tons of all
sorts of chemicals with very little concern for mixing those
(19:45):
chemicals or how to treat specific substances. At least twelve
of the chemicals somewhere in that twenty one tons are
known carcinogens, and they just popped them in metal barrels.
That's the best way to say. We can walk through
like what a containment barrel is, but we don't really
need to like picture and oil drum exactly, and we
(20:07):
can at least say that the chemical company did line
the entire area, like the bottom of it with a
clay that they thought would be protective. They also covered
all those chemicals with clay, thinking oh, this will help. Um,
you can you can imagine that they thought it would help.
And just the last thing from the reporting that we've
(20:28):
been going through, only one chemical at the time that
they dumped in there was a known carcinogen at the
time the others were like maybe some maybe this could
cause harm it that way, Yeah, but still they knew
enough to not try adding dioxen to eliminate or something. Right, Like,
(20:49):
they knew this stuff was bad, and that's the attempted
to yet to enclose it in kind of a clay shell. Uh,
the the idea that anything that might leak from those
barrels wouldn't get through the clay. But you have to
wonder about their motivations here. This is a part that
still remains a matter of speculation. So they when they
(21:12):
are done with this landfill, which is now filled with
hazardous wighs sixteen acres of it, tens of thousands of tons,
they sell it not to the city but to the
Niagara Falls school Board, and they sell it for a
dollar with a caveat. So my question there their caveat
is we are never responsible by by giving us this
(21:36):
dollar and taking this land you agree that forever to
the end of time, we are not responsible for anything
that might happen to anyone ever in this area. Yeah,
this whole dirty business. Yep. So I want to ask
you is do you think that's just like standard boilerplate
(21:58):
legal agreement anguish at the time. Do you think they
were motivated by some charitable aspect, you know, to give
back to the city. Can you say, anytime you see
in like film or TV or what have you, somebody
selling somebody something for a dollar as like some sort
of like faux legal protection. Usually something shady is going
(22:19):
on where it's like, quick, give me a dollar, I'll
be your lawyer, and then'll give us a client lawyer privilege.
All of a sudden, does that really hold up? Like
he paid me, See I have this dollar, Like come
on that slipping Jimmy stuff. Well, if you give someone
a car, for instance, it's really common to just say
(22:41):
on the on the title that you sold it for
a dollar. I don't know at that point, I don't
know if people actually do exchange the dollar. Uh, maybe
they do. But you're right, you're right, it is. It
is pretty suss. So this town takes this deal, and
the city goes on very shortly afterwards to build a
(23:04):
school directly over the site, and then they also build
housing again directly over the site. And during this construction
that kind of lackluster clay enclosure is busted. There is
damage done to the containment site and a couple of
(23:26):
there are at least a number of barrels that are
breached at that time. But it's it's again kind of
seems like a low impact problem. A couple of barrels,
couple of places where the clay gets breached, and so
they put the clay back as well. You should say that,
but they're they're kind of you know, fiddle d d
they're in a hurry, and uh, no one really talks
(23:48):
about this Until the late nineteen seventies, which means for
the better part of two decades, all these chemicals, this
very very dangerous mixtape stayed in the round, and it
slowly began to leach into the environment and locals like
It wasn't until local investigative journalists and concerned citizens started
(24:13):
going door to door in town saying, Hi, I think
something's up in in this neighborhood. Do you have you
or any member of your family, you guys, feeling anything weird?
And the evidence started to add up, at least what
they saw as evidence. People began to think there was something,
(24:34):
something more, something dark and sinister to that old canal. Oh, dude,
I mean this stuff, the fallout I guess no pun intended. Well,
it's not exactly nuclear, but it's slight well exactly, we'll
get there. But the um, let's just say, the telltale
signs were about as spooky as they come. You have
gardens and trees withering and dyeing, this place becoming like
(24:58):
a you know, cree be maccab wasteland bicycle tires um
because of the rubber they're made of and the reactions
they're having with these chemicals. In addition to the souls
of like little kids, shoes started to like melt into
like these you know, gelatinous noxious pools. Yeah, cool, because
(25:19):
they're they're puddles of chemicals popping up everywhere. We're we're
getting a little ahead of it right now. We're gonna
give you all these details here. Um it's it's it's
really bad. It's really bad. And and the thing that
really it really, I mean, this thing is such a tragedy. Right,
we're having some fun, we're doing our thing, we're being lighthearted,
but it's a problem that was ramping up and causing
(25:44):
harm unbeknownst to the people who are living on top
of that canal. Because there were a hundred homes that
were also built on this land, like right on the
edges of the land um and it was going from
the nineteen fifties through the nineteen seventies. There's problem and
health effects that are just again ramping up, and nobody knew. Yeah,
(26:05):
weirds were who had left town by the way, skied
out of uh. Weird smells, strange pools and basements and
things just ap peering in the soil and yards. City
officials initially do kind of a lip service investigation, but
they don't really act, They don't really put energy into
(26:27):
solving the problem. And at this time, you know, obviously
decades have passed, so there are new generations of city
officials who are coming into play, and they may not
have the full awareness of this faustian bargain that was
cracked back in the forties. These surveys are you know,
(26:50):
they're not necessarily methodologically sound at this point, because people
are self reporting right there, trying to find a correlation,
and they see patterns of very strange clusters of illness
and medical conditions epilepsy, asthma, migraines, nefrosis, learning disabilities. It
(27:12):
seems like they're also hot abnormally high rates of birth
defects as well as miscarriages, not necessarily throughout Niagara Falls
the city overall, but particularly in the Love Canal neighborhood.
And the heroes of this story right now are the
(27:32):
journalists and these door to door surveyors who are primarily
like the driving force behind this um this investigation is
a group of working class women who live in the neighborhood,
and they are fighting the power in a very real way.
And if it worked for them, we wouldn't be able
(27:54):
to tell you the third act of this story, which
will do after word from our sponsors, and we've returned.
When talk about heroes in this story, we want to
give a special thank you to then Congressional aid Bonnie Casper,
(28:16):
as well as the other people who were working against
the powers that be to get this acknowledged and to
get some sort of solution or closure. Things are bad.
The town looks haunted like Twilight Zone Tails from the
Dark Side haunted. You would walk in there and you
would be like, the land is wrong, and it really was, Yeah, yeah, exactly.
(28:43):
You bury your own Uh. Here's what happened. There were
a lot of wet winters in the nineties seventies and
because of this excess water, the water table rose and
all those chemicals started to lead at an even faster rate.
