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By Rachel Sobel |
Nearly three decades after Love Canal came into the American consciousness with a bang, it has quietly been delisted from the Superfund National Priorities List (NPL). The impact that Love Canal left on environmental policy nationally, especially in New York, is enormous.
Ken Kamlet, director of development for Newman Development in Vestal, N.Y., explains, “Love Canal caused New York state to enact the country’s first Superfund law, but it has probably contributed to the unwillingness of corporate owners of contaminated property to tranfer title to brownfields ever since.”
The 70-acre Superfund site was originally a canal excavated by William Love in the 1890s for a hydroelectric project that was never built. In 1942, Hooker Chemicals and Plastics began disposing of hazardous waste in the canal. By 1952, 21,000 tons of waste had been legally dumped.
The site was eventually covered over. Modest homes were built nearby. Because of known contamination, there were usage restrictions placed on the land, which was sold to the school board for one dollar. The board did not heed warnings not to build and erected a school.
“Were cities doing things without awareness of institutional controls? Yes,” says Eckardt C. Beck, EPA Region 2 Administrator from 1977 to 1979. “Did they know any better? No.”
Unusually heavy rains in the 1970s caused groundwater to rise, flooding basements and pushing chemicals into homes and the school. Residents began noticing patterns of health problems and activists organized to draw media and political attention to the situation.
“We didn’t have the essential tools to deal with it then,” says Beck. “Today, the world is responding differently.”
And so, out of Love Canal, a new way of dealing with environmental abuses was born. In 1989, President Carter signed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA, or “Superfund”) into law.
Approximately $400 million later, in 1999, the site was deemed construction complete. On September 30, 2004, it was quietly deleted from the NPL. It will continue to be monitored.
What does delisting signify? Damien Duda, remedial project manager for EPA Region 2 answers, “A lot of people read things into NPL deletions, but they are really just an administrative detail.”
“Today it is easy to drive by and not realize it was a Superfund site,” says Duda. “People there are tired of the stigma.” BFN
Rachel Sobel is managing editor of Brownfield News. A tour of Love Canal will be given at NBA's International Brownfield Summit on June 2–3, 2005.