March 26, 2024 • 46 mins
A man with an unfulfilled vision left a huge gash in the ground near Niagara Falls. Then a chemical company came along and filled it with toxic waste. Then people came along and built homes and an elementary school on top of it. Then things went badly.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. So I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff
you should know. The I can't believe this happened, but
I can totally believe it.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Addition, Oh, I thought it was the Romantic Cruise in
the Gondola edition.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
I know you'd think so. By the name of it,
Love Canal.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Love Canal sounds so wonderful.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
For sure, it does. The love can No love canal
we're talking about today is not wonderful or nice at all.
Even before it was filled with toxic waste, it was
not so great to begin with.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Spoiler, Yeah, love.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Canals filled in toxic waste. As we'll see, Love Canal
was an incident in American history where America came to
grips with the idea that all the toxic waste it
had been burying for the last century, essentially, yeah, was
starting to intrude into the ground, and that there was
(01:09):
way more than just water pollution or air pollution. There
was such a thing as ground pollution, and all of
a sudden, all the toxic waste sites around the United
States suddenly seemed like ticking time bombs thanks to one
that actually went off.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
That's right, and supplementary material are do we do one
in super funds? I know we did one on brownfield remediation.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
That's the closest I think we came.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Okay, that was an old one though, But you know,
if you're into that kind of thing, or maybe landfills too.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, if you're a remediation fan, check it out.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
But for this one, we should go back in time, correct, Yeah,
let's go.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Back all the way back to the eighteen nineties. We're
gonna head on up north to Niagara Falls, New York.
Not just the falls, but the city. There's a city
called Niagara Falls, and it is where where you would
stay if you were honeymooning in Niagara Falls, which is
something that people did for a very long time.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Yeah, we also did one on going over Niagara Falls
and a barrel.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Totally did that. Feels like you're a fan of barrels,
check it out.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
That feels like one of those that had to be
like an early fifteen minute episode.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Oh I really think it was like on par with
more like five.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Okay, it was a long long time ago. Yeah, So
eighteen nineties. We are in Niagara. We look to our
right and we see a gentleman named William T. Love.
He says hello, he says hi. There. He's very excited
because he said, I've got an idea for you guys.
Niagara Falls is doing pretty great. Here's powering a bunch
of there's a bunch of industrial mills around. But I
(02:44):
have a vision that we can make this better. We
can build a model city if we just divert part
of this Niagara River over there on Lewiston Ridge. And
then he pointed that away whichever way that was sure,
and he said, we can double our hydro electric output
if we do that. It's just four miles down river,
(03:06):
and we can build this amazing neighborhood that has electricity
and telephone lines and anything you would want. And like
I said, we'll call it model city. And all you
got to do is let me build Love Canal. You
don't have to name it dat, right, but it'll be
seven miles long, eighty feet wide, and fifteen feet deep
and that's all we need to do.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Yeah. So he wanted to set up a new fall.
He wanted to create a man made or human made
waterfall to generate hydro electric power which would power this
amazing town that he was building. I mean, because that
was quite a draw electricity, telephones, gas lines, sewer lines
in the eighteen nineties, like he would have gotten free takers,
(03:46):
and he got some investors for sure. And also, in
what would become a long standing tradition, the city of
Niagara Falls gave this random person carte Blanc to exercise
eminent domain and take people's land to carve a canal
from the Niagara River to a different part, to divert
some of it, to just do some really serious stuff.
(04:06):
And he's he got a lot of people interested. But
two things happened that killed the model city plan of
William T. Love. First, the Panic of eighteen ninety three.
It was a huge economic meltdown in the eighteen nineties,
scared a lot of investors. They wanted sure things from
that point on. And then the second thing was Nikola
(04:28):
Tesla's He came up with the method of long distance
electrical transmission. The whole reason William T. Love wanted to
build this electro hydroelectro plant is because you needed close
by electrical generation to power stuff. Tesla said, you don't
need that anymore. So at that point, William T. Love
just threw up his hands and moved to I think,
(04:49):
on some rural part of Ontario.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
He went north. Yeah, very interesting. Seems like he goes
south after that.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
You would think so, but he didn't. He went north
and it was like, I can't remember. It was like
the name of the town was rats something. It was
not a pleasant place to be. But he left behind
a legacy of sorts, didn't he he did.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
He left behind you know, they got started on the
dam or I'm sorry, on the canal because I think
damn when I think hydro electricity. Look at me. Yeah,
not seven miles, but one mile of this thing had
been dug and so it's there. It's you know, I
don't know if it was the full eighty feet wide
(05:33):
and fifteen feet deep and a mile long, but it
was a huge, dug up swath of earth. And so
the city is like, all right, well, now we got
this here, I guess. You know, kids are swimming in
it in the summer and they're skating on it in
the other ten months out of the year. And in
the nineteen thirties a company came along the Hooker Electrochemical Company,
(05:54):
which made industrial chemicals and plastics and pesticides and all
kinds of stuff. And they said, I would like to
buy that land because we would like to or we
would like to buy that land because we would like
to do what everyone else does when they have toxic waste,
and that's bury it and steal drums. And that's a
You've already dug the hole for us, so exactly, you
(06:16):
did a lot of the work up front, and we'd
like to buy it so we can stick our drums
in there.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Yeah, William T. Love inadvertently dug out a trash pit. Yeah,
that the Hooker Company was like, heck, yeah, I looked
up the dimensions. I think it was something like three
thousand feet by ten feet deep by I think twenty
or something feet across, so it covered like sixteen acres essentially,
(06:40):
and that's a lot. You can fit a lot of
waste in a ten foot deep pit. Yeah, that's sixteen
acres total surface area. And they did. They ended up
so because they the Hooker Company, didn't make the products
that kill us. They made the ingredients that people put
into the products that kill us. So like they actually
created the dioxins and the PCBs and stuff that plastic
(07:03):
manufacturers and pesticide makers used in their products. So the
stuff they were throwing away as waste was as deadly
as it gets, essentially like just the most toxic of
toxic waste. But at the time people didn't realize that.
They knew you didn't want to be around it or
get it on your skin or breathe it in, but
they did not realize the extent of toxicity of some
(07:23):
of these things.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
No, not at all. And they ended up over a
nine year period bearing close to twenty two thousand tons
of this stuff in the Love canal, and like you said,
every toxic compound and dioxin and carcinogen you can think
of practically as in there. And like you were mentioning,
it wasn't you know, it wasn't like it is today. Obviously,
(07:45):
first of all, the fact that you could do that
at all, but the way they did it, you know,
if the lid popped off after it was in there,
they didn't send someone down there to seal that lid.
If one of the drums got cracked or something, they
didn't say, oh, well, let's get down there and get
that drum out of here and repair it or put
the waist in a new drum. They were just like,
it's probably fine. They're hosing their hands and clothes off
(08:08):
with the hoses of nearby neighbors, and all of a sudden,
you know, problems start happening kind of right away. You know,
groundwater is rising, some of these drums are rusting, and
stuff starts leaching pretty quickly. So they said, all right,
we've filled this thing about as full as we can
full it. Not just them, but I think like all
(08:28):
like local the City of Niagara was dumping stuff in there,
and like all kinds of people were dumping stuff, right.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
The Army dumped a bunch of stuff as well. It
was not just hooker, but they were far and away
the largest contributor to the toxic weights pit.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Yeah, for sure. So this thing gets full, they said,
all right, we got a sixteen acre landfill. Basically, we're
gonna cap it with some clay shovel about a foot
and a half atop soil on it and call it
a day. And here's what we'll do, City of Niagara.
We would like to sell it back to you just
for a dollar.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Yeah, the City of Niagara Falls, like Hookers is the
biggest employer there, right, So this seemed like a real,
like a benefactor type situation, like this company that that
was like caring for the community by employing all these people,
was also showing it cared for the community by basically
(09:20):
donating a decent sized chunk of land for the town
to build a new elementary school. And that's what the
town did with it.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Yeah, it is in.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
A certain ghoulish way, for sure. It's a laugh of irony,
not right exactly, So that's exactly what they did. The
City of Niagara Falls paid one dollar to Hooker, a
chemical company, and it took possession of this the swath
of land that contained this toxic waste pit, and gave
(09:49):
it to the Board of Education and said build a school.
And you might think that that is madness and that's nuts,
and that probably the Hooker company was trying to keep
all this underwrap, and apparently that is not the case. Hooker.
Even in the deed you can read the deed where
they transferred ownership of land to the city, it says like, hey,
(10:10):
there's waist down there and you don't want to touch it,
but you guys are taking possession of this stuff and
it's now your responsibility. So they weren't like trying to
pass off something that they knew was like a ticking
time bomb from everything I can tell. Instead, they were like,
we can't use this anymore. You guys should use it.
Just don't build anything with a basement nearby.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, I mean they did say we're not liable for
anything like that was definitely in the agreement. Yeah, but
they also like they literally brought members of the school
board out there and they dug holes, I think like
eight holes in the ground and said, look, this stuff
is four feet down. You can see these these barrels,
no basements, Like, don't do any underground piping, don't subdivide
(10:54):
it for homes, like you should not do that stuff.