They were going through a sewer system that drained into
(29:06):
nearby creeks, So the water is getting poisoned. It's going
into basements, is going into yards, it goes into the
playground of that elementary school built directly over the canal.
And the people who are raising their hand about this
are dismissed initially as a bunch of hysterical housewives. They're
(29:27):
portrayed as like busybodies who have too much time on
their hands until other investigations begin. Well, think about you're
talking about twenty five years of that process that been
described with with you know, wet winters, cold temperatures, rising
water table, all of that occurring, and to the point
where you are seeing the residents that are seeing these
(29:47):
barrels of breach out from that clay like it's hard
to overestimate how insane that probably felt to be a
home owner and to have to be sending your child
to school in this place where this is occurring, where
it's what is the toxic avenger? No, what's it? What
is it? Who's the um there's some superhero or comic
(30:09):
where it was a dude that was made out of
toxic waste from trauma. Yeah, this is what it feels
like to me. Yes, yeah, I mean it's almost like
it's satirical sounding, you know what I mean. This is
the kind of stuff you think happens in places with
like zero oversight, where it's just business first, free for all.
And now that I'm saying that out loud, that sounds
(30:30):
a hell of a lot like what America is, even
though there's a semblance of oversight. But again, we have
to remember this is just in the nascent days of
the e p A, and a lot of you know,
stuff was still not known and there was not nearly
as much oversight and attention paid to the details. So
a lot of the stuff that we're still dealing with
today in terms of the super fund sites and clean
(30:51):
up projects that last decades, if not forever, started in
those days. It's a good point. I mean, there we're
a lot of environmental laws before the e p A,
but they were often ineffective. They were kind of built
to be toothless. Uh. Now that this results in things
like intergenerational genetic chromosometal damage. The consequences are real. This
(31:16):
cover up does have um more to it than just
selling land for a dollar And just on the birth
effects tip that you're talking about, then, um, there was
reporting at the time where there were five known cases
of birth effects, and Laya's originally reported was often you know,
there are only five cases of birth effects, but there
(31:38):
are local residents in particularly the father of one child
who was born with some some birth effect were just
it reiterating there are only two hundred and seventies something
people that live in this area and there are five
families who have are you know, five instances within those
two hundred and seventy people, which if you think about
(31:59):
the e of birth effects, then what that really means
just how horrifying this is. Yeah, if you think of
it in percentage right, Yeah, this is Uh, this is
a very very disturbing ratio. It hits the national sphere
in nineteen seventy eight. Uh, this is where then President
Jimmy Carter catches wind of what's going on. I've got
(32:23):
here the very first paragraph of the New York Times
expose from the front page on August first, twenty five
years after the Hooker Chemical Company stopped using the Love
Canal here as an industrial dump. Eighty two different compounds,
eleven of them suspected carcinogens, have been percolating upwards through
the soil, their drum containers, rotting and leaching their contents
(32:46):
into the backyards and basements of a hundred homes and
a public school built on the banks of the canal. Yeah,
and that's not hyperbole. There were photographs of the time
where you would see, you know, corroded decade metal drums
popping through the soil in people's backyards. This is super bad.
And I don't mean the comedy film, which was good,
(33:07):
honestly bears a rewatch they called Boobs Warlocks, which is
still like one of the coolest lines Jonah Hill ever
did anyhow. I mean, there's we're having some levity. But
it's interesting that it's interesting that we're naming so many
works of fiction like Captain Planet, Toxic Avenger, stuff like that.
(33:28):
It's based on this story. This story inspired these things,
this cover up. And there's a journalist we should shout out,
Eckhartsea Beck. He wrote an article in the e p
A Journal in nine and it's his account of visiting
Niagara Falls at this time speaking with residents, and it's harrowing.
(33:50):
He talks about the trees and gardens all over the
neighborhood have turning black and dying. He goes by a
swimming pool that has been entirely popped out of its
foundation and now it is afloat on a sea of
chemicals from the ground. The pool is in a pool?
Is what happened? Not to be too exhibit about it. Yeah,
And and you know when that's being reported by a
(34:11):
federal entity like that, people take notice. The Carter administration
starts paying attention and they decide, you know, everybody collectively
there who's in charge, decides, okay, we need we should
probably get the humans out of here. So they begin
relocating people. And when they initially started, they begin moving
(34:31):
pregnant women and children first because again there they continue
to show that the birth effects and the problems that
are occurring start at a very very young age, both
within the children and within the mothers who were carrying
those children. So it was like a you know, lifeboat
on the Titanic situation. You got the priority ones they
(34:51):
get to go, and the rest of them are just
kind of like listening to the orchestra play on the
deck of a sinking ship. Um. They didn't see it
that way because they believe government that seven hundred families
were not of sufficient risk to warrant this expense. We'll
get to that part in a minute. Um. But the
testing showed that was conducted by the n y s
Department of Health, that toxic substances were actually leaching into
(35:15):
their homes. So I don't know, I don't know how
much more at risk you can get than that. Um.
I mean, I know, in a large scale operation like this,
you kind of have to have certain priorities. But it
sounds to me just like the government nickel and diming,
you know, a very dangerous situation. But Carter did relent
and declared an additional second state of emergency. But it
(35:36):
wasn't until nineteen eighty one, um after local activists just
you know, continued to bang the drum. Uh, and eventually
the remaining families were located at a cost of seventeen
million dollars all in UM, which with inflation today would
be about fifty four million dollars, which is no small
chunk had change. But my question is is the chemical
(35:56):
company on the hook for any of this or does
that stick years and years of class action lawsuits for
any of that to come to fruition. There's no hook
for the Hooker because of that legal transaction they made. Yeah,
that was gonna a dollar and one caveats. Yes them,
I mean the people like the school, not the company.
(36:18):
You know they they were playing the long game there, right.
Spoiler alert. No one goes to jail. Let's talk a
little bit about you know that that rarely happens. It
would be very rare for um, you know, the head
of a company responsible for these activities to see the
inside of a prison unless they were messing with the money.
Shout out Black Monday murders. Please read it if you haven't.
(36:40):
So the canal that gets capped again, it's fenced off,
the buildings around it are torn down, let no stones
stand on another. And there's this long series of legal processes. Eventually,
the first thing that happened is legally, is that thirteen
(37:01):
hundred people who used to live in Love Canal at
some point agreed to a twenty million dollar settlement with
the successor of the Hooker Chemical Company, a place called
Occidental Chemical Corporation, which took over a Hooker in the
nineteen sixties, and they also settled with the city of
Niagara Falls, New York. The clean up continues. We're talking
(37:26):
thirty years of just trying to make this less worse.
