March 18, 2004

Love Canal declared clean

The (in)famous Love Canal -- Superfund site #1 has been declared by the federal Environmental Protection Agency to be clean and the site has been removed from the Superfund list of contaminated sites. As the NY Times reports: bq. Two decades after Love Canal became the first polluted site on the newly created Superfund list, federal officials announced yesterday that the neighborhood that epitomized environmental horror in the late 1970's was clean enough to be taken off the list. bq. Hundreds of families were evacuated from the working-class Love Canal section of Niagara Falls, N.Y., after deadly chemicals started oozing through the ground into basements and a school, burning children and pets and, according to experts, causing birth defects and miscarriages. The neighborhood had been built on a 19th-century canal where a toxic mix of more than 80 industrial chemicals had been buried. The EPA Superfund website is here and on this page, you can use several methods to search for and locate Superfund sites. I am sitting less than five miles from three sites. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside... Posted by DaveH at March 18, 2004 12:03 PM