But apparently the school board was broke they did it anyway,
So you know, the blood is on the hands of
the school board as well as the city and the
Hooker Chemical Company.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah, this is one of those things where like when
you read the histories of it in retrospect, like there's
clear heroes, there's clear villains, there is clear you know,
indifference that's just criminal, and all of that is true.
It does exist, but it's definitely more nuanced than that.
It's not nearly as clear cut as you know you
might read in a single article about Love Canal. And
(11:33):
that's part of it. Hooker takes a lot of the blame,
and part of it is definitely fairly, and part of
it is not at all fairly, for sure. But the
one group that seems to have really been just basically
the pits from any angle I can find is the
city of Niagara Falls. The managers who the mayor, the
city council. They just were not good. They were not
(11:56):
in any kind of position to take on what was
about to happen in the neighborhood that was now called
Love Canal that had build up around the school.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
I think that's a good spot for a break, Sure
it is. I mean it's kind of early, but I
mean that's as good as a Niagara Falls style cliffhangers
you can get. Right, people are hanging off of Lewiston Ridge.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Yeah, their barrels are just dangling from their toes.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
All right, we'll be right back then and tell you
what started happening pretty quickly after this. All right, So
(12:53):
we mentioned elementary school. What better to do on a
chemical waste stump there in Springfield than to build the
ninety ninth Street school. The school, if you look at
a map, was built right in the center of where
this landfill was.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Yeah, even just taking the toxic waste out of account,
the stability of the ground, it's like scary just looking
at like a hokey map of it.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
No, totally, I didn't even think about that, like foundationally,
it probably wasn't that you know, firm, you know.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
No.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
So they completed the school in nineteen fifty five. Even
though they said, hey, don't subdivide this for homes, They're like,
are you kidding me? People want to live near the school.
So the neighborhood that was known as Love Canal had
about eight hundred houses and about two hundred and forty apartments,
and right away I think this was all completed. The
(13:49):
school in fifty five. It's starting and like two or
three years later problems started happening. People were coming down
with physical symptoms that were horror.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Yeah. I think nineteen fifty eight some kids were taken
to the hospital for treatment of chemical burns. Yeah, that's
just a few years of the school opening. The following year,
a family called the Vorhis found that there was black
sludge seeping through their basement walls.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Took a horror movie.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Yeah, I mean, I think that's literally part of Amityville
Horror at the end, isn't there like black seeping through
the walls?
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Yeah, I mean, I think there's more than one movie
that does the old black sledge trick.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Well, this is where they got it was from the
families of Love Canal in the late fifties. There's another
thing I turned up. There were the kids in the
area loved to play with fire rocks that they found.
There was a kind of rock they found that if
you threw it in another rock or threw it at
a hard surface, sometimes they would explode catch fire. One
kid puts some of these fire rocks in his pockets
(14:53):
and ran home, and the friction caused the fire rocks
to catch fire and burn the kid quite badly, And
so of course people started to investigating. They're like those
chunks of white phosphorus and it should probably stop playing
with that.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
It was like that, Yeah, yeah, totally. The fire chief sent,
I believe, a report to the city manager of what
he said were obnoxious odors. Of course, we can apply
the sick rit scriptum because he meant noxious.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Sure, he also said it was irritating to the lungs
and we should probably do something about this. And that
was sixty four.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Yeah, and then all of a sudden, babies start being
born that have disfigurements, that have disabilities, deafness. This one
baby in the Schroeder family was born with a second
row of teeth, among other things. Really alarming stuff. So
flash forward, that's nineteen sixty eight. By the nineteen seventies,
(15:51):
people are just living there. It looks like a regular suburban,
you know, northeastern suburban neighborhood. Some of the residents may
have known about this that were in the know, but
probably not many of them. There was a lot of
series of winters in a row with like tons of rainfall,
tons of snow, tons of lakes freezing, and this all
(16:13):
just melts into that groundwater system and carries the stuff
even further through the groundwater system, and the canal itself
became so saturated that like these some of these barrels
started like rising up through the surface of the earth.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Yeah, and all the ones that were already open and
had been leaking over the years were now really spilling
their contents, and that stuff was being pushed up and
out of the relative safety of the canal the pit.
You know, now it wasn't even being held by the
canal any longer. It was like in the ground. This
(16:48):
was in people's backyards. There was a there was a
ball field nearby that I saw that. It swelled and
contracted like a bowl of gelatine whenever, whenever heavy equipment
drove a because it was so saturated and just ready
to pop. This is a baseball field. A pool popped
out of the ground and was floating on toxic chemicals.
(17:10):
Like pools of toxic sludge were starting to appear in
people's backyards because the ground was so saturated and there
was some really toxic stuff in the ground. So you
put those things together. All of a sudden, people's backyards
are toxic waste sites. And some, like you said, some
had no idea that that was there.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
By the seventies, yeah, absolutely, you know, all men are
Wildlife of course is dying. Trees are dying, landscaping is dying.
Back people are losing their hair, pets are losing their hair.
All of a sudden, there's you know, breathing problems, there's numbing,
there's fatigue, there's blood in people's stools, and eventually, in
(17:50):
nineteen seventy six, Niagara Gazette publishes the very first article
that says, Hey, this nightmare that's happening all around us,
by the way, has a reason behind it. And it's
because the love canal and Hooker chemical got together and
it's a toxic waste dump basically. Yeah, and a lot
of these residents are like for the very first time,
(18:12):
learning what's going on and probably going, oh, my god,
you know, so much of my life makes sense now.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Yeah, those fifty five gallon drums that were popping out
of the creek beds makes sense now. I understand it now.
But I mean it was so I think even the
people who were used to had grown up throwing fire
rocks at one another, and we're like used to the
idea that there's some weird stuff around. Maybe even knew
there was a dump site nearby. Yeah, this was now
(18:41):
in their backyard thanks to the blizzard of seventy seven
that dumped so much snow on that eventually trickled in
and then saturated the ground. It brought it into the sunlight,
and now there was just no denying it whatsoever. And
then the Niagara Gazette, like you said, brought it further
into the sunlight. So it was such an obvious problem
out of the gate that the City of Niagara hired
(19:04):
the Cowspan Corporation. They do all sorts of like freelance
testing and stuff, and they investigated. They went to some
of the basements that were emitting black sludge and checked
the sump pumps, and they did some air testing, and
they checked the sewer lines. And as the data started
to roll in while they were doing this testing, there
(19:26):
was a really dramatic moment where all of the Cowspan
people got in their cars and sped away as fast
as they could.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
In the movie, that's exactly what would happen. And then
they just like they throw a file out the window
and it slides to the feet of the mayor, and
in that file is the data which basically says Displace
is a disaster. The levels of toxic compounds is truly horrifying.
(19:54):
We're out of here. But nothing happened. They didn't disclose
the report, the findings from that report. The City of
Nagar didn't, so the drumbeat keeps happening from the Nagregazette
over the course of seventy seven seventy eight, they're still
doing these reports. No one is still doing anything because,
like you mentioned at the beginning, Hooker Chemical is still there.
(20:16):
There's still a huge employer for that town, and it's
a huge expense to clean this stuff up. So they
weren't eager to bring this like fully into the light
and say, all right, we got to do something about it.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
No, So the city had I saw what was described
as an incestuous relationship with Hooker Chemical. There was a
time where Hooker was suspected of leaking waste elsewhere in
the city, and so they hired Hooker Chemical to go
take samples and analyze it to find out if they
were that kind of stuff. In addition to not wanting
(20:53):
to tick off Hooker, they were also really worried about
tourism because, like I said, like this is a time
where if you honeymooned, and you you know, were working
class or middle class, you would you there's a good
chance you would travel to Niagara Falls and honeymoon there.
So tourism was a big part of their economy. We
(21:13):
didn't want to be like, come to Niagara Falls. We
got the falls and a toxic waste dump too. So
people are like, we need to keep this quiet. That
was the city's position. We need to keep this quiet,
we need to deny, we need to obfuskate. That was
the whole thing that they tried to do, and it
got as word got out, people started kind of castigating
(21:35):
the mayor in the city council. I saw that I
couldn't find the actual video, but I saw reference to
an episode of The Donahue Show, Phil Donahue, and he
had the mayor on Michael O'Laughlin and apparently Donahue compared
him to the mayor from Jaws only cared about keeping
the beaches open, which I thought was kind of apt.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
I can hear and visualize Donahue doing that with his
righteous indignation.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
I can imagine Phil Hartman doing Phil Donahue doing.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Man, God, what a loss. I think about Phil Hartman
about once a month.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
I feel like, well, there you go, there's your monthly reminder.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Yeah, so sad, we should do a show on him
at some point.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
It's a good idea.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
That'd be kind of awesome. So they got a health
commissioner doctor Francis Clifford, and he came along and he said,
you're all hypochondriacs. This is just an odoriferous nuisance. Really,
it's like you're just smoking a few cigarettes or something.
It's really no big deal here. If you have a basement,
you've got sludge and stuff. Here's a window fan on us. Yeah,
(22:41):
and that that should take care of it than us later.
And all of this is happening and being buried. And
we mentioned promise of a hero, and in steps a
remarkable human being named Lois Gibbs who lived in the area,
who had a no for other than a high school education.
