[Ghost Written] Forty Years After Love Canal, Communities are Still Suffering from Chemical Contamination
By Lois Gibbs, As published in the Columbus Dispatch, October 22, 2019
Forty years ago, when the first news cameras arrived to film my community in Niagara Falls about a pollution crisis happening in our neighborhood, I had no clue a group of women in upstate New York would eventually spark a national movement. As a young mother, I had discovered my family was living next to a former Hooker Chemical waste disposal site — breathing the contaminated air and my child’s school’s playground on top of the toxic waste.
As we began noticing trends of unexplained birth defects in our community’s children and clusters of cancer, our story became an internationally-cited pollution tragedy. Love Canal was the perfect storm of corporate irresponsibility and government negligence. And yet, eventually, we won our case. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was pressured to step in and relocate our community. Then, the agency eventually established the Superfund program to clean up contaminated, abandoned toxic dumps.
We’ve made progress, but we are still fighting. Our government still lets industries who are mass producing poorly-studied chemicals off easy. Corporations coat our cooking pans, our clothing, carpets, fast food wrappers, even dental floss with “non-stick” Teflon chemicals to make fabric stain-proof and items waterproof. The same per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) chemicals can smother a high temperature fire — and now are used at every military base and airport across the country. This rampant use continues despite the health and environmental consequences.
PFAS chemicals never break down in the environment. Instead, they migrate through air and groundwater and accumulate in our bodies, where they increase the risk of cancer and harm our immune and reproductive systems. Nearly every American has measurable amounts of PFAS in them. However, the problem is much more severe for people living downstream from military bases and industrial sites. Millions of mothers have the same fear I did — that they’ve passed these chemicals to their children, during pregnancy, nursing or mixing bottles with contaminated tap water. And they need Congress to step in to put an end to this reckless pattern, because the Trump administration and corporations won’t.
And now, because of this massive toxic buildup, the military is dumping unused fighting foams in waste incinerators across the country, concentrating the pollution in low income communities. While it once was Love Canal, it is now places like East Liverpool, Ohio that keep me awake at night.
After Love Canal, I started an organization — the Center for Health, Environment & Justice — to help address the needs of communities living in the boundaries of corporate pollution and environmental injustice. In Ohio, I spent years with community activists fighting the construction of the East Liverpool incinerator slated to be built in the center of the small town on the banks of the Ohio River, just steps from an elementary school. I joined up with local activists and heard a familiar choir of families similarly worried about their kids’ safety and health. Unfortunately, the incinerator was approved and the East Liverpool community has become ground zero as a dumping ground for the nation’s hazardous waste.
Just as we feared, the incinerator has been a disaster. In 2013 it exploded, covering the adjacent community in toxic ash. Scientists at the University of Cincinnati partnered with the community to study impacts of the incinerator on children. They traced high levels of manganese from the smoke stack to the bodies of neighborhood children, and found that those with the highest levels did poorly in school and had lower IQ measurements.
Last year, Heritage Environmental Services, who runs the incinerator, settled with the EPA for nearly $600,00 for the explosion. Yet it has not been held fully accountable for the 150 permit violations we tallied between 2000 and 2005. Instead, the company was rewarded with lucrative contracts with the Department of Defense to burn thousands of gallons of its PFAS wastes.
Right now, we have a key moment to stop this unchecked, unjust pollution. Congress is voting on the military appropriations bill this month — which includes a dozen strong measures that will begin to safeguard Americans from PFAS. The rules will end the use of PFAS in military firefighting, provide clean water to farmers and dairies who’ve had their wells contaminated by the military, bring PFAS chemicals into the Superfund program and, most importantly to me, halt the incineration of PFAS in places like East Liverpool.
Forty years after Love Canal, I’ve come to learn I am just one of the concerned parents in the thousands of similarly polluted American communities. I’ve recognized the terrible irony we faced; Living close to a documented waste site and having children with visible birth defects, was able to prompt a national outcry and move us to safety. Due to systemic racism or geographic isolation, many communities don’t get the national attention that prompts these swift actions. I say it’s past time we demand our elected officials to step in and keep us safe from these environmental and health disasters. Congress must pass the PFAS protections in the military spending bill to bring vital assistance to incinerator communities, military families, fire fighters, and American children.