New York State in the nineties says, okay, we're done.
Some parts of the canal are safe to live in again.
They renamed the area and saw Black Creek Village. That's
the first name they went with, and they started auctioning
(37:46):
off houses there. But the legal processes continue because the
contamination is still there. And then you know, years later,
in ninety four, the same chemical company previously Hooker, now Occidental,
they agreed to pay nine eight million to New York
(38:07):
State as a way of as a way of making
up for the problems that they're dumping created. Right, so
million New York gets to begin cleaning the place up.
And the next year they're like, okay, yeah, now we're
gonna Now we're gonna settle with the Feds, the Federal boys,
(38:28):
for the same actions that we took, and this time
it will be a hundred and twenty nine million dollars.
So that one dollar price tag that they you know,
sold that thing for is looking not so great at
this point. Yeah, that's the that's the kicker. These stories
continue after the headlines are gone, you know what I mean.
(38:52):
And in some ways there's a happy ending, right because
justice was done. But no, no amount of money can
reverse these medical conditions, right and uh, no amount of
money can give people that part of their lives back.
But there's something bigger about the Love Canal. There's there's
(39:15):
a reason that we find this and illuminating conspiracy. It
is a parable, that's what you can see it as that.
That's what we how we introduced it in the beginning.
But it's not a parable just about one company in
a small town in New York State. It's about the
long term dangers at play here, both with chemical waste
(39:36):
and corporate cover ups. This became a rallying point for
a lot of people. It symbolized the looming environmental disaster
represented by untold numbers of toxic waste sites across the
United States. And you can see that legislators and activists
(39:56):
have cited Love Canal when they're trying to a deal
with problems like this in their own neck of the woods.
It actually this situation the fallout from that or the aftermath,
I should say, is one of the big driving forces
behind the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, which
(40:21):
the street name for that is super fun and super
fun sites are essentially Uncle Sam saying, who this is bad?
We something must be done right, and uh, you know,
we've got I think we've got experience with super fun sites.
You know, I think you reported on some back in
the day. Maybe, um, is that correct? Yeah? Yeah. When
(40:43):
I was at GPB or George Public Broadcasting, my beat
was the nuclear industry because I was really close to
Plant vogel Um and Savannah River site, which is considered
a super fun site. But we always kind of joked
around in the newsroom that that term just makes it
sound like a playground or something. It's a super fun site,
you know, let's go hang out there and uh, you know,
(41:04):
let's talk about let's talk about something we haven't mentioned
with this site yet, and that is this dumping site
may have also been at least in some way radioactive
because the U. S. Army in that time period between
the nineteen or in the nineteen forties, right before and
(41:26):
probably during the time that Hooker chemical company owned the area.
UH the U. S. Army was dumping chemicals and waste
from the Manhattan Project from from the United States efforts
to build nuclear weapons. It was it's known, it's reported
on in several places here throughout this story that the U. S.
Army was actively dumping stuff there. So who knows what
(41:49):
else was underneath there that we just will never know,
right And the thing is, during the Manhattan Project, the
contents of that dumping would have been and outter of
national security, so it wouldn't really have been reported. But
if you want to learn more about super funds, I
would recommend checking out stuff. You should know. They've got
(42:10):
a great episode on this. It's one of their older ones.
It holds up. I think that's a great entry point there.
This cover up also helped give birth to a related
series of conspiracies, the militant environmental movements in the US
and abroad. If you want to learn more about that,
check out our earlier episode on the so called eco terrorists.
(42:32):
That is a loaded term, so let's just be clear
about that. And where we end here is this you
have to wonder what else is out there? As we
record today, it is statistically certain that there are more
love canals somewhere in the United States. They're improperly maintained,
or they've been neglected, they may have been compromised, they
(42:54):
may have been completely abandoned, and they may be largely
forgotten by the folks who are living in these sites today.
This is something that's going to hit home for a
lot of people, unfortunately. You can learn more about love
canal in the book Paradise Falls, written by a journalist
named Keith O'Brien. He focuses on the ninety six period,
(43:16):
so it's very very specific focus, but he builds he
builds a case for problems to come in the future.
Right now, you know, we can say this cover up
has been proven. People try to make it right. But
read your local history, check that water in your basement,
be safe. Let us know what you think is there
(43:36):
is there a story like this that's being under reported
where you live in the US or abroad. Please be
aware if your child comes home with melted shoes, my god.
And just to continue calling out Keith O'Brien as an
awesome person, He also wrote an article for Politico that
you can read right now titled how a determined congressional
(43:58):
aid helped break up in the biggest environmental scandal in
US history. Worth your time. Yes, and while you're online,
if you have a story like this from your neck
of the Global Woods, we'd love to hear from you.
We try to be easy to find. It's right. You
can find us online where we have a Facebook group
called Here's Where It Gets Crazy. Check that one out
(44:18):
for sure for memorie galore and good conversation with good
folks about the episodes on this very show. You can
also find us on Twitter and YouTube under the handle
Conspiracy Stuff on Instagram or Conspiracy Stuff Show. Yes, and
if you liked this story a historical version of something
(44:40):
terrible happening when a private corporation and the government, you know,
work together and mess something up your you might like
our book Stuff They don't want you to know. You
can preorder it right now all the places you can
pre order. It comes out in October, butus your pre
order now. You'll get it then and you'll know that
it's coming, so it'll be exciting you get it. And
(45:01):
uh and then Illumination Global Unlimited will renew our blood
contract for another seven years. Oh yeah, wait, did you not?
You just signed it when they gave it to you,
and you got to negotiate, so I'm a blind signer.
I just they just had such nice suits. They do
(45:22):
have very nice I will say that. I say which
will about them. They have nice suits. Giant eyeball shaped heads,
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But if you have a comment and you don't like
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(45:43):
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(46:06):
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(47:00):
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From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
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production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Met, my name is Noel. They called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer
Paul Mission Control Decond. Most importantly, you are you. You
are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't
want you to know. Fellow conspiracy realists, regardless of your
political inclinations, your own personal beliefs or ideologies, one thing's
(00:48):
for sure. Captain Planet was right. Uh. The world is
burning down as we record. Good morning, by the way,
and uh we we hope that you are having at
least a tolerable time while we watch civilization slide into
a not quite inevitable catastrophe. Today's story is one that's
(01:11):
a long time and coming, both in terms of our
show and in terms of the conspiracy and cover up
coming to light. This is not a conspiracy theory. This
is a true story. Uh. This is something that probably
affects some of our fellow listeners to this day. Here
(01:31):
the facts we're going to Niagara Falls, And we kind
of have to explain Niagara Falls a little bit because
it's super confusing if you're not from the U. S.
