0:01

Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production

0:04

of iHeartRadio.

0:11

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. So I'm Josh, and

0:13

there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this

0:15

is stuff you should know. The

0:18

I can't believe this happened, but I can totally

0:20

believe it.

0:21

Addition, Oh, I thought it was the

0:23

Romantic Cruise in

0:26

the Gondola edition.

0:28

I know you'd think so. By the name of it, Love

0:30

Canal.

0:30

Love Canal sounds so wonderful.

0:33

For sure, it does. The love

0:35

can No love canal we're talking about

0:37

today is not wonderful or nice at all. Even

0:40

before it was filled with toxic waste, it was not

0:43

so great to begin with.

0:45

Spoiler, Yeah, love.

0:48

Canals filled in toxic waste. As

0:50

we'll see, Love Canal was an

0:52

incident in American history where

0:55

America came to grips with the

0:57

idea that all the toxic waste

1:00

it had been burying for the last century,

1:02

essentially, yeah, was

1:06

starting to intrude into the

1:08

ground, and that there was way more than just water

1:10

pollution or air pollution. There was such

1:12

a thing as ground pollution, and all of a sudden,

1:15

all the toxic waste sites around the United

1:17

States suddenly seemed like ticking time bombs thanks

1:19

to one that actually went off.

1:22

That's right, and supplementary

1:25

material are do

1:27

we do one in super funds? I know we did one on brownfield

1:29

remediation.

1:31

That's the closest I think we came.

1:33

Okay, that was an old one though, But you

1:35

know, if you're into that kind of thing, or maybe

1:37

landfills too.

1:39

Yeah, if you're a remediation fan, check

1:41

it out.

1:43

But for this one, we should go back in time, correct,

1:46

Yeah, let's go.

1:47

Back all the way back to the

1:49

eighteen nineties. We're gonna

1:51

head on up north to Niagara

1:53

Falls, New York. Not just the

1:56

falls, but the city. There's a city called

1:58

Niagara Falls, and it is where where

2:00

you would stay if you were honeymooning

2:02

in Niagara Falls, which is something

2:04

that people did for a very long time.

2:06

Yeah, we also did one on going over Niagara

2:09

Falls and a barrel.

2:10

Totally did that. Feels like you're a fan of barrels,

2:13

check it out.

2:13

That feels like one of those that had

2:15

to be like an early fifteen minute episode.

2:18

Oh I really think it was like on par

2:20

with more like five.

2:21

Okay, it was a long long time ago. Yeah,

2:24

So eighteen nineties. We are in

2:26

Niagara. We look to our right and we

2:29

see a gentleman named William T. Love.

2:32

He says hello, he says hi. There. He's very

2:34

excited because he said, I've got an idea for

2:36

you guys. Niagara Falls is

2:38

doing pretty great. Here's powering a bunch

2:40

of there's a bunch of industrial mills

2:42

around. But I have a vision

2:45

that we can make this better. We can build

2:48

a model city if we just divert

2:51

part of this Niagara River over

2:54

there on Lewiston Ridge. And then he pointed

2:56

that away whichever way that was sure,

2:59

and he said, we can double our hydro

3:01

electric output if we do that.

3:04

It's just four miles down river, and

3:06

we can build this amazing neighborhood

3:08

that has electricity and telephone

3:11

lines and anything you would

3:13

want. And like I said, we'll call it model city.

3:15

And all you got to do is let me build Love

3:18

Canal. You don't have to name it dat, right,

3:21

but it'll be seven miles long, eighty feet

3:23

wide, and fifteen feet deep and that's all we need

3:25

to do.

3:26

Yeah. So he wanted to set up a new fall.

3:28

He wanted to create a man made or human made

3:30

waterfall to generate hydro

3:32

electric power which would power this

3:35

amazing town that

3:37

he was building. I mean, because that

3:39

was quite a draw electricity, telephones,

3:42

gas lines, sewer lines in the eighteen nineties,

3:44

like he would have gotten free takers,

3:46

and he got some investors for sure. And

3:48

also, in what would become a long standing

3:51

tradition, the city of Niagara Falls

3:53

gave this random person carte Blanc

3:55

to exercise eminent domain and

3:57

take people's land to carve

4:00

a canal from the Niagara River to a

4:02

different part, to divert some of it, to

4:04

just do some really serious stuff. And

4:07

he's he got a lot of people interested.

4:10

But two things happened that killed

4:12

the model city plan of William T.

4:14

Love. First, the Panic

4:17

of eighteen ninety three. It was a huge

4:19

economic meltdown in the eighteen nineties,

4:22

scared a lot of investors. They wanted sure things

4:24

from that point on. And then

4:26

the second thing was Nikola Tesla's He

4:29

came up with the method of long distance

4:32

electrical transmission. The whole

4:34

reason William T. Love wanted to build this electro

4:37

hydroelectro plant is because you needed

4:39

close by electrical generation to power

4:42

stuff. Tesla said, you don't need that

4:44

anymore. So at that point, William T.

4:46

Love just threw up his hands and moved to I

4:49

think, on some rural

4:51

part of Ontario.

4:52

He went north. Yeah, very interesting.

4:55

Seems like he goes south after that.

4:57

You would think so, but he didn't. He went

4:59

north and it was like, I

5:01

can't remember. It was like the name

5:04

of the town was rats something. It

5:06

was not a pleasant place to be. But

5:09

he left behind a legacy of sorts, didn't

5:11

he he did.

5:12

He left behind you know, they got started

5:14

on the dam or I'm sorry, on the canal

5:18

because I think damn when I think hydro electricity.

5:20

Look at me. Yeah,

5:23

not seven miles, but one mile of

5:26

this thing had been dug and

5:28

so it's there. It's you

5:30

know, I don't know if it was the full eighty

5:32

feet wide and fifteen feet deep and a mile

5:35

long, but it was a huge, dug

5:37

up swath of earth. And so

5:39

the city is like, all right, well, now we got this here,

5:41

I guess. You know, kids are swimming

5:44

in it in the summer and they're skating on it in

5:46

the other ten months out of the year. And

5:50

in the nineteen thirties a company came along

5:52

the Hooker Electrochemical Company, which

5:54

made industrial chemicals and

5:57

plastics and pesticides and all kinds of stuff.

