It wasn't a dump of responsibility by the chemical company. Hooker chemical took more care with the initial dump, than was customary or legally required at the time. (Also much of the waste was from public dumpers such as the city of Niagara Falls, the Army, and various civilian federal departments) The company was pressured to give the land to the school district, and then they warned the school district that there was dangerous chemicals buried in that land. They made sure the school district would actually see direct evidence of the chemicals. Also Hooker wanted to restrict the future use of the property, even to the point of trying to get a provision that the title would revert to Hooker if the school district tried to use the property as anything else but parkland, but the school board rejected any such restrictions.
If Hooker wanted to be clear of all responsibility, and even get some money rather than the nominal $1 they got, all they had to do was let the school district sieze the land through emmienent domain.
Hookers claim of why it didn't do this was -
..that it had wanted any future propertyholder there to know of the dangerous chemicals and that it had therefore agreed to donate the property, subject to the Board’s recognition that, to quote Hooker’s letter of October 16, 1952, to the Board, "in view of the nature of the property and the purposes for which it has been used, it will be necessary for us to have special provisions incorporated into the deed with respect to the use of the property and other pertinent matters." Had the land been condemned and seized, says Hooker, the company would have been unable to air its concerns to all future owners of the property...
reason.com
Now I can see why you don't want to take Hooker's word for it, but there isn't any other obvious motive. By acting the way they did, they recieved no money other than $1, and where much less protected from liability than they would have been had they made the school district sieze the land, rather then comming to an agreement to basically donate it.
The school district apparently just wanted cheap land, and either didn't care about the potential danger and liability, or thought that Hooker was exaggerating it.
And in fact the direct medical danger may have been exaggerated
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" Since 1997, the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) has been trying to "fully measure" the allegedly "profound and devastating effects" of Love Canal by conducting a comprehensive series of follow up studies of former Love Canal residents. The NYSDOH has been able to enroll 96 percent of the former residents who had participated in earlier studies.
The studies are ongoing, but preliminary results indicate that Love Canal's effects have fortunately been somewhat less than "devastating." The April 2002 NYSDOH Love Canal newsletter reports, "Based on information so far, Love Canal residents have the same life expectancy and cancer incidence rates as upstate New York and Niagara County residents. We do have enough statistical power in the overall findings to feel confident in them." To reiterate, the study found: "Canal residents are at no greater risk of death or cancer than upstate New York or Niagara County residents."
What about reproductive effects? After all, the New York Times just reported again that experts found that the chemical wastes seeping out of Love Canal "caus[ed] miscarriages and birth defects." NYSDOH's September 2002 newsletter reports that researchers found overall that the "average birth weight of Canal [neighborhood] babies was the same as upstate New York and Niagara County averages," and that "the rate of premature births for Love Canal women was the same as upstate New York and Niagara County women." However, mothers "living on the Canal [itself] during their pregnancy had more very low birth weight babies than mothers living outside the study area," and they "had more premature births than mothers who had moved away." These findings are essentially mirror images of one another since babies born prematurely tend to have lower birth weights. The study also found that "the rate of birth defects for Love Canal mothers was slightly higher than upstate New York and Niagara County (3% compared to 2%)."
For comparison, I tried numerous times to pry the actual statistics for very low birth weight, prematurity, and birth defects for Love Canal residents out of the New York State Department of Health. However, I ran into a bureaucratic wall at the NYSDOH public affairs office. I don't think they have anything to hide—it's probably just the usual bureaucratic bungling and sloth. But just for the record, the percent of very low birth weight babies born in the United States was 1.11 percent in 2002, and 6.12 percent are born with moderately low birth weight according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). And 10.4 percent of American babies are born prematurely, according to CDC data.
Figures vary on the percentage of babies born each year with birth defects. For example, the March of Dimes says that about 150,000 babies are born with birth defects each year, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says that three out of every 100 babies are born with some kind of birth defect. According to the CDC, about 120,000 babies out of the 4 million or so born in the U.S. every year have birth defects, which again translates to a 3 percent rate. If these numbers are correct, then the 3 percent rate for babies born with birth defects to mothers living on Love Canal is not extraordinary, though it may be the case that areas in upstate New York outside of Love Canal are fortunate to experience a lower 2 percent birth defect rate. "
reason.com
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But exaggerated doesn't necessarily mean false, there may have been some real health consequences, and even the estimated medical danger wasn't real, the exposure to lawsuits and the decline of property values clearly was a real problem.
The school district comes out of this looking the worst it was at worst foolish, and apparently reckless negligent in pushing Hooker to fork over the property, and perhaps malicious in its later sale of the property
"Following Hooker’s successful defeat of the Buildings and Grounds Committee’s proposal to sell Love Canal property to developers in 1957, the Board I sought every means possible to transfer liability for the property to somebody else. They wanted to dump the Canal like a hot potato. First, they tried to palm it off onto the local Junior Chamber of Commerce for a playground area. But the Jaycees wouldn’t move ahead without liability insurance, which, it seems, no firm was willing to supply. So that deal fell through. Then, on June 2, 1960, the Board "dedicated to the City" the section of Canal property that lay north of the school. Hooker’s restrictive provisions were included in the deed.
All that remained to unload now was the southern section. This was put up for public auction in December 1961. On the bidding sheet was duly imprinted the last paragraph of the deed from Hooker, with all those ghoulish warnings, and with one revealing addition: the indemnification clause to protect Hooker was now expanded with the mention also of the Board of Ed, so that the Board would pass liability along with the property. The difference this time was that the new owner would be receiving the property in dangerous condition and, in spite of the warnings in the deed, without any mention of all of Hooker’s admonitions concerning suitable use of the property.
When the sole bid was opened, the Board found that they had been offered $1,200, which they voted, unanimously, to accept. The fellow who bought the land–a former firefighter, now a motel-keeper, by the name of Ralph Capone–ended up paying $5,400 in local paving assessments and $1,500 in property taxes, even though the city, every time he tried to get a building permit to develop 50 or so houses, confronted him with regulations that, as he later put it, "would have cost me millions." Then in 1972 the city ordered him to do $100,000 worth of work on his plot "to correct…strong chemical odors permeating from ground surface" and to alleviate "potentially hazardous conditions" there. Finally, after spending a total of $13,000 on the property, he gave up in 1974 and sold this bundle of headaches to a friend for $100.
Capone says that when he bought the property for $1,200 he had considered himself lucky. The release clause on the bidding sheet and in the deed had struck him as having been just so much lawyerese, hardly meriting a second wink. As he recently put it, in an interview with the Niagara Gazette’s Paul Westmoore, "Back then I never would have believed a public body would have sold land it felt was dangerous." In fact, however, the Board had known quite well what it was selling; and the minutes of the Board, under the date of January 4, 1962, show the following reaction to Capone’s bid: "Three members of the committee visited this plot of land on 99th Street and checked from one corner to the other. We all agreed that, if we could sell the property , it was the thing to do."
reason.com |