It's a beautiful place, right, That's where Pam and Pam
and Jim got secretly married. Spoiler alert from the American Office. Sorry. Yeah,
in this case, we're going to Niagara Falls, New York
(01:53):
and it's a it's a beautiful place. I'm looking at
it on Google Maps right now, Uh, specifically looking at
just all the rivers and the giant lakes that are
that are roaming around there, the great ones, and when
it freezes on rare occasions, that looks amazing. It is
(02:14):
currently illegal to put yourself in a barrel and go
over the edge of one of those waterfalls for kicks. Uh.
People have done it, people have done it in real life, uh,
and some have survived. So Niagara Falls, if you're not
familiar with the area, it is the name for several
things in this region. First the beautiful falls, uh. Then
(02:36):
secondly two different cities both with the same name, one
in the States, one in Canada. And then there's another
place nearby, a smaller place that's just known as Niagara.
You'll see it called the town of Niagara. What we're
saying is they took the name Niagara and they just
went nuts with it. They were like this works, rents
and repeat one another one. Yes, d J. Cow. So
(03:00):
the the US city Niagara Falls, the subject of today's show,
is still you know, due to its location by the falls,
it's still a pretty popular tourism destination. Uh. It has
a fairly large population around a little north of forty
eight thousand, six hundred people. That's a fact that's going
(03:21):
to be sadly important later because once upon a time,
many many more people lived there. I love that you're
mentioning the map, Matt, because if you picture New York State,
which is one of those very weirdly shaped states, Niagara
is on the far far northwestern corner, and it's been
(03:41):
home to human beings for a long long time because
it's such a it's by such a great water source,
and like we discussed earlier, that's usually one of the biggest,
if not the biggest, determining factor for where civilizations begin. Yes,
it is not just a coincidence that those places are
called Niagara because of that Niagara River that connects up
(04:02):
to major bodies of water and uh, the I guess
let's should we talk about the exact place that we're
going in this area? Why not? Specificity is the name
of the game, guys. Yeah, if you're playing Cinema of
the Mind with us today, folks, picture yourself like one
of those investigators on a procedural drama. You're looking at
(04:24):
a at a satellite map and you go enhance and
then you know, the computer person is like, so you're
enhancing your zooming in to a neighborhood called love Canal,
that's its real name. Yeah, let's get the sex jokes
in early. Let's squeeze him in. Oh no, no, we
got we got a lot of show to squeeze those
(04:45):
in organically, it's gonna happen. But you love Canal that yeah,
of course immediately you know euphemism for uh, sexy parts.
But also I picture like tunnel of love type situations
where you're you and you're sweetie, you know, are in
a s on boat going through a tunnel um with
like you know, cupids and stuff everywhere. And I've never
actually seen one of those in the real world. I've
(05:07):
only seen them in like movies. You guys have seen
a real tunnel of love amusement. Yeah. Yeah, over time
a lot of them got replaced with like tunnel of
spookiness kind of vibes like yeah, I love his terrifying
Are you kidding? But the so there's uh, Matt, you
and I were talking about this off air castor memory back.
(05:30):
It's eight nine. There's a guy named William T. Love
Billy Love to his friends as he said, he's a
he's a railroad man. He's a forward thinker, and he says,
I want to build a community to leverage hydro electric power,
which sounds very progressive nowadays, but nine was a very
(05:53):
different time and people didn't treat uh, stuff like hydro
electric energy as the so called alternative energy sources. But
when you say a railroad man, do you mean like
railroad tycoon or like a railroad like he worked on
the rails. He was a hobo. No, I'm kidding, he
was no no, uh yeah, let's learn a little bit.
(06:14):
Uh he was. You could call him an entrepreneur. I
wouldn't put him in tycoon class, but he was one
of those forward thinkers. If TED talks were around at
this time, he would have given a TED talk on
how to build a city. Uh, it would probably been
a great ted talk, but the facts would have not
(06:35):
been especially supportive of his ideas. He was he dreamed big,
is what we're saying. It's very American dream style. Well,
he had a great idea, so you kind of have
to It helps if you look at a map while
we're talking about this, maybe you should. If you imagine
Lake Ontario, and then from there the Niagara Falls kind
(06:55):
of moving southward and kind of sneaking around a bit.
Billy loves idea was to instead of having to use
the water that's already flowing down Niagara Falls in that
main channel, was to connect up another part of the
Niagara River that kind of goes around this thing called
the Grand Island, and uh, cut through the earth and
(07:18):
make a new canal that would connect up to that
lower part or that the kind of channel of the
river to Lake Ontario, and you would use that water
flowing through to generate electricity. Is pretty brilliant, A great
grand idea. Yeah, and it bypasses the falls, so it's
kind of like we're gonna make our own thing. Uh.
(07:39):
With what's the futurama joke with black Jack and hookers,
and hooker will come into play. Yeah, that's foreshadowing. So
the he calls this place model City, New York, and
his idea is ambitious, but it's also pretty brilliant because
at the time, one of the big problems with electricity,
(08:01):
however generated, was how to transmit it efficiently over long distances.
So this is why hydro electric stuff made sense. He thought,
I will build this way to generate hydro electric power,
and then industries are going to come to me. Manufacturers
will build plants along the canal. And as work began
(08:22):
on this in, he's moving as quickly as he could. Uh.
There were manufacturers who had already kind of bought in, Uh,
investors who had put some money on the table for it.
Other other businesses are like sniffing around because it seems
like a good deal, but they were beset poor Willie
(08:43):
Loving Company by a number of disasters. There's a thing
called there's a children's book called Camember of the kid's name,
but it's like that no good, very bad, terrible something
day Alexander and the no good, terrible, very bad day,
and he's just having a real bad name. Yeah. Yeah,
And and love is having like an extended version of
(09:06):
this for a while. So first there's a thing called
the Panic of eight economic disaster. Most investors are just
trying to survive. They can't be part of this crazy
future town. Uh. And then environmentalists come into play, and
they will appear a couple of times in the story.
In nineteen o six and early environmental group lobbies Congress
(09:31):
to pass a law meant to protect the natural state
of the Niagara River in the falls, and so they're
successful in their lobbying, and Congress eventually banns the removal
of water from the river, which means if you're a guy,
any old guy who happens to be digging a canal
powered by water coming from the river, you just sort
(09:54):
of became a criminal if you keep doing. Yeah. But
but hey, we can work around that. We're powerful, we
can get more investors. These are not problems that we
can't solve. But then guess what happens immediately after that
another panic, This was this time in n Yeah, another
economic panic. So remaining investors who have still you know,
(10:19):
maybe they have some cost fallacy up to this point.
