Niagara: A History of the Falls (45 page)

Near where the parts of the Thing surfaced the inflated rubber mattress was found floating. Red’s shoes, which he had removed after climbing into the craft, also turned up. But the broken body of the riverman didn’t appear until the following day near the
Maid of the Mist
landing.

Thus the Hill legend began its tragic end. Corky would die a year later, killed by a falling rock while working on the new Ontario Hydro plant, Sir Adam Beck No. 2. Major Lloyd Hill would die an alcoholic, by his own hand in a jail cell. It was he, standing over the remains of the Thing, who uttered his brother’s epitaph.

“Well,” said Major, “he put on a great show.”

Chapter Eleven

1
The witch’s end of fairyland
2
The park man
3
The river takes over
4
The fighting Tuscarora

1
The witch’s end of fairyland

Whenever he gazed across the Niagara River at the manicured vistas on the Canadian side, Robert Moses was consumed with frustration. He had been appointed head of the New York State Power Authority on March 8, 1954, charged with the daunting task of building the largest hydroelectric plant in the western world at Lewiston. Directly opposite he could also see the newest Canadian plant, Sir Adam Beck No. 2, taking shape; indeed, by the time Moses got the job, Beck 2 was almost complete. But the American project had now been delayed four years by congressional wrangling. A venomous conflict between the proponents of public power and its antagonists, who attacked public ownership as “creeping socialism,” had not yet been resolved.

Moses saw something else on the Canadian side that made him envious. The Niagara Parks Commission now had under its care the entire clifftop from the Falls to Queenston. The handsome drive along the river took tourists past green lawns, public parks, recreation trails, gardens, a golf course, heritage buildings, and historic groves – everything from an art library to a floral clock. By contrast, the dingy American side, apart from the original state reservation, had been left to haphazard exploitation by private interests. The results – a welter of grime-coated factories, railroad tracks, telephone poles, and coal piles – were, to Moses, simply appalling.

The main entrance to the city of Niagara Falls, New York, led along Buffalo Avenue, a dreary, two-mile wasteland of electro-chemical and electro-metallurgical factories – industries attracted to the community by the prospect of cheap Falls power. But now the atmosphere was acrid with fumes rising from the tall smokestacks. Motorists rolled up their car windows when passing through “the Witch’s End of Fairyland,” as one writer called it.

This was the legacy of the heroic age of invention – the reality behind the Utopia that the earlier entrepreneurs had contemplated. The dream city that was supposed to take shape above the cataract had become nightmarish. Pollution was now a fact of life for the citizens of Niagara Falls, the majority of whom worked for or were provided for by the same companies that polluted the atmosphere – Olin Corporation, Union Carbide, Du Pont, and Hooker Chemical. The city fathers cared less about the tourist industry than they did about the thousands of blue-collar jobs the factories provided.

Robert Moses’ plan was to circumvent the gritty Buffalo Avenue entrance by building a parkway along the river. “I am a park man,” he had said more than once. He had, indeed, invented the modern parkway – a ribbon of divided highway running between two sylvan strips of grass and trees. Besides his new post as chairman of the power authority, Moses was chairman of the State Council on Parks, chairman of the Tri-borough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, coordinator for federal-state highway construction in New York City, and a member of the Long Island State Power Commission. He had been a public servant for all of his career and was used to wearing several hats. At one period he had held ten appointive jobs simultaneously.

Moses had already built 416 miles of parkway in New York State. Now, in his mind’s eye, he could contemplate an impressive stretch of parkland running along the American side of the Niagara gorge. He would construct it from the massive mountain of earth, clay, and stone that would be available when the power tunnels and reservoir were excavated. Matching its Canadian counterpart, the park and road would finally frame the Niagara picture, and there was no doubt that once the power project was under way, Moses would pull it off. He had absolute authority and knew how to use it. But even if he had wished to, he could not eliminate the cloud of smog that hung over the city, causing the eyes to smart and the lungs to choke. It could be seen clearly by any air traveller – a dark mantle of greyish brown, masking the land below.

