The Love Canal scandal galvanized a band of working-class mothers to escape a toxic wasteland, radically expanded the powers of the EPA and helped launch the career of a young Tennessee congressman — Al Gore Jr.
PARADISE FALLS: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe
Casper agreed to the meeting with McDougall, hung up the phone, and didn’t think anything about it. As an aide to Congressman John LaFalce — the man representing New York’s 36th Congressional District — Casper was always meeting with someone from the suburbs north of Buffalo. It was her job to keep local officials happy and make sure they thought highly of the congressman, and she did it well, especially of late.
Bonnie Casper, second from left, and Congressman John LaFalce, right, tour the Love Canal area in August 1978. | Mickey H. Osterreicher But as they sat down to lunch that day — Casper, McDougall and the consultant, an environmental engineer named Richard Leonard — McDougall dissuaded her of this notion and got straight to the point. They weren’t there to discuss Mirex, pesticides or problems with the water in Niagara Falls. They had a different issue, they explained, involving Hooker Chemical, and this one was potentially more dangerous than Mirex.
The Love Canal site after landfill was completed, circa 1948. | Courtesy of the University Archives, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, deeply entrenched in the city and connected in all the places that mattered most. Hooker men — and they were always men — often descended from true Yankee blood, graduated from Ivy League schools, entertained at the Niagara Falls Country Club and attended Presbyterian services in the suburbs on Sunday mornings with their wives and children.
In 1941, the new Hooker man in charge — a Dartmouth graduate and a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence — set his sights on buying an abandoned canal just a few miles upriver, a ragged waterway carved into the ground long ago by an entrepreneur named William T. Love. A power company owned the land these days, but it was unused, and by the spring of 1942 the two parties had worked out an agreement for Hooker to utilize this location “as a waste disposal area.
But over the course of the spring of 1952, Hooker executives began to come around on the idea — at least, in part, for one reason. “The Love Canal property,” one executive said, “is rapidly becoming a liability because of housing projects in the near vicinity.” And by the following year, 1953, Hooker agreed to sell the land to the board of education for a dollar. There was just one caveat: The company wouldn’t be liable for any future damages that the chemicals might cause.
But in Casper’s opinion, none of that mattered. He needed to go out there, she told him. He needed to visit the site as soon as he could. “I think this is an issue that we could do something about,” she told LaFalce. “We should at least visit the place with appropriate officials to let them know that we are trying.”
Schroeder’s mother sprayed down the men with a garden hose that day while they waited for help to arrive. But the hose wasn’t strong enough to put out the fires that broke out at the dump every once in a while — when the chemical drums cracked open and the contents inside spontaneously ignited, and the few people who lived there at the time had to call the fire department to report that the land was burning. One night, in 1949, it took firefighters four hours to knock down the flames.
Coey didn’t reply to LaFalce right away. Instead, Bonnie Casper heard from Hooker’s vice president of corporate affairs, its public relations chief, Charles Cain, who wanted Casper to know that they were on it. Coey had received LaFalce’s letter. He would be getting back in touch soon, and Cain would love to meet with the congressman to discuss the matter in person. Yet when Casper offered Cain a chance to schedule an appointment with LaFalce, he didn’t take it.
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