Maybe they're like, Okay, I'm just gonna hold on, and
they have to let go around this time too. In history, uh,
good friend of the show Nicola, Tesla figures out how
to transmit electricity over log distances with alternating current. Uh.
(10:40):
You can learn more about Tesla and or YouTube videos
and earlier episodes. Learn about elephants and other animals being
shocked sometimes to death and electricity. You've got to break
a few elephants, or hopefully you'll have to break a
few Edison's God, that guy's effect on anyhow anyhow. Yeah,
(11:03):
this is bad. This is bad for our boy. Willie
Love in the Dream is dead. You know what I mean.
It's like that song in Lams and all that was
left to commemorate his ambition. It's very like that poem
Ozamandious look upon my works, you mighty. Uh. There's a
partial ditch where it started digging the canal before all
(11:27):
his dreams went to pot. Uh. It's it's huge. It's
you don't imagine a little like ditch you know that
you've seen on the side of the road. This is big. Yeah,
it goes for city blocks. It is you know, it
would have carried a significant amount of water. It is
slowly filling with water over time. The season's past snow, rain, sleet, hail,
(11:50):
and local start treating it like like a watering hole,
which is fine because it's big enough that it's not
going to disappear, right it's uh, it's going to be
a semi permanent fixture for these folks. So if you're
growing up in the area at this time, you might
swim there in the summer. If we go back with
the idea of dating, you might get some skates and
(12:13):
uh and take your honey out there when the water freezes.
So it's just now it's like a local attraction. And
the city authorities quietly for about ten fifteen years, they've
been thinking of ways to better use this land. Skate
park is fine, local pond to swimming is okay, but
(12:35):
what else can we do with it? Keep in mind
Niagara Falls, New York. The city is growing growing at
this time. So they say, okay, we're gonna turn this
into the town dump. You got a lot of people,
which means there's a lot of trash. We're gonna put
the trash here, just regular trash at this point, you
know what I mean, just like as far as food
(12:58):
scraps and and really our guests or is based on
the technology at the time. That's what that's why we
can say, you know, just normal trash, because we live
in the era of incredibly dangerous trash. So yeah, I
mean there's this, uh, there's this garbage mountain here in Atlanta,
um off of Moreland. You can see it literally from
(13:19):
you know, like a mile away, and that's where they
keep the recycling. But yet it never seems to get smaller.
And if you look at it, it's like they clear
a path to the tops of these dozers can go
up there and just dump stuff on there. And I
just don't buy that it's all recycling. Just anyway, that's
a story for another day. Like the landfills. Landfills are
(13:40):
a hell of a thing. It's like someone was just
like some brilliant fellow was just like, hey, what if
we just put all our trashes in a hole on
the ground and forget about it. That'd be cool, right
with Grandpa, right exactly? So this is this is yeah, sorry,
but like you, you guys are pointing out a really
important thing, the idea of something being out of sight,
(14:03):
out of mind, and that is a huge part of
this conspiracy. So they're they're using it as the town
junk keep for a while landfill and they do this
for about two decades in the late nineteen forties. This
is where the Hooker comes into play. Hooker Chemical Company.
That's right, we're not we're sex positive on this show.
(14:25):
We're never going to call sex workers, uh, those kind
of terms. There is an actual Hooker Chemical company and
they came to town and they said, uh, let's make
a deal. Yeah, oh, in a deal they didn't make.
By the way, this is the second Ellen I've ever
come across who was a founder of a company. Correct
(14:47):
me if I'm wrong here, guys, But the founder of
the Hooker Chemical Company was Elon Hooker and found He
founded it in that area in Niagara, like on the
shores of the Niagara River, according to Politico dot com
in nineteen o five. And a lot of this company
is active in a lot of chlorination technologies, so they're
(15:08):
working with various chemicals that definitely have needful industrial uses
but are not super good. Well, this was the era
of that, right where it's like, oh, magical chemical that
does a dirty job, let's just throw it on everything
and caution to the wind, and then find out a
(15:29):
decade later that it gave everyone cancer. What can is
best is not do folks. Yeah, this is where our
story begins. It's a story almost a century in the making.
It remains one of the most disturbing, sadly prescient tales
of slow burned disaster in US history. This is a disaster,
like the Yellow King, It exists beyond time. It doesn't
(15:52):
just exist in the past. It functions as a harbinger.
As we'll see, it's a fable, a parable that could
be repeated beat four beat through any number of towns
in the United States. Today, we're gonna pause for a
word from our sponsor, and then we'll dive into some
very polluted waters. Here's where it gets crazy, all right,
(16:19):
it's the nineties fifties. Everybody imagine the Transatlantic voice. People
are doing, you know, weird dances and stuff. Uh, the
cars look really nice. Business is good for America, especially
post World War two economic boom, and that means business
is good for the town of Niagara Falls. Their population
is exploding, don't the only thing that's exploding. Yeah, exactly.
(16:47):
On top of the waters may seem placid, but beneath
there's a flurry of activity, chemical activity. Yeah. So there's
a boom on a couple of levels. You've got you know,
when you've got industry coming in, people spending money, is
going to be a population boom. People want to move there.
In the forties and fifties, because of that, the town
was doing very well and the population expanded to over
(17:08):
a hundred thousand people by nineteen sixty, about a hundred
and two well not about exactly a hundred and two thousand,
hundred nine, according to census data from the from the
from the year. UH. The Hooker Chemical Company was participating
hand over fist in these boom times. They're so successful
in fact, that they had a bit of a problem,
(17:28):
and it's a byproduct of a good problem. Uh, making
lots of money because of selling lots of chemicals. But
what are we gonna do with all this industrial waste? Yeah,
I mean it's a real thing. Because you know, when
these chemical companies were really had their boom in general,
chemical companies in the early nineteen hundreds up until about
this time, and then continued forward, the thought was, will
(17:52):
take all these chemicals, will make other chemicals, and we'll
use those, you know, to make products. And a lot
of those chemicals have byproducts, or stuff you can't use afterwards,
or stuff that's generated from creating a third chemical out
of two or more, right, um, And so much of
it was being generated that they just had to dump
(18:12):
it just This is still one of those eras of
Western history where a lot of companies were before they
threw stuff away, they tried to figure out whether there
was some other method of transforming it into a product
that could be sold. That's the reason American bacon is
different from Canadian bacon or what American excuse me, what
(18:36):
people in the US called bacon is different from what
people in Canada and the rest of the world called bacon.
