One of America's largest natural disasters. Superfund, the hazardous material cleanup group, does not seem to work well. And People can save so much money by not cleaning up an area that causes serious mutations just by drinking the water.
The news site Chemical and Engineering News has an article on it from November 17th, 2008 on the atrocities committed at Love Canal. Love Canal was a neighborhood in New York State where a company originally named Hooker Chemical dumped thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals into the water and underground. The chemicals that were buried underground eventually started causing birth defects like one child was born mentally retarded, deaf, and had teeth problems. The company that dumped all of their waste around and inside of this town didn’t dispose properly of it. They thought that putting it into this one area underground that was surrounded by impermeable clay would keep it secure and safe, but their plan (if they actually had one) failed. The people were so unaware of this that they even build a school right on top of the burial site. In the article it said that kids used to see bubbles forming from the dirt and would throw rocks at it to try and pop it.
Superfund tried to clean it up, but eventually declared the town uninhabitable. People could still live there if they wanted to, but no more new houses could be built. The people that lived there while they were unaware of the problem had no idea that the chemicals were seeping into their basements. One woman said she would just hold her breath so she could go do laundry and the kids were not allowed in the basement. People can still go to live there now like one guy named George Krebutz moved into the area with the highest contamination levels. No one told him about it and he did not know until he Googled “Love Canal”. Hopefully he has gotten out of that town by now. |
