Selection 23

Controversy at Love Canal

Beverly Paigen

This article starts by talking about the toxic wastes dumped into Love Canal. The Hooker chemical company dumped over 200 different kinds of chemicals into an empty canal in 1942 and then "sealed" it up. Later an elementary school was built on the site with housing developments all around it. People began to report high levels of birth defects, miscarriages, and mental retardation in newborns. The author, Paigen, was working for the department of health at the time and began studying the causes of these effects and whether they were genetic, geographic, or randomly distributed. She discovered that the high clusters of disease where located at locations of existing swales, swamps, and ponds, where the chemicals in the ground were accumulating. The health department denied the facts that the chemicals underneath Love Canal were causing the disease at first based on the Warburton and Fraser study and statistics they had received. Eventually, they realized that it was the chemicals on site and began evacuating the pregnant women and young children before they eventually relocated the entire families. The controversy was that the state knew there was toxic chemicals buried beneath the site and Hooker Chemical warned them not to build a school, but they did anyway and did not inform the residents. Hooker Chemical was not liable for any lawsuit because of a specific clause in the bill of sale and claims that they used the best technology at the time to dispose of the chemicals. However evidence suggests that because they were interested in profit gain they used the least expensive methods to dispose of the chemicals. When the residents turned to the health department for help and were largely ignored they viewed the department as not meeting its goals and responsibilities, they were angry since they paid for their salaries through taxes. It takes such a long time to reach resolutions in controversies like this one because: the department of health doesn't want to seem favourable to one side, the state only wants to evacuate those who would certainly be effected, there is a need for information gathered from different groups so the outcomes are accurate, threats are made to those who work for the state that disagree with their decisions (whistle blowers), the violation of social controls of scientific behaviour, and it is very hard for the entire party to agree on all aspects of their resolution strategy. Many of the controversies of Love Canal were stated as scientific issues but were actually ethical issues and the controversy would have been resolved easier if the ethics had been openly stated and understood.