It's also the reason there are things like cream of tartar, right,
literally stuff scraped off of barrels. That's how I found that,
and they sell it in grocery stores across the planet today.
So they went through the Hooker Company went through different
(18:58):
iterations of trying to find a use for this waste.
Like you said, they couldn't and they had this surplus,
and so they came to Niagara Falls, perhaps doing a
Monty Burns steeple with their hands, you know. And from
two to nineteen fifty three at least this company, with
(19:20):
the knowing approval of the local government, use the canal
as a chemical waste dump and use it. They used
it to great extent. Uh. If you look at it now,
you will see that over this time period they dumped
anywhere from twenty to twenty two thousand tons of all
sorts of chemicals with very little concern for mixing those
(19:45):
chemicals or how to treat specific substances. At least twelve
of the chemicals somewhere in that twenty one tons are
known carcinogens, and they just popped them in metal barrels.
That's the best way to say. We can walk through
like what a containment barrel is, but we don't really
need to like picture and oil drum exactly, and we
(20:07):
can at least say that the chemical company did line
the entire area, like the bottom of it with a
clay that they thought would be protective. They also covered
all those chemicals with clay, thinking oh, this will help. Um,
you can you can imagine that they thought it would help.
And just the last thing from the reporting that we've
(20:28):
been going through, only one chemical at the time that
they dumped in there was a known carcinogen at the
time the others were like maybe some maybe this could
cause harm it that way, Yeah, but still they knew
enough to not try adding dioxen to eliminate or something. Right, Like,
(20:49):
they knew this stuff was bad, and that's the attempted
to yet to enclose it in kind of a clay shell. Uh,
the the idea that anything that might leak from those
barrels wouldn't get through the clay. But you have to
wonder about their motivations here. This is a part that
still remains a matter of speculation. So they when they
(21:12):
are done with this landfill, which is now filled with
hazardous wighs sixteen acres of it, tens of thousands of tons,
they sell it not to the city but to the
Niagara Falls school Board, and they sell it for a
dollar with a caveat. So my question there their caveat
is we are never responsible by by giving us this
(21:36):
dollar and taking this land you agree that forever to
the end of time, we are not responsible for anything
that might happen to anyone ever in this area. Yeah,
this whole dirty business. Yep. So I want to ask
you is do you think that's just like standard boilerplate
(21:58):
legal agreement anguish at the time. Do you think they
were motivated by some charitable aspect, you know, to give
back to the city. Can you say, anytime you see
in like film or TV or what have you, somebody
selling somebody something for a dollar as like some sort
of like faux legal protection. Usually something shady is going
(22:19):
on where it's like, quick, give me a dollar, I'll
be your lawyer, and then'll give us a client lawyer privilege.
All of a sudden, does that really hold up? Like
he paid me, See I have this dollar, Like come
on that slipping Jimmy stuff. Well, if you give someone
a car, for instance, it's really common to just say
(22:41):
on the on the title that you sold it for
a dollar. I don't know at that point, I don't
know if people actually do exchange the dollar. Uh, maybe
they do. But you're right, you're right, it is. It
is pretty suss. So this town takes this deal, and
the city goes on very shortly afterwards to build a
(23:04):
school directly over the site, and then they also build
housing again directly over the site. And during this construction
that kind of lackluster clay enclosure is busted. There is
damage done to the containment site and a couple of
(23:26):
there are at least a number of barrels that are
breached at that time. But it's it's again kind of
seems like a low impact problem. A couple of barrels,
couple of places where the clay gets breached, and so
they put the clay back as well. You should say that,
but they're they're kind of you know, fiddle d d
they're in a hurry, and uh, no one really talks
(23:48):
about this Until the late nineteen seventies, which means for
the better part of two decades, all these chemicals, this
very very dangerous mixtape stayed in the round, and it
slowly began to leach into the environment and locals like
It wasn't until local investigative journalists and concerned citizens started
(24:13):
going door to door in town saying, Hi, I think
something's up in in this neighborhood. Do you have you
or any member of your family, you guys, feeling anything weird?
And the evidence started to add up, at least what
they saw as evidence. People began to think there was something,
(24:34):
something more, something dark and sinister to that old canal. Oh, dude,
I mean this stuff, the fallout I guess no pun intended. Well,
it's not exactly nuclear, but it's slight well exactly, we'll
get there. But the um, let's just say, the telltale
signs were about as spooky as they come. You have
gardens and trees withering and dyeing, this place becoming like
(24:58):
a you know, cree be maccab wasteland bicycle tires um
because of the rubber they're made of and the reactions
they're having with these chemicals. In addition to the souls
of like little kids, shoes started to like melt into
like these you know, gelatinous noxious pools. Yeah, cool, because
(25:19):
they're they're puddles of chemicals popping up everywhere. We're we're
getting a little ahead of it right now. We're gonna
give you all these details here. Um it's it's it's
really bad. It's really bad. And and the thing that
really it really, I mean, this thing is such a tragedy. Right,
we're having some fun, we're doing our thing, we're being lighthearted,
but it's a problem that was ramping up and causing
(25:44):
harm unbeknownst to the people who are living on top
of that canal. Because there were a hundred homes that
were also built on this land, like right on the
edges of the land um and it was going from
the nineteen fifties through the nineteen seventies. There's problem and
health effects that are just again ramping up, and nobody knew. Yeah,
(26:05):
weirds were who had left town by the way, skied
out of uh. Weird smells, strange pools and basements and
things just ap peering in the soil and yards. City
officials initially do kind of a lip service investigation, but
they don't really act, They don't really put energy into
(26:27):
solving the problem. And at this time, you know, obviously
decades have passed, so there are new generations of city
officials who are coming into play, and they may not
have the full awareness of this faustian bargain that was
cracked back in the forties. These surveys are you know,
(26:50):
they're not necessarily methodologically sound at this point, because people
are self reporting right there, trying to find a correlation,
and they see patterns of very strange clusters of illness
and medical conditions epilepsy, asthma, migraines, nefrosis, learning disabilities. It
(27:12):
seems like they're also hot abnormally high rates of birth
defects as well as miscarriages, not necessarily throughout Niagara Falls
the city overall, but particularly in the Love Canal neighborhood.
And the heroes of this story right now are the
(27:32):
journalists and these door to door surveyors who are primarily
like the driving force behind this um this investigation is
a group of working class women who live in the neighborhood,
and they are fighting the power in a very real way.
And if it worked for them, we wouldn't be able
(27:54):
to tell you the third act of this story, which
will do after word from our sponsors, and we've returned.