6:00

And they said, I would like to buy that

6:02

land because we would like to or

6:04

we would like to buy that land because we would like to

6:07

do what everyone else does when they have toxic

6:09

waste, and that's bury it and steal

6:12

drums. And that's a You've already

6:14

dug the hole for us, so exactly, you did

6:16

a lot of the work up front, and we'd like to buy it so

6:18

we can stick our drums in there.

6:20

Yeah, William T. Love inadvertently dug

6:23

out a trash pit. Yeah,

6:26

that the Hooker Company was like, heck, yeah,

6:28

I looked up the dimensions. I think it was something

6:30

like three thousand feet by ten feet

6:32

deep by I think twenty or something

6:35

feet across, so it covered

6:37

like sixteen acres essentially,

6:40

and that's a lot. You can fit a lot of waste in

6:42

a ten foot deep pit. Yeah, that's

6:44

sixteen acres total surface area.

6:47

And they did. They ended up so because

6:49

they the Hooker Company,

6:51

didn't make the products that kill us.

6:54

They made the ingredients that people put

6:56

into the products that kill us. So

6:59

like they actually created the dioxins

7:01

and the PCBs and stuff that plastic manufacturers

7:04

and pesticide makers used in their

7:06

products. So the stuff they were throwing

7:08

away as waste was as deadly as

7:11

it gets, essentially like just the most

7:13

toxic of toxic waste. But at

7:15

the time people didn't realize that. They knew you didn't

7:17

want to be around it or get it on your skin or breathe

7:19

it in, but they did not realize

7:21

the extent of toxicity of some of

7:23

these things.

7:24

No, not at all. And they ended up over a nine

7:26

year period bearing close

7:29

to twenty two thousand tons of this stuff

7:31

in the Love canal, and like you

7:33

said, every toxic compound

7:35

and dioxin and carcinogen

7:38

you can think of practically as in there. And

7:41

like you were mentioning, it wasn't you know, it

7:43

wasn't like it is today. Obviously, first

7:45

of all, the fact that you could do that at all, but

7:48

the way they did it, you know, if the lid popped

7:50

off after it was in there, they didn't

7:52

send someone down there to seal that lid.

7:55

If one of the drums got cracked

7:57

or something, they didn't say, oh, well, let's get down

7:59

there and get that drum out of here and repair it or

8:02

put the waist in a new drum. They were just

8:04

like, it's probably fine. They're hosing

8:06

their hands and clothes off with the

8:09

hoses of nearby neighbors, and

8:12

all of a sudden, you know, problems

8:14

start happening kind of right away. You know, groundwater

8:16

is rising, some of these drums are rusting,

8:19

and stuff starts leaching pretty quickly.

8:22

So they said, all right, we've filled this thing about

8:24

as full as we can full it.

8:26

Not just them, but I think like all like local

8:29

the City of Niagara was dumping stuff in there, and like

8:31

all kinds of people were dumping stuff, right.

8:33

The Army dumped a bunch of stuff as well. It was

8:35

not just hooker, but they were far and away

8:38

the largest contributor to the toxic

8:40

weights pit.

8:41

Yeah, for sure. So this thing gets full, they

8:44

said, all right, we got a sixteen acre landfill.

8:46

Basically, we're gonna cap it with some

8:48

clay shovel about a foot

8:50

and a half atop soil on it and call

8:52

it a day. And here's what we'll do, City

8:54

of Niagara. We would like to

8:56

sell it back to you just for a dollar.

9:00

Yeah, the City of Niagara Falls,

9:03

like Hookers is the biggest

9:07

employer there, right, So this seemed

9:09

like a real, like a benefactor type

9:11

situation, like this company

9:13

that that was like caring for

9:15

the community by employing all these people,

9:18

was also showing it cared for the community by basically

9:20

donating a decent sized chunk

9:22

of land for the town to build a new

9:24

elementary school. And

9:27

that's what the town did with it.

9:28

Yeah, it is in.

9:29

A certain ghoulish way, for sure. It's

9:32

a laugh of irony, not right exactly,

9:35

So that's exactly what they

9:37

did. The City of Niagara Falls paid one dollar

9:39

to Hooker, a chemical company, and

9:43

it took possession of this

9:45

the swath of land that contained this toxic

9:48

waste pit, and gave it to

9:50

the Board of Education and said build a school. And

9:53

you might think that that is madness and that's

9:55

nuts, and that probably the Hooker company

9:58

was trying to keep all this underwrap,

10:00

and apparently that is not the case.

10:03

Hooker. Even in the deed you can read

10:05

the deed where they transferred ownership

10:08

of land to the city, it says

10:10

like, hey, there's waist down there and you don't

10:12

want to touch it, but you guys are taking

10:14

possession of this stuff and it's now your responsibility.

10:17

So they weren't like trying to pass off

10:20

something that they knew was like a ticking time bomb

10:22

from everything I can tell. Instead, they

10:24

were like, we can't use this anymore. You guys

10:26

should use it. Just don't build anything with

10:28

a basement nearby.

10:30

Yeah, I mean they did

10:32

say we're not liable for anything like

10:35

that was definitely in the agreement. Yeah,

10:37

but they also like they literally brought members

10:39

of the school board out there and

10:41

they dug holes, I think like eight holes

10:43

in the ground and said, look, this stuff

10:46

is four feet down. You can see

10:48

these these barrels, no basements,

10:50

Like, don't do any underground piping, don't

10:53

subdivide it for homes, like

10:56

you should not do that stuff. But apparently

10:59

the school board was broke they

11:01

did it anyway, So you know, the blood

11:04

is on the hands of the

11:07

school board as well as the city and the Hooker

11:09

Chemical Company.

