To: i-node who wrote (617734 ) 6/29/2011 3:08:56 PM From: tejek Respond to There's never any evidence until after the fact.....like with Love Canal and cigarettes. These kind of claims have been made since the country was been founded only to be overturened by reality. Hooker Chemical had sold the site to the Niagara Falls School Board in 1953 for $1, with a deed explicitly detailing the presence of the waste,[1] and including a liability limitation clause about the contamination. The construction efforts of housing development, combined with particularly heavy rainstorms, released the chemical waste, leading to a public health emergency and an urban planning scandal. Hooker Chemical was found to be negligent in their disposal of waste, though not reckless in the sale of the land, in what became a test case for liability clauses. The dumpsite was discovered and investigated by the local newspaper, the Niagara Falls Gazette, from 1976 through the evacuation in 1978. Potential health problems were first raised by reporter Michael H. Brown in July 1978. en.wikipedia.org As to cigarettes, the story was entirely different. You're talking about a highly addictive substance where its manufacturers were part of the fabric of the American economy since the earliest days of the country. They had plenty of money and CONTROLLED the science on the subject, which made it easy to mislead the public -- and the addictive nature of the substance made it astoundingly difficult to get people to stop using it. We don’t know enough about hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to judge whether the process will contaminate drinking water supplies, harm the environment, and have harmful effects on human health.
