Love Canal, Lois Gibbs and the Neighborhood That Built Superfund

In the spring of nineteen seventy-eight, Lois Gibbs was twenty-seven years old, had no organizing experience, and had never attended a public meeting. She started going door to door in the LaSalle neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York, because her son was sick and she suspected the school.

What she found was this: between nineteen forty-two and nineteen fifty-three, the Hooker Chemical Company had buried twenty-one thousand tons of industrial waste in a former canal bed in the middle of what would become a residential neighborhood. The buried chemicals included benzene, dioxin, and more than two hundred other compounds. In nineteen fifty-three, the Niagara Falls City School Board purchased the land from Hooker for one dollar. The deed contained a clause noting the presence of chemical waste. The board built an elementary school over the site anyway. Then the city built a subdivision around it. Families moved in.

By the time Gibbs began knocking on doors, children in the neighborhood had elevated rates of illness. Basements smelled of chemicals. Gardens produced deformed vegetables. Gibbs organized the Love Canal Homeowners Association, went through the health records street by street, and mapped what she found. The pattern was not random. It followed the buried chemical trenches exactly.

She held state officials in their own office until they agreed to meet with her. She organized mothers. She wrote letters. She testified. In August of nineteen seventy-eight, President Carter declared a federal emergency at Love Canal, the first time a federal emergency had ever been declared for a human-caused environmental contamination. More than eight hundred families were eventually relocated.

In nineteen eighty, Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, known as Superfund, the foundational law of American hazardous-waste cleanup. Lois Gibbs, who had never attended a public meeting before the spring of nineteen seventy-eight, had caused a federal law to be written.