11:11

Yeah, this is one of those things where like

11:14

when you read the histories of it in retrospect,

11:16

like there's clear heroes, there's clear villains,

11:19

there is clear you know, indifference

11:21

that's just criminal, and

11:23

all of that is true. It does exist,

11:26

but it's definitely more nuanced than that. It's

11:28

not nearly as clear cut as

11:30

you know you might read in a single article about

11:32

Love Canal. And that's part of it. Hooker

11:34

takes a lot of the blame, and part of it is

11:36

definitely fairly, and part of it is not

11:39

at all fairly, for sure. But the one

11:41

group that seems to have really

11:43

been just basically

11:46

the pits from any angle

11:48

I can find is the city

11:50

of Niagara Falls. The managers who the

11:52

mayor, the city council. They

11:54

just were not good. They were not in any kind

11:57

of position to take on what was about to happen

11:59

in the neighborhood that was now called Love

12:01

Canal that had build up around the

12:03

school.

12:04

I think that's a good spot for a break, Sure

12:07

it is. I mean it's kind of early, but I mean

12:09

that's as good as a Niagara Falls

12:11

style cliffhangers you can get. Right,

12:14

people are hanging off of Lewiston Ridge.

12:16

Yeah, their barrels are just dangling from

12:18

their toes.

12:18

All right, we'll be right back then and tell

12:21

you what started happening pretty quickly after

12:23

this. All

12:52

right, So we mentioned elementary

12:54

school. What better to

12:57

do on a chemical waste stump

13:00

there in Springfield than to build the ninety ninth

13:02

Street school. The

13:04

school, if you look at a map, was

13:07

built right in the center of

13:10

where this landfill was.

13:12

Yeah, even just taking the toxic

13:14

waste out of account, the stability

13:17

of the ground, it's like scary

13:19

just looking at like a hokey map of

13:22

it.

13:22

No, totally, I didn't even think about that, like

13:25

foundationally, it probably wasn't that you know, firm,

13:27

you know.

13:27

No.

13:28

So they completed the school in nineteen fifty five.

13:31

Even though they said, hey, don't subdivide

13:33

this for homes, They're like, are you kidding me?

13:36

People want to live near the school. So the

13:38

neighborhood that was known as Love Canal

13:41

had about eight hundred houses and

13:43

about two hundred and forty apartments, and

13:45

right away I think this was all

13:48

completed. The school in fifty five. It's

13:51

starting and like two or three years later problems

13:54

started happening. People were coming down with physical

13:58

symptoms that were horror.

14:01

Yeah. I think nineteen fifty eight some

14:03

kids were taken to the hospital

14:06

for treatment of chemical burns. Yeah,

14:09

that's just a few years of the school

14:11

opening. The following year, a family

14:14

called the Vorhis found that there was black

14:17

sludge seeping through their basement walls.

14:19

Took a horror movie.

14:20

Yeah, I mean, I think that's literally part

14:22

of Amityville Horror at the end, isn't

14:25

there like black seeping through the walls?

14:27

Yeah, I mean, I think there's more than one movie that does

14:29

the old black sledge trick.

14:30

Well, this is where they got it was from the families

14:32

of Love Canal in the late fifties. There's

14:35

another thing I turned up. There

14:37

were the kids in the area loved

14:39

to play with fire rocks that they found.

14:42

There was a kind of rock they found that if

14:44

you threw it in another rock or threw it at a hard surface,

14:46

sometimes they would explode catch

14:48

fire. One kid puts some of

14:51

these fire rocks in his pockets and ran

14:53

home, and the friction caused

14:55

the fire rocks to catch fire and burn

14:57

the kid quite badly, And so of

14:59

course people started to investigating. They're like those

15:01

chunks of white phosphorus and it should

15:04

probably stop playing with that.

15:06

It was like that, Yeah, yeah,

15:08

totally. The fire

15:10

chief sent, I believe,

15:12

a report to the city manager of what

15:15

he said were obnoxious odors.

15:19

Of course, we can apply the sick rit

15:21

scriptum because he meant noxious.

15:24

Sure, he also said it was irritating to the lungs

15:26

and we should probably do something about this. And

15:28

that was sixty four.

15:30

Yeah, and then all of a sudden, babies start being

15:32

born that have disfigurements,

15:35

that have disabilities, deafness.

15:38

This one baby in the Schroeder family was born

15:40

with a second row of teeth, among

15:42

other things. Really alarming

15:45

stuff. So flash forward,

15:47

that's nineteen sixty eight. By the nineteen seventies,

15:51

people are just living there. It looks like a regular suburban,

15:55

you know, northeastern suburban neighborhood.

15:57

Some of the residents may have known about this

16:00

that were in the know, but probably not

16:02

many of them. There was a lot

16:04

of series of winters

16:06

in a row with like tons of rainfall, tons

16:09

of snow, tons of lakes

16:11

freezing, and this all just melts

16:13

into that groundwater system and

16:15

carries the stuff even further through

16:18

the groundwater system, and the

16:20

canal itself became so saturated

16:22

that like these some

16:24

of these barrels started like rising up through the

16:26

surface of the earth.

16:28

Yeah, and all the ones that were already

16:30

open and had been leaking over the years were

16:32

now really spilling their contents, and that stuff

16:35

was being pushed up and out

16:38

of the relative safety of the canal

16:41

the pit. You know, now it wasn't even

16:43

being held by the canal any longer. It was

16:45

like in the ground. This

16:48

was in people's backyards. There

16:50

was a there was a ball field nearby

16:53

that I saw that. It swelled

16:55

and contracted like a bowl of gelatine

16:57

whenever, whenever heavy equipment drove a because

17:00

it was so saturated and just ready to pop. This

17:02

is a baseball field. A

17:05

pool popped out of the ground and was

17:07

floating on toxic chemicals.

17:10

Like pools of toxic sludge

17:12

were starting to appear in people's backyards

17:14

because the ground was so saturated and there

17:17

was some really toxic stuff in the ground. So

17:19

you put those things together. All of a sudden,

17:21

people's backyards are toxic

17:24

waste sites. And some, like you said,

17:26

some had no idea that that was there.