There was far worse pollution beneath the soil, but few were aware of that in 1954 when Moses, the park man, was named energy czar. In the various chemical waste dumps scattered about the area – all within earshot of the great natural wonder – potential disaster lurked.

One of the biggest producers of chemical waste was the Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation, named for Eldon Huntington Hooker, who had started his business in a three-room farmhouse and was by 1906 producing caustic soda from salt brine. The waste from Hooker Chemical and other companies stemmed from the revolution in organic chemistry that had occurred in the late thirties and forties. This had its origin in discoveries made just before the turn of the century, when scientists found that carbon, which is the principal component of coal and oil, has remarkable properties that allow its molecules to form long, complex chains and rings. On the eve of the Second World War, chemical companies began to use carbon to create thousands of new medicines, solvents, plastics, pesticides, weed killers, dyes, fabrics, preservatives, transformer fluids, and other products. These ranged from polyester clothing to 2, 4-D and were greeted enthusiastically as the harbingers of a dazzling new post-war world. But in manufacturing the new chemicals, the industry also created waste products that were unknown in nature, many so durable they would remain in the environment for years without breaking down. Some were soluble in fats but not water. Thus they could accumulate in the fish and animals eaten by humans.

By the late forties, with the chemical revolution in full swing and consumers demanding more and more of the new plastics and fabrics, Hooker needed a suitable place to dump the fast-accumulating waste. To the Hooker company, William Love’s old unfinished canal, dating back to the 1890s and used thereafter as a winter skating rink and a summer swimming hole, was the ideal dump site. Hooker first arranged with the owner, the local power company, to store wastes in the ditch. In 1947 Hooker bought the site.

The canal was a mile long, fifteen yards wide, and between ten and forty feet deep, built at right angles to the river. The company drained it, lined it with a casing of clay, and deposited in it twenty thousand tons of chemical waste contained in thousands of fifty-five-gallon metal barrels. A thin cap of clay and grass covered the whole. At the time this was considered an adequate safeguard. No one, apparently, foresaw that the barrels might rust or break, or that if they did their contents could leach through the clay with horrifying results. And few, if any, in those days realized there was a connection between the discarded chemicals and a wide range of health problems that included birth defects, liver damage, some chronic diseases, and cancer.

One man did raise a small warning flag. In 1948, a Boston scientist, Dr. Robert Mobbs, wrote in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
that one of the insecticide chemicals in the waste dump, lindane, was a possible cancer-causing agent. Years later, when a Hooker vice-president told a television audience that in the forties his company had no reason to be aware of hazardous wastes, Mobbs was outraged. “Did Hooker come looking for the evidence?” he asked. “Like hell they did. They ignored, minimized and suppressed the facts.…” If
he
had known about lindane, he asked, why hadn’t they?

That Hooker was concerned about future problems and wanted to purge itself of all liability became clear in 1953. By that time, the grass-covered canal was being using as a children’s playground. In May, the Niagara Falls Board of Education, reeling from the pressures of the post-war baby boom, agreed to buy the land from Hooker as part of an urgent plan of school construction. Parents in the burgeoning LaSalle district, in which Love Canal was located (between 97th and 99
^th
streets), were desperate for a school closer to their homes. When Hooker offered the property for a token dollar, the board jumped at it in the belief that the company was acting as a good corporate citizen.

It was no secret that the new 99th Street School would be built next to a dump of waste chemical products. That did not bother the nine members of the board, even though there was more than a hint that Hooker was trying to distance itself from any future controversy or liability involving the devil’s brew of chemicals that lay under the grass. There were, indeed, no fewer than eighty-two different substances hidden beside the future school site, including several carcinogens such as benzene, chloroform, lindane, trichloroethylene, and – the most dangerous of all – two hundred tons of trichlorophenol wastes, containing 130 pounds of dioxin, the deadliest small molecule known to mankind.