(23:01):
Was it stay at home mom? But she knew what
was The writing was on her wall in black sludge,
and she knew what was happening and went to the
school board and was like, I don't want my son
going to the school. Yeah, I want to pull him
out of school. And they said no, no, no, no, no,
we can't do that because the word will get out,
everyone will freak and there won't be a school anymore.
(23:23):
And she said, well, I am, I'm a mad mom
and I'm not going to take it. So even though
I have no history of activism or organizing or anything.
I'm going to start. I'm going to get some other
parents together. I'm going to start the Love Canal Parents Movement,
which would become the Love Canal Homeowners Association, and we're
going to wreak havoc on your head through the breast.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
She said, close the beaches.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
So, yeah, I think Lois kids. I want to say, like,
she's an example of what a person can do when
they're left without choices and being ignored by the people
who are supposed to be helping them. But there's a
lot of people who would have just probably given up.
So she is remarkable in that sense for sure. So
she headed the Love Canal Homeowners' Association for a couple
(24:14):
of years. This thing went on for so the Blizzard
of seventy seven happened at the beginning of nineteen seventy seven.
Things really started to just kind of creep out in
seventy six. This went on until nineteen eighty and the
homeowners Association had to fight every day, tooth and nail
to get somebody to do something about this. And what
(24:37):
they had to do first was to show that these
complaints of congenital disorders of weird cancers, rectal bleeding apparently
more than one person had rectal bleeding. There, liver problems,
kidney problems. That this wasn't just like some random assemblage
(24:58):
of defective people want them put it like. This was
they were being poisoned by the toxic materials that were
flowing into their neighborhood from this overflowing toxic dump and
the bureaucracy, the city government did everything it could to
say no, your hypochondriacs, just sit down and shut up.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Yeah, until they couldn't it. Finally, because of the newspaper,
because of Lois Gibbs and the homeowners Association raised so
much hay, they finally said, all right, the state steps in.
The New York State Health Department launched an investigation in
nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah, they stepped in and they said, City of Niagrit,
we got this and winked at them.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yeah, exactly. So they did all kinds of testing to
the soil, to the air, did health histories and blood
tests and stuff of the residents, and you know, the
results were what you were kind of talking about, these
birth defects, the liver problems. I think the thirty five
percent of women had miscarriages, which is, you know, higher
(26:04):
than average. They say, you know, ten to twenty percent.
Some say up to twenty five to thirty percent of
pregnancies into miscarriages, but nothing goes as high as thirty five.
So that was a high number. And then finally, in
August of seventy eight, the state Health Commissioner Robert Whalen.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Robert Big Bob Whalen.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Said, a health emergency is being declared. If you are pregnant,
if you have kids under two, you should leave the area.
And this wasn't some you know, super upper class affluent area.
They couldn't just pack up and leave. So they were mad.
They were like, what do you expect us to do?
Speaker 2 (26:44):
What?
Speaker 1 (26:44):
We live here?
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Yeah, these were people who were tied to this area
by their mortgages. I saw the average income was between
ten and twenty five thousand dollars, which at the time
is like forty seven to one hundred and eighteen thousand today.
So it's like pretty squarely middle class, but not the
kind they can just be like, Okay, I'm walking away
from my mortgage right, here's my house bank. I'm just
(27:07):
going to go start life elsewhere. They couldn't do that.
They were stuck there with these houses that it was
becoming increasingly clear no one would want, which was a
huge problem. They were facing a catch twenty two. Nobody
was going to help them unless they got national attention
for this. But the more attention they got for it,
the more it was, the more they were sticking themselves
(27:29):
in this place until they got the help they needed,
because no one was going to come along and buy
your house after a very short time when worried about
Love Canal got out.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
That's right, But guess who did buy their house, Jimmy Carter.
It finally does become national news. The national TV networks
were all over it. They were doing reports from there.
With all these protests happening, Jimmy Carter steps in. He
declares a federal state of emergency and said, here's ten
(27:59):
million dollars we can relocate. We're going to buy up
your houses if you live within the first like the
first zone basically like that's closest to the canal.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Chuck, I'm sorry, and I'm sorry, I'm behalf of everyone listening.
You're really not gonna do a Jimmy Carter impression offering
to buy these people's houses.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Oh boy, I don't know if I've ever done Jimmy Carter,
I did. I was doing it when I was a kid.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
You have I've heard you have. I.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Oh. Now I'm on the spot and I'm missing a tooth.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Okay, all right, maybe he can come in later.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
This will be the first time. Now it's that good stuff.
It was the first time that federal emergency funds were
used in the United States and their history or our
history for something other than a natural disaster. So it
was a big, big deal that they stepped in then,
along with the help of New York State, when Governor
(28:57):
Carrey said, we're going to buy up two hundred and
thirty nine of these homes in the first couple of
rings around this landfill. We're going to close that school.
And also maybe don't eat those veggies or the herbs
you've been growing in your backyard.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
That was part of it. And also don't spend unnecessary
time in your basement. That was the other thing they said.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
So all the teenage boys were just like, oh man, so.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
That's that's pretty cool. First, the first two rings, so
people whose backyards were on top of essentially the waist
pit and then the people like maybe across the street
from them, like all the way around the Love Canal.
The US governor is like, we're going to buy your houses.
(29:39):
You can move now, you're fine. We're going to pay
you fair market value for them. And the two hundred
and thirty nine people were like yeah, okay, or two
hundred and thirty nine families.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
But still it was awful. I mean imagine being like, well,
all I got to leave my home now, Like sure,
someone's buying my house, but I didn't want to leave. No,
I work here.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
That's definitely part of it. For sure, there had to
be like a pretty decent sense of relief though at
least that was they weren't stuck anymore. But yeah, I'm
sure they didn't want to leave their community, or at
least some of them. But the problem was this. You
said that there was about eight hundred houses and a
whole apartment building that was in this Love Canal neighborhood,
(30:18):
and the people who are there were like, Okay, you
can't forget about us. We need help too. Like in
addition to like no one wanting to buy our houses
because we're so close to the Love Canal dump, we're
still suffering all sorts of health maladies as well, and
so the city goes back to their playbook and they're like,
(30:41):
there's no way you guys are actually suffering health maladies.
You're beyond the second ring of houses. You guys are fine,
You're just hypochondriacs. And the whole thing started all over again.
And I think, luckily for all the people who lived
in Love Canal that were left out of the eight hundred,
the fact that Lois Gibbs was among them, yeah, definitely
(31:02):
something mark in their favor for sure, because she was unstoppable.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
Yeah, she lived in that second zone, so she was
still there.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
So I say we take a break and then we
come back and talk a little more about what Lois did,
Lois Gibbs did, and who she got some help from.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Hint, hint, she didn't quit.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
So chuck. Now we reached the point where Love Canal
starts to really become national news because the federal government,
the state government, the local government, they're like, yeah, yeah,
problem solved. We moved the people who needed to, we
demolished their homes. It's all good, essentially, and this whole
group that was left behind that still needed help, we're like, no,
(32:11):
we're we're going to get louder than ever, essentially, and
a division grew in the community where in Love Canal
they were viewed outside of the neighborhood and the rest
of the city as basically labmounts, rebbel rousers, people who
were just out for like easy money from the federal
government and we're making up all these maladies at the
(32:31):
expense of the tourism industry and ticking off hooker. They
threatened the well being of the rest of the town
just by you know, being labmouths. And it was a
really seems like it would have been a really terrible
time to live in Niagara Falls.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Oh, I'm sure. And Lowe S. Gibbs is like, you
know what, I just bought one hundred bullhorns, that's right,
And they went no, no, no, no.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Yeah, And she was like, and I'm saving up for
the batteries.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
So the LHCA, headed by Lois Gibbs, brought in doctor
Beverly Pagan, scientists with the Health Department of New York.
They did their own door to door detailed questionnaire about
people's health. They analyzed the data, they found a lot
of the same problems, but what they really zeroed in
(33:22):
on were the fact that if you lived in what
they called a wet home, which was if you lived
near a creek or a swale or something, versus a
dry home that wasn't near a creek, then you were
much worse off. Twenty percent of the children born in
wet homes had birth defects compared to six point eight
percent in dry homes. The asthma rate was three and
(33:42):
a half times higher in wet homes. Suicide attempts were
higher in wet zones. And this is when they were dismissed.
I believe some of the authorities said it was useless
housewife data, which is a real bum in the eye
of Lois Gibb in the LHCA and doctor Pagan.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Yeah, just two things. So for reference, twenty percent of
children born in that area and the wet homes that
had congenital disorders compared to six point eight percent. Both
of those were way above the national average for nineteen
seventy eight of two point eight percent, so almost a lot.