17:28

By the seventies, yeah, absolutely,

17:32

you know, all men are Wildlife of course is dying.

17:34

Trees are dying, landscaping

17:36

is dying. Back people are losing

17:39

their hair, pets are losing their hair.

17:42

All of a sudden, there's you know, breathing problems, there's

17:45

numbing, there's fatigue, there's blood in people's

17:48

stools, and eventually, in

17:50

nineteen seventy six, Niagara Gazette

17:53

publishes the very first article that says,

17:56

Hey, this nightmare

17:58

that's happening all around us, by the way, has

18:01

a reason behind it. And it's because the love

18:03

canal and Hooker chemical

18:05

got together and it's a toxic waste

18:07

dump basically. Yeah, and a lot

18:09

of these residents are like for

18:11

the very first time, learning what's

18:14

going on and probably going, oh, my

18:16

god, you know, so much of my

18:18

life makes sense now.

18:19

Yeah, those fifty five gallon

18:22

drums that were popping out of

18:23

the creek beds makes

18:25

sense now. I understand it now. But

18:28

I mean it was so I think even the people

18:30

who were used to had grown up throwing

18:32

fire rocks at one another, and we're like used

18:34

to the idea that there's some weird stuff around. Maybe

18:36

even knew there was a dump site nearby. Yeah,

18:40

this was now in their backyard thanks

18:43

to the blizzard of seventy seven that dumped

18:45

so much snow on that eventually trickled in

18:47

and then saturated the ground. It

18:49

brought it into the sunlight,

18:52

and now there was just no denying it whatsoever.

18:55

And then the Niagara Gazette, like you said,

18:57

brought it further into the sunlight. So it

18:59

was such an obvious problem out of the gate

19:01

that the City of Niagara hired

19:04

the Cowspan Corporation. They

19:07

do all sorts of like freelance testing and stuff,

19:09

and they investigated. They went to

19:11

some of the basements that were

19:14

emitting black sludge and checked the sump pumps,

19:17

and they did some air testing, and they

19:19

checked the sewer lines. And

19:21

as the data started to roll in while they were doing

19:24

this testing, there

19:26

was a really dramatic moment where

19:28

all of the Cowspan people got in their cars and

19:30

sped away as fast as they could.

19:33

In the movie, that's exactly what would happen. And

19:36

then they just like they throw a file

19:38

out the window and it slides

19:41

to the feet of the mayor, and in

19:43

that file is the data which basically says

19:45

Displace is a disaster. The

19:48

levels of toxic compounds

19:51

is truly horrifying.

19:54

We're out of here. But nothing

19:57

happened. They didn't disclose the report,

20:00

the findings from that report. The City of Nagar didn't,

20:03

so the drumbeat keeps happening from

20:05

the Nagregazette over the course of seventy seven

20:08

seventy eight, they're still doing these reports.

20:11

No one is still doing anything because, like you mentioned

20:13

at the beginning, Hooker Chemical is

20:15

still there. There's still a huge

20:17

employer for that town, and it's

20:20

a huge expense to clean this stuff up. So

20:22

they weren't eager to bring this like

20:24

fully into the light and say, all right, we got

20:27

to do something about it.

20:28

No, So the city had I saw

20:30

what was described as an incestuous relationship

20:32

with Hooker Chemical. There

20:34

was a time where Hooker was

20:37

suspected of leaking

20:40

waste elsewhere in the city, and

20:42

so they hired Hooker

20:44

Chemical to go take samples and analyze

20:47

it to find out if they were that kind

20:49

of stuff. In

20:51

addition to not wanting to tick off Hooker,

20:55

they were also really worried

20:57

about tourism because, like I said,

20:59

like this is a time where if you honeymooned,

21:02

and you you know, were working class or

21:04

middle class, you

21:06

would you there's a good chance you would travel

21:08

to Niagara Falls and honeymoon there. So tourism

21:11

was a big part of their economy. We

21:13

didn't want to be like, come to Niagara

21:15

Falls. We got the falls and a toxic

21:17

waste dump too. So people

21:20

are like, we need to keep this quiet. That was the city's

21:22

position. We need to keep this quiet, we need to

21:24

deny, we need to obfuskate. That

21:26

was the whole thing that they tried to

21:28

do, and it got as

21:31

word got out, people

21:34

started kind of castigating the mayor in the city

21:36

council. I saw that I couldn't

21:38

find the actual video, but I saw reference

21:40

to an episode of The Donahue

21:43

Show, Phil Donahue, and

21:45

he had the mayor on Michael O'Laughlin

21:48

and apparently Donahue compared him

21:50

to the mayor from Jaws only cared

21:52

about keeping the beaches open, which

21:54

I thought was kind of apt.

21:56

I can hear and visualize

21:58

Donahue doing that with

22:00

his righteous indignation.

22:02

I can imagine Phil Hartman doing Phil

22:04

Donahue doing.

22:06

Man, God, what a loss. I

22:08

think about Phil Hartman about once a month.

22:10

I feel like, well, there you go, there's your monthly

22:12

reminder.

22:13

Yeah, so sad, we

22:15

should do a show on him at some point.

22:17

It's a good idea.

22:17

That'd be kind of awesome. So they

22:20

got a health commissioner doctor Francis Clifford,

22:23

and he came along and he said, you're all hypochondriacs.

22:26

This is just an odoriferous nuisance.

22:28

Really, it's like you're just smoking a few

22:30

cigarettes or something. It's really no big

22:32

deal here. If you have a basement,

22:35

you've got sludge and stuff. Here's a

22:37

window fan on

22:39

us. Yeah, and that

22:41

that should take care of it than us later.

