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The legal and ethical fallout of Love Canal
By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer
A UB law professor spoke out last week about the legal and ethical fallout of Love Canal and the concentration of hazardous waste disposal sites in Buffalo-Niagara as a result of the region's historical connection to the Manhattan Project.
Aerial photograph of the Love Canal area taken September 5, 1980. The Canal itself is in the center of the photo.
Note that the Canal has long since been covered over. View faces North.
PHOTO: UB LIBRARIES; LOVE CANAL COLLECTION
The region east of the Niagara River and south of Lake Ontario, home to popular tourist attractions such as Old Fort Niagara, also is adjacent to the only storage site in the Northeast that accepts hazardous industrial wastes and toxic materials from environmental cleanups across the United States, says Nils Olsen, professor and dean in the UB Law School, who presented "The Concentration of Hazardous Waste Disposal Sites in Western New York," June 27 as part of the UBThisSummer lecture series.
"This is not right," he says, "to concentrate all of this waste in one place. There are serious issues of morality raised by a public policy that operates to concentrate hazardous waste disposal facilities in a single community."
High-income waterfront properties conceal a robust hazardous waste disposal business in Niagara County, he says, which includes a 710-acre hazardous waste landfill operated by Chemical Waste Management (CWM) Chemical Services, Inc. and a 191-acre site called the Niagara Falls Storage Site (NFSS), maintained by the U.S. government.
"All is not well in this historical waterfront Eden," according to Olsen, noting the CWM landfill is located less than one mile from the Lewiston-Porter School District and pointing out all the trucks that transport hazardous waste to the site trace an approved route that passes in front of the school.
"Much of the hazardous waste disposed of in these facilities...originates in distant communities inside and outside New York State," he adds. "Typically, only a very small proportion of the waste received at the Chemical Waste Management site is generated in New York State."
Olsen says the presence of these facilities in the region stems from the former Lake Ontario Ordinance Works (LOOW), which once housed a government project to produce TNT for World War II, and later a 165-foot, open-topped silo used to store radioactive byproducts from industrial processes performed in Tonawanda for the Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bomb.
He also notes the area is home to Model City, an unincorporated hamlet related to a failed project by William T. Love to connect the two levels of the Niagara River in the 1890s. The incomplete, one-mile canal was used to dump hazardous waste by the City of Niagara Falls in the 1920s and then by the Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation in the 1940s and early 1950s. The business sold the land to the Niagara School Board for a dollar in 1953, he adds, and public health problems related to the subsequent construction of a grade school and later a sewer system on the site brought to light decades of environmental abuse and mismanagement.
The "Love Canal" scandal created the EPA Superfund Project for the nationwide cleanup of environmental waste sites, says Olsen, but failed to spur related actions to ensure the more equitable distribution of future hazardous waste storage facilities across the United States.
"Available land, in conjunction with the need for [hazardous waste disposal] facilities to accept waste from environmental amelioration efforts and...local industry, undoubtedly led to the reluctant opening of the door to such facilities," he says. "Once open, that door has been kept ajar by an unholy alliance of convenience between the commercial disposal industry and the State of New York."
The State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has failed "in the most shocking fashion" to meet a nearly 20-year-old legislative deadline requiring a siting plan that addresses the equitable geographic distribution of facilities that treat and store hazardous wastes, says Olsen, despite the desire of CWM to launch a significant expansion of their facilities in Model City.
"The state," he adds, "driven by need and political expediency, can avoid hard decisions and maintain majority support through inaction, permitting the continued concentration of facilities in one small area of the state with relatively insignificant political power."
"It's just not right to concentrate all of this waste in just one place," Olsen concludes. "This is a problem not only for the people in the towns of Lewiston and Porter; it's a problem for every right-thinking person in New York State."