Published: August 04, 2008 04:52 pm      

LOVE CANAL: Former residents return to site with a message

If it weren’t for the barren lots where homes once stood, it might have felt like old times at Love Canal.

Lois Gibbs and members of her organization, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, addressed a throng of reporters Friday morning near the corner of 100th Street and Colvin Boulevard. Several former residents of the neighborhood were there also.

The occasion was the 30th anniversary of the first state of emergency declaration in the neighborhood. On Aug. 2, 1978, state Health Commissioner Robert Whalen ordered the closure of the 99th Street School and recommended the evacuation of pregnant women and young children.

Eventually, more than 950 families were relocated and 350 homes and the school were demolished as the situation generated local outcry and national headlines. It prompted a federal state of emergency declaration from President Jimmy Carter on Aug. 7, 1978, and was the inspiration for both the state and federal Superfund programs.

A 70-acre fenced cap over the original 16-acre landfill now covers the site of the former canal, where Hooker Chemical Company dumped nearly 22,000 tons of toxic waste from 1942 to 1953.

Years of testing, cleanup and studies ensued in the wake of the initial reports. The widespread publicity made former resident Gibbs, the most outspoken of the neighborhood residents and former president of the Love Canal Homeowners Association, a household name. And it made Love Canal infamous.

But 30 years later, the people who did so much when Love Canal became an issue aren’t sitting back and reminiscing. The problems don’t only exist in the past, they say.

Walking in Friday’s procession was 30-year old Renee Retton, a Ransomville resident whose family lived on 100th Street.

“I’m trying to carry on Lois’ fight and involve kids form the area,” said Retton, who is attending Niagara County Community College for a nursing degree.

Retton, whose younger sister died at child birth before the family moved out of the area and whose father was just diagnosed with cancer, spoke of the need to continue testing on residents. A press release at the event said she plans to follow in Gibbs’ footsteps and make environmental advocacy her life’s work.

There too was Luella Kenny, whose young child, Jon, died in October 1978 from an immune response disease. After that, she became a prominent voice urging government action in the area, logging the condition of the creeks behind her house.

One day in 1979, after she’d submitted written testimony in state Supreme Court to protest the manner of some cleanup work there, a toxicologist came to her house to view the creek. While he was watching, a bird landed and took a drink of water. Then it dropped dead.

“They put that bird in the freezer that was in my house,” said Kenny, who had moved away from the house at that time. “I never used that freezer again.”

Gibbs and scientist Stephen Lester used the occasion to cast doubt on a state Department of Health draft health study, released in 2006, the goal of which was to track and document negative health consequences on former residents of the neighborhood.

Among Gibbs and Lester’s criticisms are that the study is an incomplete portrait because it does not address health problems of residents while they lived in the area and includes only a fraction of the neighborhood’s residents.

“The health department had a very limited method from the beginning,” said Lester, CHEJ’s science director and a state on-site science expert at Love Canal in the late 1970s. “The biggest criticism is it’s computer-generated data. It doesn’t involve people.”

To the north of the landfill is a thriving neighborhood, the site of once-abandoned homes that has been repopulated and now looks much as it once did, with working class homeowners and their children.

To Patty Grenzy, who once lived at 793 100th St., that isn’t a good thing.

“I was floored and shocked they resold those homes,” Grenzy said. “I was enraged because if anybody did their homework you could see their homes are still contaminated.”

Underground swales connect the landfill to a creek which run through the neighborhood, she said.

That sentiment was echoed by Gibbs who said homeowners were “bamboozled” into buying cheap homes there.

At the very least, the state Department of Health and federal Environmental Protection Agency should do health studies there to determine if people are being harmed by contamination, Gibbs said.

A spokesman for the EPA said many studies and cleanups have been done in that area and that the state ordered the area safe in 1988 after rigorous testing.

“We would have not ever recommended the homes relivable if it weren’t that the state Department of Health determined the areas west of the canal and north of Colvin were suitable for rehabilitation,” the spokesman, Mike Basile, said.

Later Friday, a reception and program at the VFW Post 917 on Seneca Avenue featured a series of speakers, including local and state officials. One notable portion of the evening was the announcement of CHEJ’s “Love Canals of Today,” which included the Bethlehem Steel site in Buffalo, CWM Chemical Services in Lewiston and Porter, FMC in Middleport and the West Valley nuclear site outside Buffalo.

When asked how they were nominated, Gibbs smiled.

“They nominated themselves,” she said.