22:44

And all of this is happening and being

22:46

buried. And we mentioned promise

22:48

of a hero, and in steps

22:52

a remarkable human being named Lois

22:54

Gibbs who lived in the area,

22:57

who had a no for

23:00

other than a high school education. Was it stay

23:02

at home mom? But she knew

23:04

what was The writing was on her wall in black

23:06

sludge, and she knew what was happening

23:09

and went to the school board and was like, I don't want my son

23:11

going to the school. Yeah, I want to pull him

23:13

out of school. And they said no,

23:15

no, no, no, no, we can't do that because the

23:18

word will get out, everyone will freak and

23:21

there won't be a school anymore. And she

23:24

said, well, I am, I'm

23:26

a mad mom and I'm not going to take

23:28

it. So even though I have no history of

23:31

activism or organizing or anything.

23:33

I'm going to start. I'm going to get some other parents

23:35

together. I'm going to start the Love Canal Parents

23:37

Movement, which would become the Love Canal Homeowners

23:40

Association, and we're going to wreak

23:42

havoc on your head through

23:45

the breast.

23:45

She said, close the beaches.

23:48

Yeah, exactly.

23:50

So, yeah, I think Lois kids. I want to

23:52

say, like, she's an example of what a

23:55

person can do when they're

23:58

left without choices and being ignored by

24:00

the people who are supposed to be helping them. But

24:03

there's a lot of people who would have just probably

24:05

given up. So she is remarkable

24:07

in that sense for sure. So

24:10

she headed the Love Canal

24:12

Homeowners' Association for a couple of years.

24:15

This thing went on for so the Blizzard of

24:17

seventy seven happened at the beginning

24:19

of nineteen seventy seven. Things

24:22

really started to just kind of creep out in

24:24

seventy six. This went

24:27

on until nineteen eighty

24:29

and the homeowners Association had to

24:31

fight every day, tooth and

24:33

nail to get somebody to do something

24:35

about this. And what they had

24:37

to do first was to show

24:40

that these complaints of congenital

24:44

disorders of weird

24:46

cancers, rectal bleeding apparently

24:49

more than one person had rectal bleeding. There,

24:51

liver problems,

24:54

kidney problems. That this wasn't

24:56

just like some random assemblage of

24:58

defective people want them put

25:00

it like. This was they

25:04

were being poisoned by the toxic

25:06

materials that were flowing into their neighborhood

25:09

from this overflowing toxic dump

25:12

and the bureaucracy, the city government

25:14

did everything it could to say no, your

25:17

hypochondriacs, just sit down and shut

25:19

up.

25:20

Yeah, until they couldn't it.

25:22

Finally, because of the newspaper,

25:24

because of Lois Gibbs and the homeowners

25:26

Association raised

25:29

so much hay, they finally said, all right,

25:31

the state steps in. The New York

25:33

State Health Department launched an investigation

25:36

in nineteen seventy eight.

25:37

Yeah, they stepped in and they said, City of Niagrit, we

25:39

got this and winked at them.

25:40

Yeah, exactly. So they did all kinds of testing

25:43

to the soil, to the air, did

25:46

health histories and blood tests and stuff

25:48

of the residents, and you know,

25:50

the results were what you were kind of talking about,

25:52

these birth defects, the

25:55

liver problems. I think the thirty

25:58

five percent of women had miscarriages,

26:01

which is, you know, higher

26:04

than average. They say, you know,

26:06

ten to twenty percent. Some say up to

26:08

twenty five to thirty percent of pregnancies

26:11

into miscarriages, but nothing

26:13

goes as high as thirty five. So that was a high number.

26:16

And then finally, in August of seventy

26:18

eight, the state Health Commissioner Robert

26:21

Whalen.

26:22

Robert Big Bob Whalen.

26:23

Said, a health emergency

26:26

is being declared. If you are pregnant,

26:29

if you have kids under two, you should

26:31

leave the area. And this

26:34

wasn't some you know, super

26:38

upper class affluent area. They couldn't just

26:40

pack up and leave. So they were mad. They were like, what

26:42

do you expect us to do?

26:44

What?

26:44

We live here?

26:45

Yeah, these were people who were tied to this area

26:47

by their mortgages. I saw

26:49

the average income was between ten and twenty five

26:51

thousand dollars, which at the time is

26:54

like forty seven to one

26:56

hundred and eighteen thousand today. So

26:58

it's like pretty squarely middle class, but

27:02

not the kind they can just be like, Okay, I'm walking

27:04

away from my mortgage right, here's my house

27:06

bank. I'm just going to go start life elsewhere.

27:08

They couldn't do that. They were stuck

27:11

there with these houses that it

27:13

was becoming increasingly clear no

27:15

one would want, which was a huge

27:17

problem. They were facing a catch twenty two. Nobody

27:20

was going to help them unless they got

27:22

national attention for this. But the

27:24

more attention they got for it, the more it

27:27

was, the more they were sticking themselves

27:29

in this place until they got

27:31

the help they needed, because no one was going to

27:33

come along and buy your house after a

27:35

very short time when worried about Love Canal

27:38

got out.

27:39

That's right, But guess who did buy their house,

27:42

Jimmy Carter. It

27:44

finally does become national news. The

27:47

national TV networks were all over it. They

27:49

were doing reports from there. With all these protests

27:52

happening, Jimmy Carter steps

27:54

in. He declares a federal state of emergency

27:57

and said, here's ten million dollars

28:00

we can relocate. We're going to buy up your

28:02

houses if you live within

28:05

the first like the first

28:07

zone basically like that's closest to the canal.

28:09

Chuck, I'm sorry, and I'm sorry, I'm

28:11

behalf of everyone listening. You're really

28:14

not gonna do a Jimmy Carter impression

28:16

offering to buy these people's houses.

28:18

Oh boy, I don't know if I've ever done

28:20

Jimmy Carter, I did. I was doing

28:22

it when I was a kid.

28:24

You have I've heard you have. I.

28:29

Oh. Now I'm on the spot and I'm missing a tooth.

28:31

Okay, all right, maybe

28:34

he can come in later.

28:36

This will be the first time. Now

28:38

it's that good stuff.

28:41

It was the first time that federal emergency funds

28:44

were used in the United States and their history

28:46

or our history

28:49

for something other than a natural disaster. So it

28:51

was a big, big deal that

28:53

they stepped in then, along with the help

28:55

of New York State, when Governor Carrey

28:58

said, we're going to buy up two

29:00

hundred and thirty nine of these homes in the first

29:02

couple of rings around this landfill.