When talk about heroes in this story, we want to
give a special thank you to then Congressional aid Bonnie Casper,
(28:16):
as well as the other people who were working against
the powers that be to get this acknowledged and to
get some sort of solution or closure. Things are bad.
The town looks haunted like Twilight Zone Tails from the
Dark Side haunted. You would walk in there and you
would be like, the land is wrong, and it really was, Yeah, yeah, exactly.
(28:43):
You bury your own Uh. Here's what happened. There were
a lot of wet winters in the nineties seventies and
because of this excess water, the water table rose and
all those chemicals started to lead at an even faster rate.
They were going through a sewer system that drained into
(29:06):
nearby creeks, So the water is getting poisoned. It's going
into basements, is going into yards, it goes into the
playground of that elementary school built directly over the canal.
And the people who are raising their hand about this
are dismissed initially as a bunch of hysterical housewives. They're
(29:27):
portrayed as like busybodies who have too much time on
their hands until other investigations begin. Well, think about you're
talking about twenty five years of that process that been
described with with you know, wet winters, cold temperatures, rising
water table, all of that occurring, and to the point
where you are seeing the residents that are seeing these
(29:47):
barrels of breach out from that clay like it's hard
to overestimate how insane that probably felt to be a
home owner and to have to be sending your child
to school in this place where this is occurring, where
it's what is the toxic avenger? No, what's it? What
is it? Who's the um there's some superhero or comic
(30:09):
where it was a dude that was made out of
toxic waste from trauma. Yeah, this is what it feels
like to me. Yes, yeah, I mean it's almost like
it's satirical sounding, you know what I mean. This is
the kind of stuff you think happens in places with
like zero oversight, where it's just business first, free for all.
And now that I'm saying that out loud, that sounds
(30:30):
a hell of a lot like what America is, even
though there's a semblance of oversight. But again, we have
to remember this is just in the nascent days of
the e p A, and a lot of you know,
stuff was still not known and there was not nearly
as much oversight and attention paid to the details. So
a lot of the stuff that we're still dealing with
today in terms of the super fund sites and clean
(30:51):
up projects that last decades, if not forever, started in
those days. It's a good point. I mean, there we're
a lot of environmental laws before the e p A,
but they were often ineffective. They were kind of built
to be toothless. Uh. Now that this results in things
like intergenerational genetic chromosometal damage. The consequences are real. This
(31:16):
cover up does have um more to it than just
selling land for a dollar And just on the birth
effects tip that you're talking about, then, um, there was
reporting at the time where there were five known cases
of birth effects, and Laya's originally reported was often you know,
there are only five cases of birth effects, but there
(31:38):
are local residents in particularly the father of one child
who was born with some some birth effect were just
it reiterating there are only two hundred and seventies something
people that live in this area and there are five
families who have are you know, five instances within those
two hundred and seventy people, which if you think about
(31:59):
the e of birth effects, then what that really means
just how horrifying this is. Yeah, if you think of
it in percentage right, Yeah, this is Uh, this is
a very very disturbing ratio. It hits the national sphere
in nineteen seventy eight. Uh, this is where then President
Jimmy Carter catches wind of what's going on. I've got
(32:23):
here the very first paragraph of the New York Times
expose from the front page on August first, twenty five
years after the Hooker Chemical Company stopped using the Love
Canal here as an industrial dump. Eighty two different compounds,
eleven of them suspected carcinogens, have been percolating upwards through
the soil, their drum containers, rotting and leaching their contents
(32:46):
into the backyards and basements of a hundred homes and
a public school built on the banks of the canal. Yeah,
and that's not hyperbole. There were photographs of the time
where you would see, you know, corroded decade metal drums
popping through the soil in people's backyards. This is super bad.
And I don't mean the comedy film, which was good,
(33:07):
honestly bears a rewatch they called Boobs Warlocks, which is
still like one of the coolest lines Jonah Hill ever
did anyhow. I mean, there's we're having some levity. But
it's interesting that it's interesting that we're naming so many
works of fiction like Captain Planet, Toxic Avenger, stuff like that.
(33:28):
It's based on this story. This story inspired these things,
this cover up. And there's a journalist we should shout out,
Eckhartsea Beck. He wrote an article in the e p
A Journal in nine and it's his account of visiting
Niagara Falls at this time speaking with residents, and it's harrowing.
(33:50):
He talks about the trees and gardens all over the
neighborhood have turning black and dying. He goes by a
swimming pool that has been entirely popped out of its
foundation and now it is afloat on a sea of
chemicals from the ground. The pool is in a pool?
Is what happened? Not to be too exhibit about it. Yeah,
And and you know when that's being reported by a
(34:11):
federal entity like that, people take notice. The Carter administration
starts paying attention and they decide, you know, everybody collectively
there who's in charge, decides, okay, we need we should
probably get the humans out of here. So they begin
relocating people. And when they initially started, they begin moving
(34:31):
pregnant women and children first because again there they continue
to show that the birth effects and the problems that
are occurring start at a very very young age, both
within the children and within the mothers who were carrying
those children. So it was like a you know, lifeboat
on the Titanic situation. You got the priority ones they
(34:51):
get to go, and the rest of them are just
kind of like listening to the orchestra play on the
deck of a sinking ship. Um. They didn't see it
that way because they believe government that seven hundred families
were not of sufficient risk to warrant this expense. We'll
get to that part in a minute. Um. But the
testing showed that was conducted by the n y s
Department of Health, that toxic substances were actually leaching into
(35:15):
their homes. So I don't know, I don't know how
much more at risk you can get than that. Um.
I mean, I know, in a large scale operation like this,
you kind of have to have certain priorities. But it
sounds to me just like the government nickel and diming,
you know, a very dangerous situation. But Carter did relent
and declared an additional second state of emergency. But it
(35:36):
wasn't until nineteen eighty one, um after local activists just
you know, continued to bang the drum. Uh, and eventually
the remaining families were located at a cost of seventeen
million dollars all in UM, which with inflation today would
be about fifty four million dollars, which is no small
chunk had change. But my question is is the chemical
(35:56):
company on the hook for any of this or does
that stick years and years of class action lawsuits for
any of that to come to fruition. There's no hook
for the Hooker because of that legal transaction they made. Yeah,
that was gonna a dollar and one caveats. Yes them,
I mean the people like the school, not the company.
(36:18):
You know they they were playing the long game there, right.
Spoiler alert. No one goes to jail. Let's talk a
little bit about you know that that rarely happens. It
would be very rare for um, you know, the head
of a company responsible for these activities to see the
inside of a prison unless they were messing with the money.