(34:24):
That was a lot more. I was going to do
some math and I was like, don't do the math,
so I stopped. But the other the other thing I
wanted to just call out, was doctor Pagan. She was
doing this on her own time as a volunteer. She
was volunteering her expertise as a cancer researcher to come
up with the survey to figure out like the actual
(34:44):
data to basically show that you didn't have to be
living right on top of the dump to still be
suffering health effects. And she very cleverly figured out that
when they built the homes for the Love Canal neighborhood,
they covered up all sorts of old cre beds, old
swales that were now underground, but with the ground being saturated,
(35:05):
they were providing their old historic functions of moving water
through the neighborhood. So a plume of toxicity formed that
wasn't necessarily at the dump site any longer, it was
moving out into these areas that came to be known
as wet homes. And so she showed, now, these people
are really suffering as many effects as some of the
(35:28):
people whose houses were on top of the dump, and
they still need help. And she risked her career doing
that because she was a New York State Health inspector
and her organization had already basically closed the book on it.
And she was saying, we need to open this back
up because we were wrong, Like it's worse than we thought.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Right. So after two more years they finally get the
EPA down there, and this is, you know, two full
years of continued protesting. EPA comes in, They visit Love Canal,
they do their own blood test and chromosome test and
things like that, and it showed that there was you know,
what everyone else had shown. Basically, it wasn't useless housewife
(36:11):
data or hypochondria. And they got mad. They got so
mad that they took a couple of EPA officials hostage.
They said they're not going to release them until we're relocated.
Cooler heads prevailed. It only lasted about five hours. They
didn't arrest anybody, but it was it was a big deal,
brought a lot more attention to it. And in October
(36:33):
of nineteen eighty, just a few days after this hostage thing,
President Carter steps in again. It says, all right, here's
another twenty million dollars. New York is also going to
throw in twenty million dollars, and we're going to relocate everybody,
seven hundred remaining homes, everyone but two families. There's always
a couple that are like now not leaving. They stayed there,
(36:56):
but everyone else was relocated. In Congress passed the Comprehensive
Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act CIRCLA terrible, right, not great? Yeah,
that was in nineteen eighty They call it the Super
Fun Law, and that established a trust fund with the
EPA to clean up waste sites in the future and
(37:17):
establish a national priorities list, a superfund list in nineteen
eighty three that Love Canal was put squarely on.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Yeah, and then a decade or so later was used
to clean up David Hans's mom's potting shed.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
So that Super Fun Law. It came out days after,
no months after the hostage standoff, right, And I was like, okay,
that's pretty quick that, you know, there's surely this thing
had been kicking around Congress for a while and now
there was just an opportunity to push it through. Apparently
that's not true. That law that created the superfund was
(37:53):
essentially created in response to Love Canal and the protests
that the Love Canal Homeowners Association were staging. They created
this super fund. It like people didn't understand that toxic
waste could pollute the ground before this, and now all
of a sudden, the federal government has a comprehensive response
plan designed within months. Essentially that gives the EPA a
(38:16):
right to basically tax petroleum makers and plastic makers and
all that and put it into this trust fund to
help clean up sits in the future.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Amazing, It is amazing.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
It's you know, federal government at its finest. It's not
always great. I will be the well, probably not the
first to say it, but I will say it, but
this is an example of it doing right.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
Yeah, totally. So. The remediation took a long time. It
took a couple of decades, cost about three hundred and
fifty million bucks. They flattened all those homes, of course,
they did it. They sealed the landfill of the correct way,
which is with a three foot cap of clay water,
impermeable plastic, more top soil. They started diverting the groundwater
(39:02):
to a facility that treats it. They treat about five
million gallons of water a year. And they have about
one hundred monitoring wells all over the site that collect data,
you know, at all times to detect any chemical leakage
that might be happening if you're wondering about hook or
chemical if they were on the hook for any of this. Yes,
(39:23):
they eventually were. They were sued by the EPA themselves
in seventy nine. They settled in the nineteen nineties and
ended up between the federal government and New York State
repaying them about two hundred and twenty seven million dollars. Yeah,
which is kind of did not have to admit fault, No.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
No way, And you can make a kind of a
case that they didn't need to admit fault. You know, well,
I think enough about it.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
I think that means that insulates them from more lawsuits.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
Sure, no, absolutely, I don't think it was just based
on principles or anything like that. Yeah, but that's kind
of par for the course with super fun stuff where
the government says, Okay, we're going to pay for cleanup,
and then they go after the people who were responsible
for the waste in the first place and then sue
them and then over the course of a decade or two,
finally get some fraction of the amount of the cleanup costs.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
Yeah, they fret the cost essentially.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
Yeah, So love Canal neighborhoods still around today they call
it Black Creek. And you said the houses and Rings
one and two were demolished, they were actually pushed into
the pit or the waste was and then covered over.
So the houses are down there, the parts of them,
(40:39):
and they rehabbed and updated the houses that were left over,
and after the EPA said Okay, we've cleaned this place
up enough, you guys can move back in, the neighborhood
just got life breathed back into it again. And weirdly,
just like with as new people moved in and the
Love Canal neighborhood starting in the fifth ties and sixties,
(41:01):
not all of them were told that they were living
on a toxic waste stump and that a lot of
the information was lost for people. The same thing happened
the second go around. There was a New York Times
article that found like, there's people living there that have
no idea the history of this place, and that there's
still a toxic waste dump down there. Because that's something
worth pointing out, Chuck. They didn't remove the toxic waste,
(41:22):
They just covered it up better, oh yeah than it
was covered up before.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Yeah. So there have been lawsuits, There have been people
that still complain that moved back into Black Creek of
you know, some of the same issues there. I think
twenty lawsuits with seven hundred plaintiffs kind of in recent years,
and just last year in twenty twenty three, a state
judge dismissed a couple of the really big, high profile
cases for lack of evidence, which you know doesn't bode
(41:50):
well for lawsuits to follow. Obviously, as far as you know,
testing goes and whether or not there are really like
is still a real problem there. It's sort of conflicting
evidence inconclusive. I guess mortality rate is slightly elevated, but
within the normal range. Cancer rates are actually lower six
(42:12):
percent lower, but birth defects are twice as high as
other communities nearby.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
Yeah, and that sounds really weird, Like why would cancer
rates be lower? Apparently they're like the sample size of
this study is not huge, so we're not crazy about
the results essentially. But yeah, I guess it didn't turn
out quite as bad as people had thought, which is good.
But I mean tell that to the families who had
(42:40):
babies born with you know, congenital disorders and or died young.
You know, I mean, there's there was a lot of
damage done to people living there unfairly, and that's ultimately
the saddest legacy of it. There's a triumphant legacy to it.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Yeah, but there's that.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Will never, that will never put a clay cap over
the tragedy that I happened there too.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
Yeah. Well, I hope there's a statue of Lois Gibbs somewhere.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
I don't know that there is. But she went on
to found the Center for Health, Environment.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
And Justice, which is amazing.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
She got so many letters from her you know, national
high profile as a result of this, that she went
and was like, Okay, I'm going to start an organization
that helps small towns deal with this on their own
without her help. I'm Lois Gibbs.
Speaker 1 (43:28):
Yeah, She's like, I can make some real money off
of this.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
Yeah, she's so loaded. She wears floor length mink coats
and shows up in gold plated roles to all these
these neighborhood meetings.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
No, not my lowest Gibbs. I'm looking at pictures over now,
out there shouting in front of a building. I love it. Yep.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
If you want to know more about Love Canal or
Lois Gibbs or Beverly pagan or anything like that. You
can look all over the internet. There's a bunch of
great stuff to read. And since I said it's time
for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
I actually got one more thing, so pre listener mail.
Oh boy, okay, it felt like the perfect episode to
plug a friends project. One of my oldest friends, Dave Barnhardt,
is a documentary filmmaker who takes on projects that you
know need attention, like gun violence and things like that.
And he did a documentary called Flint, the Poisoning of
(44:27):
an American city of Flint, Michigan, of course, and you
should check it out. It's you go to Flint Poisoning
dot com is the website for the documentary. And David's great.
He's doing he's doing good work and he's a good guy.
So check out the trailer and see where you can
watch it.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Great shout out man, I'm glad you did that. Yeah,
I think Flint deserves its own Episodeah for sure.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
Yeah we should follow up on that.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
Uh if you already already said that, is it time
for listener mail?
Speaker 1 (44:57):
Yeah, yeah, I just I just thwarted.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Well, Jerry just put the chime.
Speaker 1 (45:03):
Hey guys, I want to let you know how much
my family loves stuff. As you know, my boys Evan
and Alex and my wife Rachel listen to you every
chance we get. It's the first thing we do in
the morning on the way to school. The kids want
to see if there's a new episode, and they think
you're the smartest people in the world. So imagine how
they are impressed when I their lowly dad found a mistake.
(45:24):
In your snake oil podcast, nice, you guys mentioned that
patent medicines or medicines protected by patents, which gives a
manufacturer exclusive right without having to disclose what's in it.
That's actually the opposite. Pattent's grant a limited right to
exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling
the invention or importing it. But in exchange, you have
(45:45):
to disclose the invention in a way that would enable
one skilled in the art to make or use the invention.