29:04

We're going to close that school. And also

29:07

maybe don't eat those veggies or the herbs you've

29:09

been growing in your backyard.

29:10

That was part of it. And also don't spend

29:12

unnecessary time in your basement. That

29:14

was the other thing they said.

29:16

So all the teenage boys were just like,

29:18

oh man, so.

29:19

That's that's pretty cool. First, the first

29:21

two rings, so people whose backyards

29:25

were on top of essentially the

29:28

waist pit and then the people

29:31

like maybe across the street from them,

29:35

like all the way around the Love Canal. The

29:37

US governor is like, we're going to buy your houses. You can

29:39

move now, you're fine. We're going to pay you fair market value

29:42

for them. And the two hundred and thirty nine people

29:44

were like yeah, okay, or two hundred and thirty nine families.

29:46

But still it was awful. I mean imagine

29:49

being like, well, all I got to leave my home now,

29:52

Like sure, someone's buying my house, but I

29:54

didn't want to leave. No, I work

29:56

here.

29:56

That's definitely part of it. For sure, there

30:00

had to be like a pretty decent sense of relief

30:03

though at least that was they weren't stuck

30:05

anymore. But yeah, I'm sure they didn't want to leave their community,

30:08

or at least some of them. But the problem

30:10

was this. You said that there was about eight hundred

30:13

houses and a whole apartment

30:15

building that was in this Love

30:17

Canal neighborhood, and the

30:19

people who are there were like, Okay, you

30:22

can't forget about us. We need

30:24

help too. Like in addition

30:26

to like no

30:28

one wanting to buy our houses because

30:30

we're so close to the Love Canal dump,

30:34

we're still suffering all sorts of health maladies

30:36

as well, and so the city

30:39

goes back to their playbook and they're like, there's

30:41

no way you guys are actually suffering

30:43

health maladies. You're beyond the second

30:46

ring of houses. You guys are fine, You're

30:48

just hypochondriacs. And the whole

30:50

thing started all over again. And I think,

30:52

luckily for all the people who lived in Love

30:55

Canal that were left out of the eight hundred,

30:59

the fact that Lois Gibbs was among them,

31:01

yeah, definitely something mark in their

31:04

favor for sure, because she was

31:06

unstoppable.

31:07

Yeah, she lived in that second zone, so she was still

31:09

there.

31:10

So I say we take a break and then we come back and talk

31:12

a little more about what Lois did, Lois

31:15

Gibbs did, and who she got some help

31:17

from.

31:18

Hint, hint, she didn't quit.

31:49

So chuck. Now we reached the point where

31:51

Love Canal starts to really become national

31:54

news because the

31:56

federal government, the state government, the

31:58

local government, they're like, yeah, yeah, problem solved.

32:01

We moved the people who needed to, we demolished

32:03

their homes. It's all

32:05

good, essentially, and this

32:07

whole group that was left behind that still

32:10

needed help, we're like, no, we're we're going to get

32:12

louder than ever, essentially, and

32:14

a division grew

32:17

in the community where in Love Canal

32:19

they were viewed outside of the neighborhood

32:21

and the rest of the city as basically

32:24

labmounts, rebbel rousers, people who were just out

32:26

for like easy money from the federal government

32:29

and we're making up all these maladies at

32:31

the expense of the tourism industry

32:33

and ticking off hooker. They threatened

32:35

the well being of the rest of the town just

32:38

by you know, being labmouths. And

32:41

it was a really seems like it would have

32:43

been a really terrible time to live in Niagara

32:45

Falls.

32:46

Oh, I'm sure. And Lowe S. Gibbs is like,

32:48

you know what, I just bought one

32:51

hundred bullhorns, that's right,

32:53

And they went no, no, no, no.

32:55

Yeah, And she was like, and I'm saving up for the batteries.

33:01

So the LHCA,

33:04

headed by Lois Gibbs, brought in doctor

33:06

Beverly Pagan, scientists

33:09

with the Health Department of New York. They

33:11

did their own door to door detailed

33:14

questionnaire about people's health. They

33:17

analyzed the data, they found

33:20

a lot of the same problems, but what they really zeroed

33:22

in on were the fact that if you lived in

33:24

what they called a wet home, which was if

33:26

you lived near a creek or a swale or something,

33:29

versus a dry home that wasn't near a creek, then

33:32

you were much worse off.

33:34

Twenty percent of the children born in

33:36

wet homes had birth defects compared

33:38

to six point eight percent in dry homes. The

33:41

asthma rate was three and a half times higher in wet

33:43

homes. Suicide attempts were higher

33:46

in wet zones. And this

33:48

is when they were dismissed. I

33:50

believe some of the authorities said it was useless

33:53

housewife data, which

33:55

is a real bum

33:58

in the eye of Lois Gibb in

34:00

the LHCA and doctor Pagan.

34:02

Yeah, just two things. So for

34:04

reference, twenty percent

34:07

of children born in that area and the

34:09

wet homes that had congenital

34:11

disorders compared

34:14

to six point eight percent. Both of those were

34:16

way above the national average for nineteen

34:18

seventy eight of two point eight percent, so

34:21

almost a

34:23

lot. That was a lot more. I was going

34:25

to do some math and I was like, don't do the math, so I

34:28

stopped. But the other the

34:30

other thing I wanted to just call out, was doctor

34:33

Pagan. She was

34:35

doing this on her own time as a

34:37

volunteer. She was volunteering her expertise

34:39

as a cancer researcher to

34:42

come up with the survey to figure out like the

34:44

actual data to basically show that you didn't

34:46

have to be living right on top

34:48

of the dump to still be suffering

34:50

health effects. And she very cleverly

34:53

figured out that when they built the

34:55

homes for the Love Canal

34:57

neighborhood, they covered up all sorts

34:59

of old cre beds, old swales

35:02

that were now underground, but with

35:04

the ground being saturated, they were providing

35:06

their old historic functions of

35:08

moving water through the neighborhood.

