What is the Love Canal lawsuit?
Love Canal was the site of a landfill where massive contamination occurred in the 1970s, causing health and property damage. The current suits claim a containment structure built in the 1980s to store toxic waste has leaked.
What happened with the Love Canal?
The canal was turned into a municipal and industrial chemical dumpsite. Landfills can of course be an environmentally acceptable method of hazardous waste disposal, assuming they are properly sited, managed, and regulated.
Was the Love Canal lawsuit settled?
Closing a major chapter in one of the nation’s most notorious environmental disasters, the company that buried chemical wastes at Love Canal reached an out-of-court settlement with New York State yesterday, agreeing to pay $98 million and to take on cleanup work that will extend for decades, at a cost of millions more.
Who paid for the Love Canal cleanup?
The Occidental Chemical Corp.
The Occidental Chemical Corp. yesterday agreed to pay $129 million to cover the federal government’s cleanup costs at Love Canal, closing another chapter in the nation’s most notorious toxic dumping case.
What are the long term effects of the Love Canal?
The Love Canal landfill contained approximately 21,800 tons of chemical wastes. Substantial migration and contamination of soil, groundwater and basement air of nearby homes was apparent in the late 1970s.
What is the current state of Love Canal?
| Love Canal | |
|---|---|
| City | Niagara Falls |
| County | Niagara County |
| State | New York |
| Coordinates | 43°04′50″N 78°56′56″W |
How many lawsuits were filed by Love Canal residents?
Still many lawsuits were filed by Love Canal residents. A $2.5 billion lawsuit on behalf of 900 residents was launched against the Hooker Chemical Company and three public agencies, but the New York State Supreme Court rejected it.
Is Love Canal a public health emergency?
Not long after the EPA tests were released Commissioner Whalen declared the site of Love Canal a health emergency and implemented a state of emergency for the region.
Did Love Canal cause chromosomal damage?
A month after New York State filed their lawsuit the EPA announced that of 36 Love Canal residents tested 11 had chromosomal damage, undoubtedly caused by the chemicals they had been exposed to.
What laws were passed after the Love Canal disaster?
Lawmakers used the wide publicity from the Love Canal disaster to enact policy that would require those who created the pollution to clean it up. The most prominent legislation passed was the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, more commonly known as the Superfund.