Encounter 20 · 20 of 42 · 1978–1980
The housewives of Niagara
Lois Gibbs was a mother in a housing tract built over buried chemical waste. She did not start as an expert. She became a person who knocked on doors.
Love Canal, Niagara Falls, New York
A stranger does not arrive knowing why a school sat on a dump. William T. Love began a canal and did not finish it. From 1942 to 1953 Hooker Chemical put waste in the cut, on the order of twenty-one thousand tons. In 1953 the company covered the land and sold it to the Niagara Falls Board of Education for one dollar. The deed carried a long caveat meant to limit later liability. Houses followed. The 99th Street School followed.
Lois Gibbs was a mother on 101st Street. In the spring of 1978 her son Michael, at the school, was ill in ways later listed as seizure and blood disorder. Michael Brown’s reporting in the Niagara Gazette put chemicals under the neighborhood into print. She asked the school to transfer him. Then she walked with a clipboard, because no office was keeping the neighbors’ count: miscarriages, rashes, a child with a birth defect. Officials had language that made the lists sound like anecdote.
The order of knowing
- 1942–1953Dumping, then a one-dollar deed. Contemporaneous papers, later compiled.
- Spring–summer 1978A newspaper, a sick child, a clipboard. Love Canal Homeowners Association formed that summer.
- 2 August 1978New York State Health Department order: close the 99th Street School; pregnant women and children under two should leave. Contemporaneous.
- 7 August 1978Governor Carey; President Carter authorizes emergency financial aid, the first such use for a disaster that was not a flood or a storm. Inner-ring families begin to move.
1978
The tract
A kitchen table becoming a record. A house over a canal is imposed uncertainty, not a founder’s chosen risk.
1980
The later offices
In May, EPA officials were held in a house for some hours. Gibbs later described it without romance. A second federal emergency followed for families still there. CERCLA, Superfund, is December. The statute is not read backward into the clipboard.Superfund is a later statute. The 1978 tract did not know it was going to be a precedent.
Gibbs later wrote Love Canal: My Story (1982). That book is recollection. The 1978 knowing is a paper, a school, and a door.
Who knew first, and in what order: the company, the school board, the paper, the kitchen?
Private. No one else will see it.
Source
- institutional01 · U.S. EPA, “The Love Canal Tragedy”Dumping, 1953 sale, 1978 emergency aid, inner-ring relocation. Institutional chronology, compiled after.Record
- institutional02 · Center for Health, Environment & Justice2 August 1978 health order: close 99th Street School; pregnant women and children under two. Gibbs and the Homeowners Association.Record
Love Canal · 1978 · a kitchen table becoming a record