I can tell you now that this was one of the most upsetting of my interviews. It was clear to me that Hooker Chemical was unwilling and incapable of assuming any responsibility for the deaths, cancers, leukemias, and miscarriages at Love Canal.
Love Canal is a canal bed used by Hooker to bury 20,000 tons of chemical residues and then covered with clay. The land was deeded over to the local school board, which had been eyeing it eagerly for new school construction, and all legal liability for future problems transferred from the company to the new owner. The deed warned that chemical wastes were buried there. It did not say what kind or how much. But the wastes would never have percolated to the surface if dirt from the top had not been later removed for fill and the clay cap lacerated by city workers digging sewers through the canal, Hooker officials contend.
The company even sent its own lawyers to school board meetings to remind the board that there were "dangerous" chemicals buried at the site and that the land should not be sold to developers for the construction of homes. Five years after the canal land was sold, the company learned that several children had received chemical burns from playing near the dump, where some of the buried drums had become exposed and were sticking up out of the ground. Inexplicably, Hooker remained publicly silent about the newly discovered danger. The school board was informed, but neither its officials nor those of the company attempted to alert local residents. How long does a company have to look out for property it no longer owns, Hooker officials have since asked.
Ironically, Love Canal may in fact have been one of Hooker's best managed waste operations. While the barrels were lying dormant inside the canal during the 1950s and 1960s, Hooker employees were busily stacking 20,000 drums of toxic waste on top of sandy, porous soil near a Michigan lake. They were filling waste pits and holding ponds with chemical residues at Hyde Park, just over the Niagara Falls city line. With the rains, the ponds spilled over to the ground and through drainage ditches to a nearby creek that feeds the Niagara River.
More than 80,000 tons of chemical wastes, including substantial amounts of toxic pesticide component residues, were landfilled and the site would overflow periodically into drainage ditches in nearby Bloody Run Creek, which empties into the Niagara River.
Lathrop, California-Tons of hazardous chemical wastes, including a pesticide later banned by the federal government as a suspected cause of cancer and sterility, were dumped into surface ponds or buried at Hooker's Lathrop plant for at least 10 years, contaminating the groundwater.
Montague, Michigan-The company stored some 20,000 barrels of toxic C-56 residues on a wooded stretch of sandy soil behind its Montague plant for more than 15 years. The leaching of the wastes into the ground, combined with the downward movement of what the state says was 70 other toxic chemicals disposed of on the site, caused the contamination of nearly two billion gallons of groundwater, which threatened a nearby lake.
There is Taft, Louisiana, White Springs, Florida and Hicksville, Long Island.
To this day, Hooker (Now Occidental) refuses to accept responsibility for the sickness at these, and many other of their dumping sites.