How Many People Were Killed by Love Canal?

[DrLeftover]

In the 1890s, William T. Love, foreseeing an economic boom along the banks of the Niagara River, began excavating a canal. It would skirt past Niagara Falls, allowing boats to travel between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. More important, the diverted water would be used to generate hydroelectric power. Drawn by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy, new industries would spring up. Workers would commute to modern factories from a showcase urban development he would call Model City.

Love’s plan depended, in large part, on the need for power-hungry customers to come to the electricity, which in those days was generated in a form pioneered by Thomas Edison called direct current. Direct current could not be carried very far before it faded. But around the time Love’s canal broke ground, Nikola Tesla and his employer, George Westinghouse, introduced alternating current generators and transformers. Before long, electricity could be stepped up to high voltages and transported across the country. That and the great economic panic of 1893 put an end to the Love Canal project, leaving an unfinished ditch about 3,000 feet long and 100 feet wide.

In the years around World War II, the Hooker Electrochemical Company acquired it for use as a dump, eventually disposing of some 22,000 tons of toxic waste, including carcinogens like benzene and dioxin. In 1953, the land, closed and covered with dirt, was given for a token payment of $1 to the local school board with the understanding that it was filled with chemical waste. An elementary school was built there anyway, and the city envisioned turning part of the old dump site into a park.

Land bordering the canal was sold and developed, and in the late 1970s, after a couple of years of unusually high precipitation, residents began to complain of a sickening smell. When an official from the Environmental Protection Agency came to inspect, he saw rusting barrels of waste that had found their way to the surface. Potholes were oozing waste into several backyards, and it had seeped into the basement of one home. “The odors penetrate your clothing and adhere to your footwear,” he reported. Three days later his sweater still stank. The neighborhood was evacuated, a national emergency declared, and the investigations began.

I won't give it away.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2013/08/love_canal_killed_how_many_people_cancer_risk_from_environmental_pollution.html?google_editors_picks=true

 

[Jazzy]

Interesting article and I won't give away the answer either. :wink: