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Alonzo, you’re on the board for CHEJ. How did that happen? What’s your connection to CHEJ?
I’ve been on the board of CHEJ for over 25 years. I met Lois before she formed CHEJ. She’d come [/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][to East Liverpool] to testify — we were battling this facility here and she came and testified on our behalf and then when she formed CHEJ, I think maybe a year or two later, and I accepted.
What was Lois coming to testify about?
In our community we have the world’s largest hazardous waste facility permitted. We’ve been trying to stop it from day one. She and I knew some of the same people and we invited her here to testify. She came and helped demonstrate.
What hazardous waste facility?
Heritage Thermal Services, formerly known as WTI.
We’ve been fighting this since they started. We took action against permitting them to build. We requested that both the state and federal EPA monitor them, and they’ve had numerous violations cited against them. This facility should have never been built from a legal standpoint, environmental standpoint, or health standpoint.
How did you become active in the organizing community? Why fight against Heritage Thermal Services?
Well, you know originally when this was first proposed I was in favor of it, at that time, keep in mind we didn’t have any organization here. First, they said it was going to be safe, and it was going to attract industry. They were gonna sell cheap steam and electricity. To apply for their permits to build they were required to hold these hearings. We found out by attending these hearings their original statements were false. It was introduced to us as a “Waste to Energy Facility” but we found out it was actually a hazardous waste facility. So we learnt from that. Then we formed Save Our County and that was started to oppose the facility.
What is your organization up to now?
We are currently in the midst of a lawsuit against Heritage Thermal Service regarding their classification as a habitual violator by the U.S. EPA. We’ve been in court [with them] a number of times. We are set to go October 17th in the United States courthouse in Youngstown, Oh regarding our suit. We are going to present to the judge what we’d like to get out of the suit. Fighting Heritage Thermal Services is my organization’s, Save our County, main concern. We have other organizations throughout the country that our fighting their own local battles and we have gone to them and assisted them. We help other organizations in the same way that CHEJ does. We’ve learnt that from being affiliated with CHEJ.
What did you start off doing in activism?
Demonstrations at first. We held demonstrations at the facility. Martin Sheen came once and 33 of us got arrested, including Martin. We had a trial [regarding our arrest] and we won our case! We were charged with trespassing and we went to court we had a trial and we were found innocent. We had peaceful demonstrations here, demonstrations in D.C. and we were arrested there, too.
What effect has Heritage Thermal Facilities had on your community?
Right now, East Liverpool has been designated by the Ohio Department of Health to have a higher cancer rate than the state or national average of health. We were told this was going to happen to us before the Heritage Thermal Services moved in, and time has proven it to be true. Our school age children are breathing this poisonous air which has had an affect on their learning ability and attention span. We have a high rate of children with learning disabilities. This was all predicted. They said it would be a while, ten to fifteen years, and now it’s all come to fruition.
What would you recommend to communities for advice in organizing?
The first thing we tell communities is to organize and try to put people in positions of authority that are on your side, in other words, councilmen or commissioners. You have to make sure these officials understand the negative effects and are on your side, that they understand what’s going on. Ask them questions, do they know about the effects that the facility will have on the environment? These facilities have such a dramatic negative health effect on this community. This is a very important aspect that groups have to address before getting started.
Any words of advice for citizens trying to organize?
Do not be mislead by what these facilities say initially. Try to find out as much as you can about the facility itself, what they are going to do, and try to make sure that they are held accountable for all of their violations. [/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
Tag: #LoveCanal
James Goodman, Democrat & Chronicle. Professor Richard Newman chronicles the history of health & environmental activism of Lois Gibbs during her time in Love Canal. This is the foundation of the movement behind the Center for Health, Environment, & Justice.
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A chain-link fence around 70 acres of land in the southern part of Niagara Falls is the most readily apparent sign that this was ground zero for the Love Canal environmental disaster.
Underneath are about 22,000 tons of hazardous chemical waste, dumped there — much of it in 55-gallon drums — between 1942 and 1953 by the nearby Hooker Chemical Co.
Rochester Institute of Technology history professor Richard Newman details this disaster — and the citizen movement it spawned — in his new book, Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present, published by Oxford University Press.
The dangers of the dump came to a head in August 1978, when New York state Health Commissioner Robert Whalen declared Love Canal “a great and imminent peril to health,” followed by President Jimmy Carter issuing a declaration of national emergency.
Testing by the Health Department revealed the presence of 82 chemicals — including such carcinogens as TCE (trichloroethylene) and benzene — in locations beyond the dump, in air samples, basements and monitoring wells.
But that was not the last word.
Love Canal residents in the area continued to voice their concerns — leading to an evacuation of about 1,000 families and the enactment of such laws as the 1980 Superfund legislation for cleanup of hazardous sites and its 1986 amendment providing the public with the right to know what chemicals are being dumped.
“This is the first time that a human-made disaster made national and international headlines and the first time a citizen’s movement impacted national environmental policy,” Newman said in a recent interview.
Most visible among the homegrown activists was Lois Gibbs, who moved to Love Canal in 1974 with her family. She soon found that her young son, Michael, began suffering seizures and immune system problems.
Her daughter, Melissa, who was born in 1975, suffered problems with her platelets, which cause the blood to clot. Bruises began appearing on her body.