35:10

So a plume of toxicity formed

35:13

that wasn't necessarily at

35:15

the dump site any longer,

35:17

it was moving out into these areas that

35:20

came to be known as wet homes. And

35:22

so she showed, now, these

35:25

people are really suffering as many

35:27

effects as some of the people whose houses

35:29

were on top of the dump, and they still

35:31

need help. And she risked her career

35:34

doing that because she was a New York State Health inspector

35:38

and her organization

35:40

had already basically closed the book on it. And she

35:42

was saying, we need to open this back up because we

35:45

were wrong, Like it's worse than we thought.

35:49

Right. So after two more years they

35:51

finally get the EPA down there,

35:54

and this is, you know, two full

35:56

years of continued protesting.

35:59

EPA comes in, They visit Love Canal,

36:01

they do their own blood test and chromosome

36:04

test and things like that, and it showed

36:06

that there was you know, what everyone else had

36:08

shown. Basically, it wasn't useless housewife

36:11

data or hypochondria. And

36:13

they got mad. They got so mad that they took

36:15

a couple of EPA officials hostage.

36:19

They said they're not going to release them until we're

36:22

relocated. Cooler heads prevailed.

36:24

It only lasted about five hours. They didn't arrest

36:26

anybody, but it was it was a

36:28

big deal, brought a lot more attention to

36:30

it. And in

36:33

October of nineteen eighty, just a few days

36:35

after this hostage thing, President Carter

36:37

steps in again. It says, all right, here's

36:40

another twenty million dollars. New York is

36:42

also going to throw in twenty million dollars, and we're

36:44

going to relocate everybody, seven

36:47

hundred remaining homes, everyone

36:50

but two families. There's always a couple

36:53

that are like now not leaving. They

36:56

stayed there, but everyone else was relocated.

36:58

In Congress passed the Comprehensive

37:01

Environmental Response, Compensation

37:03

and Liability Act CIRCLA

37:06

terrible, right, not great?

37:08

Yeah, that was in nineteen eighty They

37:11

call it the Super Fun Law, and that established

37:13

a trust fund with the EPA to clean

37:15

up waste sites in the future and establish

37:18

a national priorities list, a superfund list

37:21

in nineteen eighty three that Love Canal was put

37:23

squarely on.

37:24

Yeah, and then a decade or so later

37:26

was used to clean up David Hans's mom's

37:28

potting shed.

37:30

Yeah.

37:31

So that Super Fun Law.

37:33

It came out days after, no

37:36

months after the hostage

37:38

standoff, right, And I was like, okay,

37:41

that's pretty quick that, you

37:43

know, there's surely this thing had been kicking around Congress

37:46

for a while and now there was just an opportunity to push

37:48

it through. Apparently that's not true. That

37:50

law that created the superfund was

37:53

essentially created in response to Love

37:55

Canal and the protests that the Love

37:57

Canal Homeowners Association were staging.

38:00

They created this super fund. It

38:03

like people didn't understand that toxic

38:05

waste could pollute the ground before

38:07

this, and now all of a sudden, the federal

38:09

government has a comprehensive response

38:12

plan designed within months.

38:14

Essentially that gives the EPA a

38:16

right to basically tax petroleum makers

38:19

and plastic makers and all that

38:22

and put it into this trust fund to

38:24

help clean up sits in the future.

38:26

Amazing, It is amazing.

38:28

It's you know, federal government

38:30

at its finest. It's not always great.

38:33

I will be the well, probably not the first

38:35

to say it, but I will say it, but

38:37

this is an example of it doing right.

38:39

Yeah, totally. So. The remediation

38:42

took a long time. It took a couple of decades,

38:44

cost about three hundred and fifty million bucks.

38:47

They flattened all those homes,

38:49

of course, they did it. They

38:51

sealed the landfill of the correct way, which is

38:54

with a three foot cap of clay water,

38:57

impermeable plastic, more top

38:59

soil. They started diverting the

39:01

groundwater to a

39:04

facility that treats it. They

39:06

treat about five million gallons of water a year.

39:08

And they have about one hundred monitoring wells

39:11

all over the site that collect data, you

39:13

know, at all times to detect any

39:16

chemical leakage that might be happening if

39:19

you're wondering about hook or chemical if they were on the hook

39:21

for any of this. Yes, they eventually

39:24

were. They were sued by the EPA themselves

39:26

in seventy nine. They

39:28

settled in the nineteen nineties and ended

39:31

up between the federal government

39:33

and New York State repaying them

39:35

about two hundred and twenty seven million dollars.

39:38

Yeah, which is kind of did not have to admit fault,

39:41

No.

39:41

No way, And you

39:43

can make a kind of a case

39:46

that they didn't need to admit fault. You know,

39:49

well, I think enough about it.

39:50

I think that means that insulates them from more

39:53

lawsuits.

39:54

Sure, no, absolutely, I don't think it was just based on principles

39:56

or anything like that. Yeah, but that's kind

39:58

of par for the course with super fun stuff where

40:01

the government says,

40:03

Okay, we're going to pay for cleanup, and then they go after

40:05

the people who were responsible for

40:08

the waste in the first place and then sue them and

40:10

then over the course of a decade or two, finally

40:12

get some fraction of the amount of the cleanup costs.

40:15

Yeah, they fret the cost essentially.

40:18

Yeah, So love

40:20

Canal neighborhoods still around today they

40:22

call it Black Creek. And

40:25

you said the houses and Rings one

40:27

and two were demolished, they were

40:29

actually pushed into the pit

40:32

or the waste was and

40:35

then covered over. So the houses are down there,

40:37

the parts of them, and they

40:40

rehabbed and updated the houses

40:42

that were left over, and after

40:44

the EPA said Okay, we've cleaned this place

40:46

up enough, you

40:49

guys can move back in, the neighborhood

40:51

just got life breathed back into it again. And

40:54

weirdly, just like with as new

40:56

people moved in and the Love

40:58

Canal neighborhood starting in the fifth ties and sixties,

41:01

not all of them were told that they

41:03

were living on a toxic waste stump and

41:06

that a lot of the information

41:08

was lost for people. The same thing happened

41:10

the second go around. There was a New York Times

41:12

article that found like, there's people living there that

41:15

have no idea the history of this place, and

41:17

that there's still a toxic waste dump down there. Because

41:19

that's something worth pointing out, Chuck. They didn't

41:21

remove the toxic waste, They just covered it up

41:23

better, oh yeah than it was covered up before.

