Love Canal

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Love Canal was a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, United States, infamous as the location of a 0.28 km2 (0.11 sq mi) landfill that became the site of an environmental disaster discovered in 1977. Decades of exposure to dumped toxic chemicals harmed the health of hundreds, often profoundly. The area was cleaned up over a period of twenty-one years in a Superfund operation. Love Canal's history began in the 1880s. William Love, a local real estate entrepreneur, conducted a large-scale dig project to obtain hydroelectricity to power a city he planned to build along the canal. Work halted in 1883, when alternating current (AC) electricity supply systems were invented. The abandoned dig project left a one mile (1.6 km) long, about 40 ft (12 m) deep trench. In the 1920s, the canal became a dump site for municipal refuse for the city of Niagara Falls. During the 1940s, the canal was purchased by Hooker Chemical Company, which used the site to dump 19,800 metric tonnes of chemical byproducts from the manufacturing of dyes, perfumes, and solvents for rubber and synthetic resins. Hooker Chemical later sold the land to the local school district in 1953 for $1. Over the next three decades, Love Canal attracted national attention for the public health problems originating from the former dumping of toxic waste on the grounds. This event displaced numerous families, leaving them with longstanding health issues and symptoms of high white blood cell counts and leukemia. Subsequently, the federal government passed the Superfund law in 1980. The resulting Superfund cleanup operation demolished the neighborhood, ending in 2004. In 1988, New York State Department of Health Commissioner David Axelrod called the Love Canal incident a "national symbol of a failure to exercise a sense of concern for future generations". The Love Canal incident...