“I had thousands of people call after Love Canal. They had questions like, ‘How did you do that?’” Gibbs said in a recent interview.
Newman’s book also tells about what he calls the “underside of the chemical century.”
And there is a Rochester connection. Hooker Electrochemical Co., as the company was formally called, was founded by Elon Huntington Hooker, an engineer and entrepreneur. He came from a prominent Rochester family and earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Rochester.
Hooker Chemical, like other emerging chemical companies, gave short shrift to the dangers posed by its pollutants.
“As he aged, Elon Huntington Hooker continued to celebrate the power, not the pitfalls, of chemical innovation,” writes Newman.
Grass-roots organizing
It was a group of residents-turned-activists who, after they and their children experienced the ill effects of Love Canal, made the pollution of this dump a national issue.
In 1978, Gibbs founded the Love Canal Homeowners Association, which sounded the alarm.
The evacuations began in 1978 and reached about 1,000 by 1980, with the federal and state governments, according to Newman, putting up $27 million for families to evacuate.
Gibbs, who was among those evacuated, moved to Falls Church, Virginia, where she established the Center for Health, Environment and Justice.
Luella Kenny, who lived in one of the hot spots near Love Canal, was among the 1,322 former residents who filed a lawsuit against Occidental Petroleum Corp., which in 1968 bought Hooker Chemical, and various governmental entities in Niagara County for damages to health and property.
Kenny, who was a cancer researcher at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, said the death of her 7-year-old son, Jon, from kidney disease was linked to the exposure of chemicals and his suppressed immune system.
In the settlement of the lawsuit, the judge ruled that her son had suffered a “wrongful death,” and ordered an undisclosed award, said Kenny.
The settlement also provided $1 million for the establishment of the Love Canal Medical Fund to help pay for medical expenses related to Love Canal. Kenny was the first president and is now vice president of the fund
“Love Canal was a man-made disaster. People should realize that they are responsible for the planet,” Kenny said.
Newman tells how state officials, in their study of Love Canal, documented increases in birth defects, miscarriages and various illnesses.
But officials were caught off balance, having to deal with so many health and environmental concerns at one time.
“Indeed, the very definition of ‘disaster’ still revolved around natural events like hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and earthquakes. But leaking chemical waste into nearby homes? This was simply not on the political radar,” writes Newman.
While other books have been written about Love Canal, Newman provides a comprehensive, start-to-finish history, with an emphasis on how the residents of Love Canal — people who had no background in political organizing — forced the issues.
They confronted public officials, questioned the halfway measures that government proposed and showed that the pollution was not an act of God, but rather the result of inadequate controls on industry.
In June 1978, Gibbs began going door-to-door with a petition to have children removed from the elementary school built on the dump.
Roots of pollution
Newman traces the history of Love Canal, which is in a region that in the 1720s served as a trading center for the French.
With companies taking advantage of its hydropower, the Niagara Frontier — most noted for Niagara Falls — became fertile ground for industrial development.
In 1894, entrepreneur William Love broke ground for what he envisioned as a power canal — diverting water for industrial development.
But within three years, Love ran out of money and left a big hole — about a mile long — in the ground.
That hole became the main dump for Hooker Chemical.
Elon Hooker was the patriarch of the company.
“He helped launch the American Chemical Century,” writes Newman. “Hooker backed an economic sector ready to take off and take over.”
A friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, Hooker aligned himself with the Progressive Party, and when Roosevelt made a bid for re-election in 1912, Hooker served as the party’s national treasurer.
Hooker Chemical took hold in the 1940s, producing not only bleaching powder and caustic soda but also explosives, rubber materials, disinfectants and defoliants used during World War II.
This was long before the full effects of hazardous chemicals were understood.
By 1953, the dump — Love Canal — was full.
Making a dangerous situation all the more so, the Niagara Falls School Board purchased Love Canal from Hooker Chemical that April for $1.
“Not since the Dutch gained Manhattan for a few guilders would a New York land transaction inspire so much subsequent scrutiny,” writes Newman.
Even though Hooker’s executive vice president told of the potentially hazardous “nature of the property,” the transfer of ownership went through and the construction of a new school ran into problems.
The foundation sank but, undeterred, the building was moved a short distance away.
Agents of change
Newman describes himself as an historian of American reform movements.
He is author, co-author or editor of six books on abolitionists and environmental history.
Newman returned to RIT for this school year after spending two years as director of The Library Co. of Philadelphia, established by Ben Franklin in 1731.
His first book, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic, found that religion “was a cornerstone of abolitionism throughout the Revolutionary and early national periods.”
In Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers, Newman focused on a former slave who “helped define the meaning of liberation theology, the notion that God sided with oppressed people.”
Newman, 49, who grew up in Buffalo and earned his bachelor’s and doctorate in history at the State University of New York at Buffalo, grew up seeing TV news reports about Love Canal.
“It was always a curiosity, but I never visited it until I became a professor teaching environmental history at RIT,” he said.
Newman, who joined the RIT faculty in 1998, first visited Love Canal a year later.
“My first impression of Love Canal was that it wasn’t marked and people tried to erase it from the landscape,” Newman said. “I wanted to uncover the important nature of Love Canal and the way activists changed American environmentalism.”
To read the original version of this article, click here.
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