Industrial chemical waste is safely managed and does not pose long-term risks to communities.

In the summer of 1978, Lois Gibbs made an appointment to see the principal of the 99th Street School in Niagara Falls, New York. Her son Michael had been enrolled there for a year. She wanted him transferred. The school sat atop the eastern end of Love Canal, a sixteen-acre trench that Hooker Chemical Company had used from 1942 to 1953 as a disposal site for more than 21,000 tons of chemical waste, including chlorinated solvents, dioxins, and benzene. When Hooker sold the site to the Niagara Falls school board in 1953 for one dollar, the deed contained a clause noting the presence of buried chemicals. The school board built an elementary school on top of it.

For nearly two decades, the buried waste remained buried. Then, in the early 1970s, unusually heavy rainfall raised the water table and began pushing chemicals toward the surface. By 1976, residents were finding oily black residue in their basements and yards. Children playing in the neighborhood were returning home with chemical burns on their skin. The Niagara Falls Gazette published articles describing the leaching. State environmental officials began monitoring. What was happening was not a dispute about chemistry, it was visible, smell-able, and spreading into people's homes.

The case Gibbs made to school officials was direct: local children were becoming sick at rates that seemed far above normal, and the most likely explanation was the chemical dump beneath the school. She had arrived at this conclusion by reading a newspaper article, correlating its findings with illness patterns she observed among the children she knew. School and state officials responded that the site was safe. That response was consistent with the dominant assumption of postwar American industrial policy: that burial was disposal, that chemicals stayed where they were put, and that any risk to nearby communities was either negligible or hypothetical.

What changed in 1978 was the accumulation of independent evidence too large to dismiss. Beverly Paigen, a cancer researcher at Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo, conducted her own health surveys of Love Canal residents and documented rates of miscarriage, birth defects, and seizure disorders that were extraordinary. New York Governor Hugh Carey declared a state emergency in August 1978 and announced the relocation of 239 families closest to the canal. President Carter declared a federal health emergency, the first such declaration ever made in response to a chemical contamination site, shortly after.

The relocation eventually expanded to cover more than 900 families as the full extent of the contamination became clear. What the Love Canal investigation revealed was not the story of a single bad actor: Hooker Chemical had operated within the legal standards of its era, which imposed essentially no requirement to prevent waste from migrating, no obligation to notify buyers or neighbors of what was buried, and no mechanism for long-term monitoring. Love Canal was evidence of an entire framework of industrial waste management built on assumptions that turned out to be wrong, that burial was permanent, that chemicals stayed in place, and that distance protected nearby communities.

The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, known as Superfund, was signed into law by Carter in December 1980, creating for the first time a federal mechanism for cleaning up hazardous waste sites and holding responsible parties financially liable for remediation. More than 1,300 sites would eventually be listed on the National Priorities List. The chemical industry's long-standing claim that its waste management practices posed no risk to surrounding communities did not survive contact with the evidence from a single neighborhood in Niagara Falls.