Introduction
Sometimes human activities lower the quality ordegradethe land by putting hazardous
substance in the soil and water. A well-known example of this is the story of Love Canal in
New York. The story began in the 1950’s, when a local chemical company put dangerous
chemicals in steel drum containers. They buried the containers in Love Canal, an abandoned
waterway near Niagara Falls, New York (Figure19.8). They then covered the containers
with soil and sold the land to the local school system.
Figure 19.8: Steel barrels like these were used to contain the hazardous chemicals at Love
Canal. After several years, they began to leak the chemicals into the soil and groundwater,
which caused many people to become sick. ( 7 )
The school system built a school on the land. The city of Niagara Falls also built more than
800 homes near Love Canal. Several years later, people who lived there began to notice bad
chemical smells in their homes. Children developed burns after playing in the soil, and they
were often sick. A woman living in the area, named Lois Gibbs, organized a group of citizens
called the ’Love Canal Homeowners Association’ to try to find out why their children kept
getting sick (Figure19.9). They discovered that their homes and school were sitting on top
of the site where the dangerous chemicals had been buried. They believed that the old steel
drums used to contain the dangerous chemicals were leaking and making them and their
children sick. They demanded that the government take action to clean up the area and
remove the chemicals.
By 1979, the United States government fully realized that the old drums were indeed leaking
dangerous chemicals into the soil and water where the people lived and went to school.
The government gave money to many of the people to move somewhere safer and began