The Love Canal essays

The Love Canal essays Love Canal was named after its creator William T. Love and its construction began in the 1890s (http://onlineethics.org/environment/lcanal/timeline.html). The project was never finished and an extremely large, seemingly useless hole was left in the ground in the Niagara Falls area. Almost 40 years later, when the area of Niagara Falls began to industrialize, a use for this gaping hole was found. Different businesses and industrial corporations started to manufacture goods and products and with the manufacture of these came the unwanted additive of industrial wastes. During the 1940s these companies looked at the unused canal as an easily accessible place to dump their wastes. During the 1940s and 50s, the Hooker Chemical Company, filled the canal, later named the "Love Canal", with about 21,000 tons of organic solvents, acids, and pesticides as well as their by-products, many of them causing cancer or birth defects (http://onlineethics.org/environment/lcanal/timeline.html). Once the canal was full, Hooker widened the canal in order to accommodate even more waste. It then covered it with clay, which was supposed to keep moisture away from the chemicals and act as a barrier seal. It was The City of Niagara Falls that started the dumping however, when in1920, the canal was sold in a public auction to the municipality for the purpose of using it as a landfill (http://onlineethics.org/environment/lcanal/timeline.html). The Army joined in and dumped chemical warfare material and "parts of the Manhattan Project. Hooker joined in 1942 negotiating with Niagara Falls in an effort to use it as a chemical dump and so the canal became a container of four-hundred plus chemicals, including sewage, "landfill" and nuclear hardware (http://onlineethics.org/environment/lcanal/timeline.html). Dumping occurred in the Northern Section, from 1942 to 1946, then in the Southern Section from 1946 to 1954, with some dumping in the Central Section at th...