How awesome would it be if government had no regulations? Check with the people up at Love Canal. I'm sure that they can tell you.
The Love Canal Tragedy About EPA US EPA
"In the 1920s the seeds of a genuine nightmare were planted. The canal was turned into a municipal and industrial chemical dumpsite.
Landfills can of course be an environmentally acceptable method of hazardous waste disposal, assuming they are properly sited, managed, and regulated. Love Canal will always remain a perfect historical example of how not to run such an operation.
In 1953, the Hooker Chemical Company, then the owners and operators of the property, covered the canal with earth and sold it to the city for one dollar.
It was a bad buy.
In the late '50s, about 100 homes and a school were built at the site. Perhaps it wasn't William T. Love's model city, but it was a solid, working-class community. For a while.
On the first day of August, 1978, the lead paragraph of a front-page story in the New York Times read:
NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y.--Twenty five years after the Hooker Chemical Company stopped using the Love Canal here as an industrial dump, 82 different compounds, 11 of them suspected carcinogens, have been percolating upward through the soil, their drum containers rotting and leaching their contents into the backyards and basements of 100 homes and a public school built on the banks of the canal.
In an article prepared for the February, 1978 EPA Journal, I wrote, regarding chemical dumpsites in general, that "even though some of these landfills have been closed down, they may stand like ticking time bombs." Just months later, Love Canal exploded.
The explosion was triggered by a record amount of rainfall. Shortly thereafter, the leaching began.
I visited the canal area at that time. Corroding waste-disposal drums could be seen breaking up through the grounds of bac. Trees and gardens were turning black and dying. One entire swimming pool had been had been popped up from its foundation, afloat now on a small sea of chemicals. Puddles of noxious substances were pointed out to me by the residents. Some of these puddles were in their yards, some were in their basements, others yet were on the school grounds. Everywhere the air had a faint, choking smell. Children returned from play with burns on their hands and faces.
And then there were the birth defects. The New York State Health Department is continuing an investigation into a disturbingly high rate of miscarriages, along with five birth-defect cases detected thus far in the area.
I recall talking with the father of one the children with birth defects. "I heard someone from the press saying that there were only five cases of birth defects here," he told me. "When you go back to your people at EPA, please don't use the phrase 'only five cases.' People must realize that this is a tiny community. Five birth defect cases here is terrifying."
A large percentage of people in Love Canal are also being closely observed because of detected high white-blood-cell counts, a possible precursor of leukemia"kyards
A bad deal? It was a deal the government of niagra demanded, the city of niagra wanted to build a school on the property, the city began eminent domain proceedings to seize the land. Hookervexplicitly stated a toxic waste dump was no place for a school.
The city government literally created the toxic waste dump, decades before.
The Love Canal was literally created by government, coincidentally, Occidental chemical owned Hooker, that is Al Gore's Occidental Chemical.