=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #133
—June 13, 1989—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
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EPA WANTS TO RENAME LOVE CANAL ‘SUNRISE CITY,’
MOVE PEOPLE BACK INTO CONTAMINATED NEIGHBORHOODS.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says it will move
families back into homes in contaminated neighborhoods at Love
Canal, near Niagara Falls, New York, this summer. WE ARE ASKING
OUR READERS TO TAKE IMMEDIATE ACTION TO PREVENT THIS WRONG: we
ask you to write two letters. Here’s why it is important:
The EPA plans to rename Love Canal “Sunrise City,” so “Love
Canal” will disappear from America’s vocabulary. It is a move
calculated to eradicate the major symbol of corporate stupidity
and greed that launched the grass roots movement for
environmental justice back in 1980, when housewife Lois Gibbs
gathered her courage, rallied her neighbors, fought a bitter
struggle for her children’s lives, and forced the phrase “toxic
waste” onto evening TV news screens across America.
As a direct result of a terrific fight waged by Lois and her
neighbors in the late ’70s, President Jimmy Carter in 1980
responded to pressure in a human way, and the federal government
bought 235 homes and moved the families out. Now the federal
government, and many state governments, are facing similar
demands all across the country: people living near toxic chemical
dumps are demanding to be bought out and relocated. After nearly
a decade of eyewash and promises, it has become clear that the
Superfund program to clean up 1000 chemical dumps isn’t going
anywhere. The EPA has not been able to clean up Superfund dumps
because cleanup technology really doesn’t exist, at least not for
the sums of money the EPA is willing to spend, so people are
demanding to be moved out, relocated, resettled. They want the
terror to stop, they want their children’s health given back,
they want peace of mind. In short, they want environmental
justice.
For its part, the federal government hopes to dig in its heels
and stonewall. If they succeed, thousands of families across
America will be the losers. It will become harder and harder to
argue for relocation. More and more people will find themselves
trapped permanently next to toxic dumps, their children suffering
rashes and abdominal pain and seizures and headaches and
diminished ability to learn, the measurable effects of chemical
exposures. It is a cruel prospect, hardly American at all–more
in line with public policies we associate with totalitarian
societies.
To pull off this cruel shift in public policy, the EPA must
rewrite history and declare Love Canal habitable. (We note that
the EPA never refers to Love Canal as “safe.” They say only, in
carefully-worded press releases, that it has been declared
“habitable.”) Without exactly saying so, the EPA wants to
establish a precedent, that people poor enough and unlucky enough
to live near a dump are just out of chips, that’s all. Too bad.
The implication is that real Americans will learn to live with
chemical dumps; only wimps and cry babies would even WANT to be
relocated.
And what more important place to establish this precedent than at
Love Canal itself? Love Canal is a place where human babies were
sacrificed to the chemical industry. The health damage to those
children has been documented more than once. The first health
study completed by the state of New York revealed that 56% of the
children living along Love Canal itself were born with birth
defects. Longer-term studies of a larger number of children have
shown that the effects of the Canal extended into other
neighborhoods besides the homes fronting directly on the dump.
These studies have shown that low birth weight babies were 2.3
times as likely to occur among homeowners living near Love Canal,
compared to a control group living elsewhere in Niagara Falls
(11.1% vs. 4.8%). Serious birth defects were twice as likely to
occur among those living near the Canal (12.1% vs. 6.2%). These
studies found seizures 2.5 times as prevalent among Love Canal
kids as among controls; learning disabilities were 1.5 times as
prevalent; hyperactivity was almost 3 times as prevalent; eye
irritation was twice as prevalent; skin rashes occurred twice as
often; abdominal pain was twice as prevalent; incontinence
occurred three times as often. Thus by seven health measures,
living near Love Canal is associated with sickness among
children. (For more details, see RHWN #104.)
But Love Canal has been cleaned up, hasn’t it? LOVE CANAL HAS NOT
BEEN CLEANED UP AT ALL. A clay cap has been placed over the worst
contamination, but the chemical wastes that seeped into Lois’s
basement are still in the ground, a toxic time bomb waiting to
kill and maim future generations of children. The EPA is
unwilling to spend the kind of money it would take to clean the
place up. Worst of all, they are not even willing to force
industry to spend the money to clean up its own mess. Instead,
they want to “solve” the problem by linguistic trickery–declare
the place “habitable,” give it a new name that makes it sound
like a Florida resort, and hope that no one remembers the awful
truth about what happened there.
This is a dark day indeed. The EPA is even using bastardized
science to justify this public relations stunt. The agency hired
scientists who compared the Love Canal neighborhood to two
inner-city neighborhoods in Niagara County, which are themselves
contaminated. One of these “control” neighborhoods is actually
contaminated by some of the same wastes as Love Canal, presumably
dumped by the same company–Occidental Petroleum. These
scientists found few differences in the levels of chemicals
measured in the three neighborhoods, and on that basis they have
declared Love Canal “habitable.” GIVEN THE HEALTH DATA FROM LOVE
CANAL, THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE justified in DECLARING THE OTHER
TWO NEIGHBORHOODS “UNINHABITABLE.” But what would the Mayor, the
Board of Realtors, the Chamber of Commerce, and Occidental
Petroleum have said about that? The scientists reached the
conclusion that EPA, local boosters and the polluters needed.
Worse yet, these scientists compared Love Canal to two other
neighborhoods outside the area and found Love Canal significantly
more contaminated than these other two “control” areas, BUT THEY
CHOSE TO IGNORE THESE DATA ENTIRELY. This is science in the
service of propaganda.
Now the EPA plans to move poor and blue collar families into the
homes that were originally abandoned. (The most contaminated of
those original homes were bulldozed; the remaining ones are less
contaminated, but health damage has been recorded among some of
the families who inhabited the homes EPA now wants to open up
again.) New families will be sacrificed to the god Progress
Through Chemistry. Lois herself is now leading the fight to stop
this travesty. Lois is asking–and we are asking–everyone to
write two letters, one to William Reilly, Administrator of U.S.
EPA [401 M Street, SW, Washington, DC 200024], and one to
Governor Mario Cuomo [State Capitol, Albany, NY 12224]. BUT
PLEASE DO NOT MAIL YOUR LETTERS TO THESE GENTLEMAN–mail them to
Lois Gibbs, P.O. Box 926, Arlington, Va 22216. Lois will get them
into the hands of Mr. Reilly and Mr. Cuomo in some creative way
this summer, as part of a strategy to stop the reinhabiting of
Love Canal.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: love canal; epa; ny; niagara falls; health
effects; birth defects; children; developmental disorders; skin
disorders; occidental petroleum;