Love Canal - Aftermath

Aftermath

Currently, houses in the residential areas on the east and west sides of the canal have been demolished. All that remains on the west side are abandoned residential streets. Some older east side residents, whose houses stand alone in the demolished neighborhood, chose to stay. It was estimated that fewer than 90 of the original 900 families opted to remain. They were willing to remain as long as they were guaranteed that their homes were in a relatively safe area. On June 4, 1980, the Love Canal Area Revitalization Agency (LCARA) was founded to restore the area. The area north of Love Canal became known as Black Creek Village. LCARA wanted to resell 300 homes that had been originally bought by New York when the residents were relocated. These homes were farther away from where the chemicals had been dumped. The most toxic area (16 acres (65,000 m2)) has been reburied with a thick plastic liner, clay and dirt. A 2.4 metres (7 ft 10 in) high barbed wire fence was constructed around this area. It has been calculated that 248 separate chemicals, including 60 kilograms (130 lb) of dioxin, have been unearthed from the canal.

In 1998, Dr. Elizabeth Whelan wrote an editorial about the Canal in which she stated that when the media started calling the Canal a "public health time bomb," it created hysteria. She declared that people were not falling ill due to exposure to chemical waste, but from stress caused by the media. Besides double the rate of birth defects to children born while living on Love Canal, a follow-up study two decades after the incident demonstrated the largest effect of Love Canal was stress due to media attention.

Love Canal, along with Times Beach, Missouri, are important in United States environmental history as the two sites that in large part led to the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA). CERCLA is much more commonly referred to as "Superfund" because of the fund established by the act to help the clean-up of toxic pollution in residential locations such as Love Canal. It has been stated that Love Canal has "become the symbol for what happens when hazardous industrial products are not confined to the workplace but 'hit people where they live' in inestimable amounts."

Love Canal was not an isolated case. Eckardt C. Beck, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during the Love Canal crisis suggested that there are probably hundreds of similar dumpsites. President Carter declared that discovering these dumpsites was "one of the grimmest discoveries of the modern era." Had the residents of Love Canal been aware that they were residing on toxic chemicals, most would not have moved there in the first place. Beck noted that one main problem remains that ownership of such chemical companies can change over the years making liability difficult to assign (a problem that would be addressed by CERCLA, or the Superfund Act). Beck contended that increased commitment was necessary to develop controls that would "defuse future Love Canals."

The free market environmentalist movement has often cited the Love Canal incident as a consequence of government decision-makers not taking responsibility for their decisions. Stroup writes, "The school district owning the land had a laudable but narrow goal: it wanted to provide education cheaply for district children. Government decision makers are seldom held accountable for broader social goals in the way that private owners are by liability rules and potential profits."

The legacy of the disaster spawned a fictionalized made-for-TV film entitled Lois Gibbs and the Love Canal (1982). A documentary entitled In Our Own Backyard was released in the U.S. in 1983, and Modern Marvels retold the disaster in 2004. The film Tootsie has a character attempting to produce a play called "Return To Love Canal". Joyce Carol Oates has brought the story of Love Canal into her 2004 novel The Falls however setting the suspicions of harm to the 1960s.