None of these details, of course, were known to the school board members, nor in many cases had the deadly effects of the chemicals been targeted. That lay in the future. The warning inherent in the Hooker deal didn’t bother anybody except the board’s attorney. If the deal went through, Hooker made clear, the Board of Education would assume “all risks and liability” involved in the use of the contaminated land. A second clause went further: “As a part of the consideration for this conveyance … no claim, suit, action or demand of any nature whatsoever shall ever be made [by the Board of Education] … for injury to a person or persons, including death resulting therefrom, or loss of or damage to property caused by reason of the presence of said industrial wastes.”

When the board’s lawyer, Ralph Boniello, read this, an alarm bell rang in his head. It was, he said later, “like waving a red flag in front of a bull.” He urged the board to hire a chemical engineer to make a study before accepting the Hooker offer. He pointed to the risk and liability it would incur if it took the property on the company’s terms. The nine members paid no heed.

The land was turned over to the city, and the 99th Street School was built. Alone among schools in the community, it had neither basement nor swimming pool because of fears that any excavation might damage the waste barrels. The four hundred grade schoolers trotted off to school each morning, often covering their faces with handkerchiefs to screen out the odours pervading the neighbourhood. Later they began to play with “firerocks” they found in a neighbouring field, which exploded with a shower of sparks when thrown against a wall or pavement. These were actually chunks of phosphorus from the Hooker plant. They burned the hands of some children who put them in their pockets.

In 1958, the Niagara Falls Air Pollution Department warned the Hooker company that several children had been burned by similar waste. The company sent two employees out to investigate. They found that wastes had surfaced on both sides of the canal. One, benzene hexachloride, was not only a carcinogen but could also poison the nervous system and cause convulsions. Hooker officials told the school board, but the board took no action. Nor did it warn any of the residents because it feared legal repercussions.

Nobody, indeed, wanted to rock the boat. The city was trying to attract industry, not repel it. Hooker employed thirty-two hundred blue-collar workers, paid taxes, and contributed to the local economy. As for the residents, their jobs for the most part depended on the presence of the big industrial firms.

As the years passed, the noxious fumes grew worse and seemed to be coming directly from the basements of some of the houses. People’s eyes seemed permanently red. The paint on some houses turned black. Potholes began to appear in the baseball diamond near the schoolyard. Children who stumbled into muddy ditches emerged covered with a strange oily substance. The city’s fire chief warned as early as 1964 that the fumes coming off the former dump could be a detriment to the health and well-being of residents in the area. But nothing was done. These conditions continued for a quarter of a century before the homeowners finally rebelled and Love Canal became a stench in the nostrils, not only of Niagara Falls but of the western world.

2
The park man

Robert Moses’ reputation as a man who got things done, even at the expense of others, made him an obvious choice to oversee the construction of the huge new generating plant on the American side of the Niagara River. His prime purpose, however, was to beautify the environs of the smog-shrouded community.

Those who were close to him had no doubt of that. John C. Bruel, who was secretary of the board of the New York State Power Authority, thought of Moses as a park man, not a hydro expert. “He didn’t know the first thing about electricity,” Bruel has said. “If he licked his finger and stuck it in a socket and it sparked, it was alive. That was all he knew.”

Moses had reached his seventieth year and was at the peak of his powers when work finally began on the ambitious project that would bear his name. Born of a middle-class Jewish family, he held a bachelor’s degree from Yale, a master’s from Oxford, and a doctorate from Columbia. In spite of that impeccable scholastic background, he had no interest in an academic life. He had spent forty-five years in the public service, and in the eyes of the press and much of the public he was a hero because of his ability to get things done. He always managed to bull his favourite projects through, pushing aside those who stood in his way and often wreaking vengeance on those who obstructed or criticized him.