In other words, if a medicine is patented, you'd have
to say exactly what's in it and how you made it,
otherwise you wouldn't get a patent. And you guys know
this because you actually said that in your how Ip
Works episode, right, Yeah, And that is from David. And
(46:07):
you know what, David, I looked into that more and
you're right. But I also found out that ninety percent
of these patent medicines didn't even have patents. They were
just called patent medicines, all right. So that's from David Greenfield.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
Thanks a lot, David, much appreciated. If you want to
get in terms of this, like David did, you can
just send an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. So I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff
you should know. The I can't believe this happened, but
I can totally believe it.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Addition, Oh, I thought it was the Romantic Cruise in
the Gondola edition.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
I know you'd think so. By the name of it,
Love Canal.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Love Canal sounds so wonderful.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
For sure, it does. The love can No love canal
we're talking about today is not wonderful or nice at all.
Even before it was filled with toxic waste, it was
not so great to begin with.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Spoiler, Yeah, love.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Canals filled in toxic waste. As we'll see, Love Canal
was an incident in American history where America came to
grips with the idea that all the toxic waste it
had been burying for the last century, essentially, yeah, was
starting to intrude into the ground, and that there was
(01:09):
way more than just water pollution or air pollution. There
was such a thing as ground pollution, and all of
a sudden, all the toxic waste sites around the United
States suddenly seemed like ticking time bombs thanks to one
that actually went off.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
That's right, and supplementary material are do we do one
in super funds? I know we did one on brownfield remediation.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
That's the closest I think we came.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Okay, that was an old one though, But you know,
if you're into that kind of thing, or maybe landfills too.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, if you're a remediation fan, check it out.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
But for this one, we should go back in time, correct, Yeah,
let's go.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Back all the way back to the eighteen nineties. We're
gonna head on up north to Niagara Falls, New York.
Not just the falls, but the city. There's a city
called Niagara Falls, and it is where where you would
stay if you were honeymooning in Niagara Falls, which is
something that people did for a very long time.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Yeah, we also did one on going over Niagara Falls
and a barrel.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Totally did that. Feels like you're a fan of barrels,
check it out.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
That feels like one of those that had to be
like an early fifteen minute episode.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Oh I really think it was like on par with
more like five.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Okay, it was a long long time ago. Yeah, So
eighteen nineties. We are in Niagara. We look to our
right and we see a gentleman named William T. Love.
He says hello, he says hi. There. He's very excited
because he said, I've got an idea for you guys.
Niagara Falls is doing pretty great. Here's powering a bunch
of there's a bunch of industrial mills around. But I
(02:44):
have a vision that we can make this better. We
can build a model city if we just divert part
of this Niagara River over there on Lewiston Ridge. And
then he pointed that away whichever way that was sure,
and he said, we can double our hydro electric output
if we do that. It's just four miles down river,
(03:06):
and we can build this amazing neighborhood that has electricity
and telephone lines and anything you would want. And like
I said, we'll call it model city. And all you
got to do is let me build Love Canal. You
don't have to name it dat, right, but it'll be
seven miles long, eighty feet wide, and fifteen feet deep
and that's all we need to do.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Yeah. So he wanted to set up a new fall.
He wanted to create a man made or human made
waterfall to generate hydro electric power which would power this
amazing town that he was building. I mean, because that
was quite a draw electricity, telephones, gas lines, sewer lines
in the eighteen nineties, like he would have gotten free takers,
(03:46):
and he got some investors for sure. And also, in
what would become a long standing tradition, the city of
Niagara Falls gave this random person carte Blanc to exercise
eminent domain and take people's land to carve a canal
from the Niagara River to a different part, to divert
some of it, to just do some really serious stuff.
(04:06):
And he's he got a lot of people interested. But
two things happened that killed the model city plan of
William T. Love. First, the Panic of eighteen ninety three.
It was a huge economic meltdown in the eighteen nineties,
scared a lot of investors. They wanted sure things from
that point on. And then the second thing was Nikola
(04:28):
Tesla's He came up with the method of long distance
electrical transmission. The whole reason William T. Love wanted to
build this electro hydroelectro plant is because you needed close
by electrical generation to power stuff. Tesla said, you don't
need that anymore. So at that point, William T. Love
just threw up his hands and moved to I think,
(04:49):
on some rural part of Ontario.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
He went north. Yeah, very interesting. Seems like he goes
south after that.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
You would think so, but he didn't. He went north
and it was like, I can't remember. It was like
the name of the town was rats something. It was
not a pleasant place to be. But he left behind
a legacy of sorts, didn't he he did.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
He left behind you know, they got started on the
dam or I'm sorry, on the canal because I think
damn when I think hydro electricity. Look at me. Yeah,
not seven miles, but one mile of this thing had
been dug and so it's there. It's you know, I
don't know if it was the full eighty feet wide
(05:33):
and fifteen feet deep and a mile long, but it
was a huge, dug up swath of earth. And so
the city is like, all right, well, now we got
this here, I guess. You know, kids are swimming in
it in the summer and they're skating on it in
the other ten months out of the year. And in
the nineteen thirties a company came along the Hooker Electrochemical Company,
(05:54):
which made industrial chemicals and plastics and pesticides and all
kinds of stuff. And they said, I would like to
buy that land because we would like to or we
would like to buy that land because we would like
to do what everyone else does when they have toxic waste,
and that's bury it and steal drums. And that's a
You've already dug the hole for us, so exactly, you
(06:16):
did a lot of the work up front, and we'd
like to buy it so we can stick our drums
in there.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Yeah, William T. Love inadvertently dug out a trash pit. Yeah,
that the Hooker Company was like, heck, yeah, I looked
up the dimensions. I think it was something like three
thousand feet by ten feet deep by I think twenty
or something feet across, so it covered like sixteen acres essentially,
(06:40):
and that's a lot. You can fit a lot of
waste in a ten foot deep pit. Yeah, that's sixteen
acres total surface area. And they did. They ended up
so because they the Hooker Company, didn't make the products
that kill us. They made the ingredients that people put
into the products that kill us. So like they actually
created the dioxins and the PCBs and stuff that plastic
(07:03):
manufacturers and pesticide makers used in their products. So the
stuff they were throwing away as waste was as deadly
as it gets, essentially like just the most toxic of
toxic waste. But at the time people didn't realize that.
They knew you didn't want to be around it or
get it on your skin or breathe it in, but
they did not realize the extent of toxicity of some
(07:23):
of these things.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
No, not at all. And they ended up over a
nine year period bearing close to twenty two thousand tons
of this stuff in the Love canal, and like you said,
every toxic compound and dioxin and carcinogen you can think
of practically as in there. And like you were mentioning,
it wasn't you know, it wasn't like it is today. Obviously,
(07:45):
first of all, the fact that you could do that
at all, but the way they did it, you know,
if the lid popped off after it was in there,
they didn't send someone down there to seal that lid.
If one of the drums got cracked or something, they
didn't say, oh, well, let's get down there and get
that drum out of here and repair it or put
the waist in a new drum. They were just like,
it's probably fine. They're hosing their hands and clothes off
(08:08):
with the hoses of nearby neighbors, and all of a sudden,
you know, problems start happening kind of right away. You know,
groundwater is rising, some of these drums are rusting, and
stuff starts leaching pretty quickly. So they said, all right,
we've filled this thing about as full as we can
full it. Not just them, but I think like all
(08:28):
like local the City of Niagara was dumping stuff in there,
and like all kinds of people were dumping stuff, right.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
The Army dumped a bunch of stuff as well. It
was not just hooker, but they were far and away
the largest contributor to the toxic weights pit.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Yeah, for sure. So this thing gets full, they said,
all right, we got a sixteen acre landfill. Basically, we're
gonna cap it with some clay shovel about a foot
and a half atop soil on it and call it
a day. And here's what we'll do, City of Niagara.
We would like to sell it back to you just
for a dollar.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Yeah, the City of Niagara Falls, like Hookers is the
biggest employer there, right, So this seemed like a real,
like a benefactor type situation, like this company that that
was like caring for the community by employing all these people,
was also showing it cared for the community by basically
(09:20):
donating a decent sized chunk of land for the town
to build a new elementary school. And that's what the
town did with it.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Yeah, it is in.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
A certain ghoulish way, for sure. It's a laugh of irony,
not right exactly, So that's exactly what they did. The
City of Niagara Falls paid one dollar to Hooker, a
chemical company, and it took possession of this the swath
of land that contained this toxic waste pit, and gave
(09:49):
it to the Board of Education and said build a school.
And you might think that that is madness and that's nuts,
and that probably the Hooker company was trying to keep
all this underwrap, and apparently that is not the case. Hooker.
Even in the deed you can read the deed where
they transferred ownership of land to the city, it says like, hey,
(10:10):
there's waist down there and you don't want to touch it,
but you guys are taking possession of this stuff and
it's now your responsibility. So they weren't like trying to
pass off something that they knew was like a ticking
time bomb from everything I can tell. Instead, they were like,
we can't use this anymore. You guys should use it.
Just don't build anything with a basement nearby.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, I mean they did say we're not liable for
anything like that was definitely in the agreement. Yeah, but
they also like they literally brought members of the school
board out there and they dug holes, I think like
eight holes in the ground and said, look, this stuff
is four feet down. You can see these these barrels,
no basements, Like, don't do any underground piping, don't subdivide
(10:54):
it for homes, like you should not do that stuff.