41:26

Yeah. So there have been lawsuits, There have been people

41:29

that still complain that moved back

41:31

into Black Creek of you

41:33

know, some of the same issues there. I think twenty

41:35

lawsuits

41:38

with seven hundred plaintiffs kind of in

41:40

recent years, and just last year

41:42

in twenty twenty three, a state judge dismissed

41:44

a couple of the really big, high profile cases

41:47

for lack of evidence, which

41:49

you know doesn't bode well for lawsuits

41:52

to follow. Obviously, as

41:54

far as you know, testing goes and whether

41:57

or not there are really like is

41:59

still a real problem there. It's

42:01

sort of conflicting evidence inconclusive.

42:04

I guess mortality

42:07

rate is slightly elevated, but within the normal

42:09

range. Cancer rates are actually

42:11

lower six percent lower, but

42:14

birth defects are twice as high

42:16

as other communities nearby.

42:18

Yeah, and that sounds really weird, Like why would cancer

42:21

rates be lower? Apparently

42:23

they're like the sample size of this study

42:26

is not huge, so we're

42:28

not crazy about the results essentially.

42:31

But yeah, I guess it didn't turn out

42:34

quite as bad as people had thought,

42:36

which is good. But I mean tell that to the families

42:39

who had babies born with you

42:41

know, congenital disorders and

42:43

or died young. You know, I

42:45

mean, there's there was a lot of damage done

42:48

to people living there unfairly, and that's ultimately

42:50

the saddest legacy of it. There's a triumphant

42:53

legacy to it.

42:54

Yeah, but there's that.

42:56

Will never, that will never put a clay

42:58

cap over the tragedy that I happened

43:00

there too.

43:01

Yeah. Well, I hope there's a statue of Lois Gibbs

43:03

somewhere.

43:04

I don't know that there is. But she went on

43:07

to found the Center for

43:09

Health, Environment.

43:10

And Justice, which is amazing.

43:12

She got so many letters from

43:14

her you know, national high profile

43:17

as a result of this, that she went and was like,

43:19

Okay, I'm going to start an organization

43:21

that helps small towns deal with this on

43:24

their own without her help. I'm

43:26

Lois Gibbs.

43:28

Yeah, She's like, I can make some real money off of this.

43:32

Yeah, she's so loaded. She

43:34

wears floor length mink coats and shows up in gold

43:36

plated roles to all these

43:39

these neighborhood meetings.

43:41

No, not my lowest Gibbs. I'm looking at pictures

43:43

over now, out there shouting in

43:45

front of a building. I love it. Yep.

43:48

If you want to know more about Love Canal or

43:50

Lois Gibbs or Beverly pagan or

43:52

anything like that. You can

43:55

look all over the internet. There's a bunch of great

43:57

stuff to read. And since

43:59

I said it's time for listener mail.

44:04

I actually got one more thing, so pre listener mail.

44:06

Oh boy, okay, it

44:09

felt like the perfect episode to plug a friends

44:11

project. One of my oldest friends, Dave

44:14

Barnhardt, is a documentary filmmaker

44:17

who takes on projects that

44:20

you know need attention, like

44:22

gun violence and things like that. And he did

44:24

a documentary called Flint,

44:27

the Poisoning of an American city of Flint,

44:29

Michigan, of course, and you

44:31

should check it out. It's you go to Flint Poisoning

44:33

dot com is the website for

44:36

the documentary. And David's great.

44:38

He's doing he's doing good work and

44:40

he's a good guy. So check

44:42

out the trailer and see where you can watch it.

44:45

Great shout out man, I'm glad you did that. Yeah,

44:48

I think Flint deserves its own Episodeah

44:51

for sure.

44:51

Yeah we should follow up on that.

44:53

Uh if you already already

44:55

said that, is it time for listener mail?

44:57

Yeah, yeah, I just I just thwarted.

44:59

Well, Jerry just put the chime.

45:03

Hey guys, I want to let you

45:06

know how much my family loves stuff. As you know, my boys

45:08

Evan and Alex and my wife Rachel

45:10

listen to you every chance we get. It's the

45:12

first thing we do in the morning on the way to school. The kids

45:14

want to see if there's a new episode, and they

45:16

think you're the smartest people in the world. So

45:19

imagine how they are impressed when I

45:21

their lowly dad found a mistake. In

45:24

your snake oil podcast, nice, you

45:26

guys mentioned that patent medicines or medicines protected

45:28

by patents, which gives a manufacturer exclusive

45:31

right without having to disclose what's

45:33

in it. That's actually the opposite.

45:35

Pattent's grant a limited right to exclude

45:38

others from making, using, offering

45:40

for sale, or selling the invention or importing

45:43

it. But in exchange, you have to disclose

45:46

the invention in a way that would enable one

45:49

skilled in the art to make or use the

45:51

invention. In other words, if a medicine

45:53

is patented, you'd have to say exactly

45:55

what's in it and how you made it, otherwise

45:58

you wouldn't get a patent. And you guys know this

46:00

because you actually said that in your how

46:03

Ip Works episode, right, Yeah,

46:06

And that is from David. And you know what, David,

46:08

I looked into that more and you're right. But

46:10

I also found out that ninety

46:14

percent of these patent medicines didn't

46:16

even have patents. They were just called patent medicines,

46:18

all right. So that's from David Greenfield.

46:22

Thanks a lot, David, much appreciated.

46:24

If you want to get in terms of this, like David did,

46:27

you can just send an email to Stuff

46:29

podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

46:35

Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

46:38

For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit

46:40

the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

46:42

or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,