A history of the Love Canal region from the nation's founding and the utopian city planned for the Niagara area to the building of the region's chemistry industry to the environmental disaster at Love Canal and its aftermath.
Love Canal--a community poisoned by toxic waste. Borrowing the multi-viewpoint technique of the classic Japanese film RASHOMON, sociologist/engineer Allan Mazur reveals that there are many--often conflicting--versions of what occurred at Love Canal. His collection of gripping personal tales tells how politics, journalism, and epidemiology often clash, when confronting a potential community disaster.
Historical snapshots of the Love Canal area -- Gender at Love Canal -- Race at Love Canal -- Class at Love Canal -- Historical implications of gender, race, and class at Love Canal
Love Canal originated in 1894 as part of William T. Love's dream to build a model city and power canal. The neighborhood emerged in the 1970s as an environmental nightmare and harbinger of the worldwide hazardous waste crisis. Photographs in Love Canal tell the story of the community's early development and the subsequent use of the canal by Hooker Electrochemical Company to discard industrial chemical waste from 1942 to 1953. In the late 1970s, the seemingly dormant dump began to leak, and residents found themselves in a slowly unfolding nightmare, learning that the waste dumped in the canal decades before was not simply garbage but actually a toxic brew of dangerous chemicals that were hazardous to life, health, and property.
A Niagara Falls, N.Y., reporter uncovered the Love Canal toxic waste scandal in 1978, and now relates tales of thousands of chemical dumps that contaminate waters, soil and air in the United States.
Today, “Love Canal” is synonymous with the struggle for environmental health and justice. But in 1972, when Lois Gibbs moved there with her husband and new baby, it was simply a modest neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York. How did this community become the poster child for toxic disasters? How did Gibbs and her neighbors start a national movement that continues to this day? What do their efforts teach us about current environmental health threats and how to prevent them? Love Canal is Gibbs’ original account of the landmark case, now updated with insights gained over three decades.
When residents moved into the neighborhood of Love Canal in the 1950s, no one knew that their homes were built on top of a toxic waste dump. By the 1970s, fould-smelling slime began seeping through basement walls, trees began to wither and die, and complaints of stomach ailments, headaches, and even birth defects increased. This book explores the roots of the tragedy.
The young housewife who organized the residents of the Love Canal neighborhood to publicize their plight and protest to state and federal officials describes how she persuaded government officials to act
The staggering story of an unlikely band of mothers in the 1970s who discovered Hooker Chemical's deadly secret of Love Canal—exposing one of America’s most devastating toxic waste disasters and sparking the modern environmental movement as we know it today. “Propulsive...A mighty work of historical journalism...A glorious quotidian thriller about people forced to find and use their inner strength.” —The Boston Globe Lois Gibbs, Luella Kenny, and other mothers loved their neighborhood on the east side of Niagara Falls. It had an elementary school, a playground, and rows of affordable homes. But in the spring of 1977, pungent odors began to seep into these little houses, and it didn’t take long for worried mothers to identify the curious scent. It was the sickly sweet smell of chemicals. In this propulsive work of narrative storytelling, NYT journalist Keith O’Brien uncovers how Gibbs and Kenny exposed the poisonous secrets buried in their neighborhood. The school and playground had been built atop an old canal—Love Canal, it was called—that Hooker Chemical, the city’s largest employer, had quietly filled with twenty thousand tons of toxic waste in the 1940s and 1950s. This waste was now leaching to the surface, causing a public health crisis the likes of which America had never seen before and sparking new and specific fears. Luella Kenny believed the chemicals were making her son sick. O’Brien braids together previously unknown stories of Hooker Chemical’s deeds; the local newspaperman, scientist, and congressional staffer who tried to help; the city and state officials who didn’t; and the heroic women who stood up to corporate and governmental indifference to save their families and their children. They would take their fight all the way to the top, winning support from the EPA, the White House, and even President Jimmy Carter. By the time it was over, they would capture America’s imagination. Sweeping and electrifying, Paradise Falls brings to life a defining story from our past, laying bare the dauntless efforts of a few women who—years before Erin Brockovich took up the mantle— fought to rescue their community and their lives from the effects of corporate pollution and laid foundation for the modern environmental movement as we know it today.