But apparently the school board was broke they did it anyway,
So you know, the blood is on the hands of
the school board as well as the city and the
Hooker Chemical Company.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah, this is one of those things where like when
you read the histories of it in retrospect, like there's
clear heroes, there's clear villains, there is clear you know,
indifference that's just criminal, and all of that is true.
It does exist, but it's definitely more nuanced than that.
It's not nearly as clear cut as you know you
might read in a single article about Love Canal. And
(11:33):
that's part of it. Hooker takes a lot of the blame,
and part of it is definitely fairly, and part of
it is not at all fairly, for sure. But the
one group that seems to have really been just basically
the pits from any angle I can find is the
city of Niagara Falls. The managers who the mayor, the
city council. They just were not good. They were not
(11:56):
in any kind of position to take on what was
about to happen in the neighborhood that was now called
Love Canal that had build up around the school.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
I think that's a good spot for a break, Sure
it is. I mean it's kind of early, but I
mean that's as good as a Niagara Falls style cliffhangers
you can get. Right, people are hanging off of Lewiston Ridge.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Yeah, their barrels are just dangling from their toes.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
All right, we'll be right back then and tell you
what started happening pretty quickly after this. All right, So
(12:53):
we mentioned elementary school. What better to do on a
chemical waste stump there in Springfield than to build the
ninety ninth Street school. The school, if you look at
a map, was built right in the center of where
this landfill was.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Yeah, even just taking the toxic waste out of account,
the stability of the ground, it's like scary just looking
at like a hokey map of it.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
No, totally, I didn't even think about that, like foundationally,
it probably wasn't that you know, firm, you know.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
No.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
So they completed the school in nineteen fifty five. Even
though they said, hey, don't subdivide this for homes, They're like,
are you kidding me? People want to live near the school.
So the neighborhood that was known as Love Canal had
about eight hundred houses and about two hundred and forty apartments,
and right away I think this was all completed. The
(13:49):
school in fifty five. It's starting and like two or
three years later problems started happening. People were coming down
with physical symptoms that were horror.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Yeah. I think nineteen fifty eight some kids were taken
to the hospital for treatment of chemical burns. Yeah, that's
just a few years of the school opening. The following year,
a family called the Vorhis found that there was black
sludge seeping through their basement walls.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Took a horror movie.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Yeah, I mean, I think that's literally part of Amityville
Horror at the end, isn't there like black seeping through
the walls?
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Yeah, I mean, I think there's more than one movie
that does the old black sledge trick.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Well, this is where they got it was from the
families of Love Canal in the late fifties. There's another
thing I turned up. There were the kids in the
area loved to play with fire rocks that they found.
There was a kind of rock they found that if
you threw it in another rock or threw it at
a hard surface, sometimes they would explode catch fire. One
kid puts some of these fire rocks in his pockets
(14:53):
and ran home, and the friction caused the fire rocks
to catch fire and burn the kid quite badly, And
so of course people started to investigating. They're like those
chunks of white phosphorus and it should probably stop playing
with that.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
It was like that, Yeah, yeah, totally. The fire chief sent,
I believe, a report to the city manager of what
he said were obnoxious odors. Of course, we can apply
the sick rit scriptum because he meant noxious.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Sure, he also said it was irritating to the lungs
and we should probably do something about this. And that
was sixty four.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Yeah, and then all of a sudden, babies start being
born that have disfigurements, that have disabilities, deafness. This one
baby in the Schroeder family was born with a second
row of teeth, among other things. Really alarming stuff. So
flash forward, that's nineteen sixty eight. By the nineteen seventies,
(15:51):
people are just living there. It looks like a regular suburban,
you know, northeastern suburban neighborhood. Some of the residents may
have known about this that were in the know, but
probably not many of them. There was a lot of
series of winters in a row with like tons of rainfall,
tons of snow, tons of lakes freezing, and this all
(16:13):
just melts into that groundwater system and carries the stuff
even further through the groundwater system, and the canal itself
became so saturated that like these some of these barrels
started like rising up through the surface of the earth.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Yeah, and all the ones that were already open and
had been leaking over the years were now really spilling
their contents, and that stuff was being pushed up and
out of the relative safety of the canal the pit.
You know, now it wasn't even being held by the
canal any longer. It was like in the ground. This
(16:48):
was in people's backyards. There was a there was a
ball field nearby that I saw that. It swelled and
contracted like a bowl of gelatine whenever, whenever heavy equipment
drove a because it was so saturated and just ready
to pop. This is a baseball field. A pool popped
out of the ground and was floating on toxic chemicals.
(17:10):
Like pools of toxic sludge were starting to appear in
people's backyards because the ground was so saturated and there
was some really toxic stuff in the ground. So you
put those things together. All of a sudden, people's backyards
are toxic waste sites. And some, like you said, some
had no idea that that was there.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
By the seventies, yeah, absolutely, you know, all men are
Wildlife of course is dying. Trees are dying, landscaping is dying.
Back people are losing their hair, pets are losing their hair.
All of a sudden, there's you know, breathing problems, there's numbing,
there's fatigue, there's blood in people's stools, and eventually, in
(17:50):
nineteen seventy six, Niagara Gazette publishes the very first article
that says, Hey, this nightmare that's happening all around us,
by the way, has a reason behind it. And it's
because the love canal and Hooker chemical got together and
it's a toxic waste dump basically. Yeah, and a lot
of these residents are like for the very first time,
(18:12):
learning what's going on and probably going, oh, my god,
you know, so much of my life makes sense now.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Yeah, those fifty five gallon drums that were popping out
of the creek beds makes sense now. I understand it now.
But I mean it was so I think even the
people who were used to had grown up throwing fire
rocks at one another, and we're like used to the
idea that there's some weird stuff around. Maybe even knew
there was a dump site nearby. Yeah, this was now
(18:41):
in their backyard thanks to the blizzard of seventy seven
that dumped so much snow on that eventually trickled in
and then saturated the ground. It brought it into the sunlight,
and now there was just no denying it whatsoever. And
then the Niagara Gazette, like you said, brought it further
into the sunlight. So it was such an obvious problem
out of the gate that the City of Niagara hired
(19:04):
the Cowspan Corporation. They do all sorts of like freelance
testing and stuff, and they investigated. They went to some
of the basements that were emitting black sludge and checked
the sump pumps, and they did some air testing, and
they checked the sewer lines. And as the data started
to roll in while they were doing this testing, there
(19:26):
was a really dramatic moment where all of the Cowspan
people got in their cars and sped away as fast
as they could.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
In the movie, that's exactly what would happen. And then
they just like they throw a file out the window
and it slides to the feet of the mayor, and
in that file is the data which basically says Displace
is a disaster. The levels of toxic compounds is truly horrifying.
(19:54):
We're out of here. But nothing happened. They didn't disclose
the report, the findings from that report. The City of
Nagar didn't, so the drumbeat keeps happening from the Nagregazette
over the course of seventy seven seventy eight, they're still
doing these reports. No one is still doing anything because,
like you mentioned at the beginning, Hooker Chemical is still there.
(20:16):
There's still a huge employer for that town, and it's
a huge expense to clean this stuff up. So they
weren't eager to bring this like fully into the light
and say, all right, we got to do something about it.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
No, So the city had I saw what was described
as an incestuous relationship with Hooker Chemical. There was a
time where Hooker was suspected of leaking waste elsewhere in
the city, and so they hired Hooker Chemical to go
take samples and analyze it to find out if they
were that kind of stuff. In addition to not wanting
(20:53):
to tick off Hooker, they were also really worried about
tourism because, like I said, like this is a time
where if you honeymooned, and you you know, were working
class or middle class, you would you there's a good
chance you would travel to Niagara Falls and honeymoon there.
So tourism was a big part of their economy. We
(21:13):
didn't want to be like, come to Niagara Falls. We
got the falls and a toxic waste dump too. So
people are like, we need to keep this quiet. That
was the city's position. We need to keep this quiet,
we need to deny, we need to obfuskate. That was
the whole thing that they tried to do, and it
got as word got out, people started kind of castigating
(21:35):
the mayor in the city council. I saw that I
couldn't find the actual video, but I saw reference to
an episode of The Donahue Show, Phil Donahue, and he
had the mayor on Michael O'Laughlin and apparently Donahue compared
him to the mayor from Jaws only cared about keeping
the beaches open, which I thought was kind of apt.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
I can hear and visualize Donahue doing that with his
righteous indignation.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
I can imagine Phil Hartman doing Phil Donahue doing.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Man, God, what a loss. I think about Phil Hartman
about once a month.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
I feel like, well, there you go, there's your monthly reminder.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Yeah, so sad, we should do a show on him
at some point.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
It's a good idea.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
That'd be kind of awesome. So they got a health
commissioner doctor Francis Clifford, and he came along and he said,
you're all hypochondriacs. This is just an odoriferous nuisance. Really,
it's like you're just smoking a few cigarettes or something.
It's really no big deal here. If you have a basement,
you've got sludge and stuff. Here's a window fan on us. Yeah,
(22:41):
and that that should take care of it than us later.
And all of this is happening and being buried. And
we mentioned promise of a hero, and in steps a
remarkable human being named Lois Gibbs who lived in the area,
who had a no for other than a high school education.