Shout out Black Monday murders. Please read it if you haven't.
(36:40):
So the canal that gets capped again, it's fenced off,
the buildings around it are torn down, let no stones
stand on another. And there's this long series of legal processes. Eventually,
the first thing that happened is legally, is that thirteen
(37:01):
hundred people who used to live in Love Canal at
some point agreed to a twenty million dollar settlement with
the successor of the Hooker Chemical Company, a place called
Occidental Chemical Corporation, which took over a Hooker in the
nineteen sixties, and they also settled with the city of
Niagara Falls, New York. The clean up continues. We're talking
(37:26):
thirty years of just trying to make this less worse.
New York State in the nineties says, okay, we're done.
Some parts of the canal are safe to live in again.
They renamed the area and saw Black Creek Village. That's
the first name they went with, and they started auctioning
(37:46):
off houses there. But the legal processes continue because the
contamination is still there. And then you know, years later,
in ninety four, the same chemical company previously Hooker, now Occidental,
they agreed to pay nine eight million to New York
(38:07):
State as a way of as a way of making
up for the problems that they're dumping created. Right, so
million New York gets to begin cleaning the place up.
And the next year they're like, okay, yeah, now we're
gonna Now we're gonna settle with the Feds, the Federal boys,
(38:28):
for the same actions that we took, and this time
it will be a hundred and twenty nine million dollars.
So that one dollar price tag that they you know,
sold that thing for is looking not so great at
this point. Yeah, that's the that's the kicker. These stories
continue after the headlines are gone, you know what I mean.
(38:52):
And in some ways there's a happy ending, right because
justice was done. But no, no amount of money can
reverse these medical conditions, right and uh, no amount of
money can give people that part of their lives back.
But there's something bigger about the Love Canal. There's there's
(39:15):
a reason that we find this and illuminating conspiracy. It
is a parable, that's what you can see it as that.
That's what we how we introduced it in the beginning.
But it's not a parable just about one company in
a small town in New York State. It's about the
long term dangers at play here, both with chemical waste
(39:36):
and corporate cover ups. This became a rallying point for
a lot of people. It symbolized the looming environmental disaster
represented by untold numbers of toxic waste sites across the
United States. And you can see that legislators and activists
(39:56):
have cited Love Canal when they're trying to a deal
with problems like this in their own neck of the woods.
It actually this situation the fallout from that or the aftermath,
I should say, is one of the big driving forces
behind the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, which
(40:21):
the street name for that is super fun and super
fun sites are essentially Uncle Sam saying, who this is bad?
We something must be done right, and uh, you know,
we've got I think we've got experience with super fun sites.
You know, I think you reported on some back in
the day. Maybe, um, is that correct? Yeah? Yeah. When
(40:43):
I was at GPB or George Public Broadcasting, my beat
was the nuclear industry because I was really close to
Plant vogel Um and Savannah River site, which is considered
a super fun site. But we always kind of joked
around in the newsroom that that term just makes it
sound like a playground or something. It's a super fun site,
you know, let's go hang out there and uh, you know,
(41:04):
let's talk about let's talk about something we haven't mentioned
with this site yet, and that is this dumping site
may have also been at least in some way radioactive
because the U. S. Army in that time period between
the nineteen or in the nineteen forties, right before and
(41:26):
probably during the time that Hooker chemical company owned the area.
UH the U. S. Army was dumping chemicals and waste
from the Manhattan Project from from the United States efforts
to build nuclear weapons. It was it's known, it's reported
on in several places here throughout this story that the U. S.
Army was actively dumping stuff there. So who knows what
(41:49):
else was underneath there that we just will never know,
right And the thing is, during the Manhattan Project, the
contents of that dumping would have been and outter of
national security, so it wouldn't really have been reported. But
if you want to learn more about super funds, I
would recommend checking out stuff. You should know. They've got
(42:10):
a great episode on this. It's one of their older ones.
It holds up. I think that's a great entry point there.
This cover up also helped give birth to a related
series of conspiracies, the militant environmental movements in the US
and abroad. If you want to learn more about that,
check out our earlier episode on the so called eco terrorists.
(42:32):
That is a loaded term, so let's just be clear
about that. And where we end here is this you
have to wonder what else is out there? As we
record today, it is statistically certain that there are more
love canals somewhere in the United States. They're improperly maintained,
or they've been neglected, they may have been compromised, they
(42:54):
may have been completely abandoned, and they may be largely
forgotten by the folks who are living in these sites today.
This is something that's going to hit home for a
lot of people, unfortunately. You can learn more about love
canal in the book Paradise Falls, written by a journalist
named Keith O'Brien. He focuses on the ninety six period,
(43:16):
so it's very very specific focus, but he builds he
builds a case for problems to come in the future.
Right now, you know, we can say this cover up
has been proven. People try to make it right. But
read your local history, check that water in your basement,
be safe. Let us know what you think is there
(43:36):
is there a story like this that's being under reported
where you live in the US or abroad. Please be
aware if your child comes home with melted shoes, my god.
And just to continue calling out Keith O'Brien as an
awesome person, He also wrote an article for Politico that
you can read right now titled how a determined congressional
(43:58):
aid helped break up in the biggest environmental scandal in
US history. Worth your time. Yes, and while you're online,
if you have a story like this from your neck
of the Global Woods, we'd love to hear from you.
We try to be easy to find. It's right. You
can find us online where we have a Facebook group
called Here's Where It Gets Crazy. Check that one out
(44:18):
for sure for memorie galore and good conversation with good
folks about the episodes on this very show. You can
also find us on Twitter and YouTube under the handle
Conspiracy Stuff on Instagram or Conspiracy Stuff Show. Yes, and
if you liked this story a historical version of something
(44:40):
terrible happening when a private corporation and the government, you know,
work together and mess something up your you might like
our book Stuff They don't want you to know. You
can preorder it right now all the places you can
pre order. It comes out in October, butus your pre
order now. You'll get it then and you'll know that
it's coming, so it'll be exciting you get it. And
(45:01):
uh and then Illumination Global Unlimited will renew our blood
contract for another seven years. Oh yeah, wait, did you not?
You just signed it when they gave it to you,
and you got to negotiate, so I'm a blind signer.
I just they just had such nice suits. They do
(45:22):
have very nice I will say that. I say which
will about them. They have nice suits. Giant eyeball shaped heads,
which is a little weird with deep figures. You know,
it looks kind of interesting. Comments ryeball guys, no comments.
But if you have a comment and you don't like
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(45:43):
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(46:06):
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(46:28):
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(47:00):
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