(23:01):
Was it stay at home mom? But she knew what
was The writing was on her wall in black sludge,
and she knew what was happening and went to the
school board and was like, I don't want my son
going to the school. Yeah, I want to pull him
out of school. And they said no, no, no, no, no,
we can't do that because the word will get out,
everyone will freak and there won't be a school anymore.
(23:23):
And she said, well, I am, I'm a mad mom
and I'm not going to take it. So even though
I have no history of activism or organizing or anything.
I'm going to start. I'm going to get some other
parents together. I'm going to start the Love Canal Parents Movement,
which would become the Love Canal Homeowners Association, and we're
going to wreak havoc on your head through the breast.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
She said, close the beaches.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
So, yeah, I think Lois kids. I want to say, like,
she's an example of what a person can do when
they're left without choices and being ignored by the people
who are supposed to be helping them. But there's a
lot of people who would have just probably given up.
So she is remarkable in that sense for sure. So
she headed the Love Canal Homeowners' Association for a couple
(24:14):
of years. This thing went on for so the Blizzard
of seventy seven happened at the beginning of nineteen seventy seven.
Things really started to just kind of creep out in
seventy six. This went on until nineteen eighty and the
homeowners Association had to fight every day, tooth and nail
to get somebody to do something about this. And what
(24:37):
they had to do first was to show that these
complaints of congenital disorders of weird cancers, rectal bleeding apparently
more than one person had rectal bleeding. There, liver problems,
kidney problems. That this wasn't just like some random assemblage
(24:58):
of defective people want them put it like. This was
they were being poisoned by the toxic materials that were
flowing into their neighborhood from this overflowing toxic dump and
the bureaucracy, the city government did everything it could to
say no, your hypochondriacs, just sit down and shut up.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Yeah, until they couldn't it. Finally, because of the newspaper,
because of Lois Gibbs and the homeowners Association raised so
much hay, they finally said, all right, the state steps in.
The New York State Health Department launched an investigation in
nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah, they stepped in and they said, City of Niagrit,
we got this and winked at them.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yeah, exactly. So they did all kinds of testing to
the soil, to the air, did health histories and blood
tests and stuff of the residents, and you know, the
results were what you were kind of talking about, these
birth defects, the liver problems. I think the thirty five
percent of women had miscarriages, which is, you know, higher
(26:04):
than average. They say, you know, ten to twenty percent.
Some say up to twenty five to thirty percent of
pregnancies into miscarriages, but nothing goes as high as thirty five.
So that was a high number. And then finally, in
August of seventy eight, the state Health Commissioner Robert Whalen.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Robert Big Bob Whalen.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Said, a health emergency is being declared. If you are pregnant,
if you have kids under two, you should leave the area.
And this wasn't some you know, super upper class affluent area.
They couldn't just pack up and leave. So they were mad.
They were like, what do you expect us to do?
Speaker 2 (26:44):
What?
Speaker 1 (26:44):
We live here?
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Yeah, these were people who were tied to this area
by their mortgages. I saw the average income was between
ten and twenty five thousand dollars, which at the time
is like forty seven to one hundred and eighteen thousand today.
So it's like pretty squarely middle class, but not the
kind they can just be like, Okay, I'm walking away
from my mortgage right, here's my house bank. I'm just
(27:07):
going to go start life elsewhere. They couldn't do that.
They were stuck there with these houses that it was
becoming increasingly clear no one would want, which was a
huge problem. They were facing a catch twenty two. Nobody
was going to help them unless they got national attention
for this. But the more attention they got for it,
the more it was, the more they were sticking themselves
(27:29):
in this place until they got the help they needed,
because no one was going to come along and buy
your house after a very short time when worried about
Love Canal got out.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
That's right, But guess who did buy their house, Jimmy Carter.
It finally does become national news. The national TV networks
were all over it. They were doing reports from there.
With all these protests happening, Jimmy Carter steps in. He
declares a federal state of emergency and said, here's ten
(27:59):
million dollars we can relocate. We're going to buy up
your houses if you live within the first like the
first zone basically like that's closest to the canal.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Chuck, I'm sorry, and I'm sorry, I'm behalf of everyone listening.
You're really not gonna do a Jimmy Carter impression offering
to buy these people's houses.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Oh boy, I don't know if I've ever done Jimmy Carter,
I did. I was doing it when I was a kid.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
You have I've heard you have. I.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Oh. Now I'm on the spot and I'm missing a tooth.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Okay, all right, maybe he can come in later.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
This will be the first time. Now it's that good stuff.
It was the first time that federal emergency funds were
used in the United States and their history or our
history for something other than a natural disaster. So it
was a big, big deal that they stepped in then,
along with the help of New York State, when Governor
(28:57):
Carrey said, we're going to buy up two hundred and
thirty nine of these homes in the first couple of
rings around this landfill. We're going to close that school.
And also maybe don't eat those veggies or the herbs
you've been growing in your backyard.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
That was part of it. And also don't spend unnecessary
time in your basement. That was the other thing they said.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
So all the teenage boys were just like, oh man, so.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
That's that's pretty cool. First, the first two rings, so
people whose backyards were on top of essentially the waist
pit and then the people like maybe across the street
from them, like all the way around the Love Canal.
The US governor is like, we're going to buy your houses.
(29:39):
You can move now, you're fine. We're going to pay
you fair market value for them. And the two hundred
and thirty nine people were like yeah, okay, or two
hundred and thirty nine families.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
But still it was awful. I mean imagine being like, well,
all I got to leave my home now, Like sure,
someone's buying my house, but I didn't want to leave. No,
I work here.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
That's definitely part of it. For sure, there had to
be like a pretty decent sense of relief though at
least that was they weren't stuck anymore. But yeah, I'm
sure they didn't want to leave their community, or at
least some of them. But the problem was this. You
said that there was about eight hundred houses and a
whole apartment building that was in this Love Canal neighborhood,
(30:18):
and the people who are there were like, Okay, you
can't forget about us. We need help too. Like in
addition to like no one wanting to buy our houses
because we're so close to the Love Canal dump, we're
still suffering all sorts of health maladies as well, and
so the city goes back to their playbook and they're like,
(30:41):
there's no way you guys are actually suffering health maladies.
You're beyond the second ring of houses. You guys are fine,
You're just hypochondriacs. And the whole thing started all over again.
And I think, luckily for all the people who lived
in Love Canal that were left out of the eight hundred,
the fact that Lois Gibbs was among them, yeah, definitely
(31:02):
something mark in their favor for sure, because she was unstoppable.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
Yeah, she lived in that second zone, so she was
still there.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
So I say we take a break and then we
come back and talk a little more about what Lois did,
Lois Gibbs did, and who she got some help from.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Hint, hint, she didn't quit.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
So chuck. Now we reached the point where Love Canal
starts to really become national news because the federal government,
the state government, the local government, they're like, yeah, yeah,
problem solved. We moved the people who needed to, we
demolished their homes. It's all good, essentially, and this whole
group that was left behind that still needed help, we're like, no,
(32:11):
we're we're going to get louder than ever, essentially, and
a division grew in the community where in Love Canal
they were viewed outside of the neighborhood and the rest
of the city as basically labmounts, rebbel rousers, people who
were just out for like easy money from the federal
government and we're making up all these maladies at the
(32:31):
expense of the tourism industry and ticking off hooker. They
threatened the well being of the rest of the town
just by you know, being labmouths. And it was a
really seems like it would have been a really terrible
time to live in Niagara Falls.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Oh, I'm sure. And Lowe S. Gibbs is like, you
know what, I just bought one hundred bullhorns, that's right,
And they went no, no, no, no.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Yeah, And she was like, and I'm saving up for
the batteries.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
So the LHCA, headed by Lois Gibbs, brought in doctor
Beverly Pagan, scientists with the Health Department of New York.
They did their own door to door detailed questionnaire about
people's health. They analyzed the data, they found a lot
of the same problems, but what they really zeroed in
(33:22):
on were the fact that if you lived in what
they called a wet home, which was if you lived
near a creek or a swale or something, versus a
dry home that wasn't near a creek, then you were
much worse off. Twenty percent of the children born in
wet homes had birth defects compared to six point eight
percent in dry homes. The asthma rate was three and
(33:42):
a half times higher in wet homes. Suicide attempts were
higher in wet zones. And this is when they were dismissed.
I believe some of the authorities said it was useless
housewife data, which is a real bum in the eye
of Lois Gibb in the LHCA and doctor Pagan.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Yeah, just two things. So for reference, twenty percent of
children born in that area and the wet homes that
had congenital disorders compared to six point eight percent. Both
of those were way above the national average for nineteen
seventy eight of two point eight percent, so almost a lot.
(34:24):
That was a lot more. I was going to do
some math and I was like, don't do the math,
so I stopped. But the other the other thing I
wanted to just call out, was doctor Pagan. She was
doing this on her own time as a volunteer. She
was volunteering her expertise as a cancer researcher to come
up with the survey to figure out like the actual
(34:44):
data to basically show that you didn't have to be
living right on top of the dump to still be
suffering health effects. And she very cleverly figured out that
when they built the homes for the Love Canal neighborhood,
they covered up all sorts of old cre beds, old
swales that were now underground, but with the ground being saturated,
(35:05):
they were providing their old historic functions of moving water
through the neighborhood. So a plume of toxicity formed that
wasn't necessarily at the dump site any longer, it was
moving out into these areas that came to be known
as wet homes. And so she showed, now, these people
are really suffering as many effects as some of the
(35:28):
people whose houses were on top of the dump, and
they still need help. And she risked her career doing
that because she was a New York State Health inspector
and her organization had already basically closed the book on it.
And she was saying, we need to open this back
up because we were wrong, Like it's worse than we thought.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Right. So after two more years they finally get the
EPA down there, and this is, you know, two full
years of continued protesting. EPA comes in, They visit Love Canal,
they do their own blood test and chromosome test and
things like that, and it showed that there was you know,
what everyone else had shown. Basically, it wasn't useless housewife
(36:11):
data or hypochondria. And they got mad. They got so
mad that they took a couple of EPA officials hostage.
They said they're not going to release them until we're relocated.
Cooler heads prevailed. It only lasted about five hours. They
didn't arrest anybody, but it was it was a big deal,
brought a lot more attention to it. And in October
(36:33):
of nineteen eighty, just a few days after this hostage thing,
President Carter steps in again. It says, all right, here's
another twenty million dollars. New York is also going to
throw in twenty million dollars, and we're going to relocate everybody,
seven hundred remaining homes, everyone but two families. There's always
a couple that are like now not leaving. They stayed there,
(36:56):
but everyone else was relocated. In Congress passed the Comprehensive
Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act CIRCLA terrible, right, not great? Yeah,
that was in nineteen eighty They call it the Super
Fun Law, and that established a trust fund with the
EPA to clean up waste sites in the future and
(37:17):
establish a national priorities list, a superfund list in nineteen
eighty three that Love Canal was put squarely on.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Yeah, and then a decade or so later was used
to clean up David Hans's mom's potting shed.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
So that Super Fun Law. It came out days after,
no months after the hostage standoff, right, And I was like, okay,
that's pretty quick that, you know, there's surely this thing
had been kicking around Congress for a while and now
there was just an opportunity to push it through. Apparently
that's not true. That law that created the superfund was
(37:53):
essentially created in response to Love Canal and the protests
that the Love Canal Homeowners Association were staging. They created
this super fund. It like people didn't understand that toxic
waste could pollute the ground before this, and now all
of a sudden, the federal government has a comprehensive response
plan designed within months. Essentially that gives the EPA a
(38:16):
right to basically tax petroleum makers and plastic makers and
all that and put it into this trust fund to
help clean up sits in the future.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Amazing, It is amazing.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
It's you know, federal government at its finest. It's not
always great. I will be the well, probably not the
first to say it, but I will say it, but
this is an example of it doing right.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
Yeah, totally. So. The remediation took a long time. It
took a couple of decades, cost about three hundred and
fifty million bucks. They flattened all those homes, of course,
they did it. They sealed the landfill of the correct way,
which is with a three foot cap of clay water,
impermeable plastic, more top soil. They started diverting the groundwater
(39:02):
to a facility that treats it. They treat about five
million gallons of water a year. And they have about
one hundred monitoring wells all over the site that collect data,
you know, at all times to detect any chemical leakage
that might be happening if you're wondering about hook or
chemical if they were on the hook for any of this. Yes,
(39:23):
they eventually were. They were sued by the EPA themselves
in seventy nine. They settled in the nineteen nineties and
ended up between the federal government and New York State
repaying them about two hundred and twenty seven million dollars. Yeah,
which is kind of did not have to admit fault, No.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
No way, And you can make a kind of a
case that they didn't need to admit fault. You know, well,
I think enough about it.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
I think that means that insulates them from more lawsuits.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
Sure, no, absolutely, I don't think it was just based
on principles or anything like that. Yeah, but that's kind
of par for the course with super fun stuff where
the government says, Okay, we're going to pay for cleanup,
and then they go after the people who were responsible
for the waste in the first place and then sue
them and then over the course of a decade or two,
finally get some fraction of the amount of the cleanup costs.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
Yeah, they fret the cost essentially.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
Yeah, So love Canal neighborhoods still around today they call
it Black Creek. And you said the houses and Rings
one and two were demolished, they were actually pushed into
the pit or the waste was and then covered over.
So the houses are down there, the parts of them,
(40:39):
and they rehabbed and updated the houses that were left over,
and after the EPA said Okay, we've cleaned this place
up enough, you guys can move back in, the neighborhood
just got life breathed back into it again. And weirdly,
just like with as new people moved in and the
Love Canal neighborhood starting in the fifth ties and sixties,
(41:01):
not all of them were told that they were living
on a toxic waste stump and that a lot of
the information was lost for people. The same thing happened
the second go around. There was a New York Times
article that found like, there's people living there that have
no idea the history of this place, and that there's
still a toxic waste dump down there. Because that's something
worth pointing out, Chuck. They didn't remove the toxic waste,
(41:22):
They just covered it up better, oh yeah than it
was covered up before.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Yeah. So there have been lawsuits, There have been people
that still complain that moved back into Black Creek of
you know, some of the same issues there. I think
twenty lawsuits with seven hundred plaintiffs kind of in recent years,
and just last year in twenty twenty three, a state
judge dismissed a couple of the really big, high profile
cases for lack of evidence, which you know doesn't bode
(41:50):
well for lawsuits to follow. Obviously, as far as you know,
testing goes and whether or not there are really like
is still a real problem there. It's sort of conflicting
evidence inconclusive. I guess mortality rate is slightly elevated, but
within the normal range. Cancer rates are actually lower six
(42:12):
percent lower, but birth defects are twice as high as
other communities nearby.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
Yeah, and that sounds really weird, Like why would cancer
rates be lower? Apparently they're like the sample size of
this study is not huge, so we're not crazy about
the results essentially. But yeah, I guess it didn't turn
out quite as bad as people had thought, which is good.
But I mean tell that to the families who had
(42:40):
babies born with you know, congenital disorders and or died young.
You know, I mean, there's there was a lot of
damage done to people living there unfairly, and that's ultimately
the saddest legacy of it. There's a triumphant legacy to it.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Yeah, but there's that.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Will never, that will never put a clay cap over
the tragedy that I happened there too.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
Yeah. Well, I hope there's a statue of Lois Gibbs somewhere.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
I don't know that there is. But she went on
to found the Center for Health, Environment.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
And Justice, which is amazing.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
She got so many letters from her you know, national
high profile as a result of this, that she went
and was like, Okay, I'm going to start an organization
that helps small towns deal with this on their own
without her help. I'm Lois Gibbs.
Speaker 1 (43:28):
Yeah, She's like, I can make some real money off
of this.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
Yeah, she's so loaded. She wears floor length mink coats
and shows up in gold plated roles to all these
these neighborhood meetings.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
No, not my lowest Gibbs. I'm looking at pictures over now,
out there shouting in front of a building. I love it. Yep.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
If you want to know more about Love Canal or
Lois Gibbs or Beverly pagan or anything like that. You
can look all over the internet. There's a bunch of
great stuff to read. And since I said it's time
for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
I actually got one more thing, so pre listener mail.
Oh boy, okay, it felt like the perfect episode to
plug a friends project. One of my oldest friends, Dave Barnhardt,
is a documentary filmmaker who takes on projects that you
know need attention, like gun violence and things like that.
And he did a documentary called Flint, the Poisoning of
(44:27):
an American city of Flint, Michigan, of course, and you
should check it out. It's you go to Flint Poisoning
dot com is the website for the documentary. And David's great.
He's doing he's doing good work and he's a good guy.
So check out the trailer and see where you can
watch it.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Great shout out man, I'm glad you did that. Yeah,
I think Flint deserves its own Episodeah for sure.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
Yeah we should follow up on that.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
Uh if you already already said that, is it time
for listener mail?
Speaker 1 (44:57):
Yeah, yeah, I just I just thwarted.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Well, Jerry just put the chime.
Speaker 1 (45:03):
Hey guys, I want to let you know how much
my family loves stuff. As you know, my boys Evan
and Alex and my wife Rachel listen to you every
chance we get. It's the first thing we do in
the morning on the way to school. The kids want
to see if there's a new episode, and they think
you're the smartest people in the world. So imagine how
they are impressed when I their lowly dad found a mistake.
(45:24):
In your snake oil podcast, nice, you guys mentioned that
patent medicines or medicines protected by patents, which gives a
manufacturer exclusive right without having to disclose what's in it.
That's actually the opposite. Pattent's grant a limited right to
exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling
the invention or importing it. But in exchange, you have
(45:45):
to disclose the invention in a way that would enable
one skilled in the art to make or use the invention.
In other words, if a medicine is patented, you'd have
to say exactly what's in it and how you made it,
otherwise you wouldn't get a patent. And you guys know
this because you actually said that in your how Ip
Works episode, right, Yeah, And that is from David. And
(46:07):
you know what, David, I looked into that more and
you're right. But I also found out that ninety percent
of these patent medicines didn't even have patents. They were
just called patent medicines, all right. So that's from David Greenfield.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
Thanks a lot, David, much appreciated. If you want to
get in terms of this, like David did, you can
just send an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
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