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When Jennifer and Patrick Blake moved into their house in the Hickory Woods neighborhood of Buffalo, N.Y., 10 years ago, they planted flowers in the garden and dreamed of filling the three bedrooms with children. Patrick, a firefighter, was thrilled to land a brand-new home near where he'd grown up. Because the working-class neighborhood was part of a much-touted city-revitalization plan, buyers got $20,000 subsidies. But the Blakes soon questioned whether they'd paid a steeper price. They were digging holes for a fence when they noticed strange, jet-black ash and shiny clumps of rock in their yard. The lumps turned out to be coke waste, toxic leftovers from a former steelmaking plant across the street. Four months after their son, Matthew, was born in 1995, he began to suffer developmental delays--and the Blakes wondered whether the black dirt was to blame. Now 8, Matthew is legally blind and cannot speak or even hold his own cup. One of his few pleasures is jumping on the trampoline his parents have set up in the backyard to keep him from playing on the grass. "I'm terrified to have any more children," says Jennifer, 31, who is among the 70 homeowners to file lawsuits against the old steel companies, the city of Buffalo and its urban-renewal agency. "All I want is out of the house."
Though the Blakes are too young to remember it, an eerily similar scenario unfolded 25 years ago just 25 miles away in the Niagara Falls neighborhood of Love Canal. Homes and schools had been built around land that had once served as a dumping ground for a toxic brew of industrial-waste chemicals. Frantic over a rash of health problems, many residents wanted to leave, but couldn't sell their tainted houses. Led by housewife Lois Gibbs, they pressured state and federal officials with a barrage of protests, media coverage and lawsuits. Eventually, the effort forced President Jimmy Carter to declare a health emergency, evacuate families and offer cash for their homes. Love Canal proved that ordinary citizens could take on the system--and win. The case also changed the way the nation viewed toxic waste, sparking the creation of the Superfund law, which forced polluters to pay for cleanups and made them more cautious about handling waste.
With more than half the 1,500 sites on the Superfund National Priorities List already cleaned up, most Americans assume the toxic-waste crisis is behind them. "We can rest assured that there aren't any more Love Canals out there," says Marianne Horinko, acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. But environmentalists caution that many of the remaining Superfund sites face delays and funding cuts; this year the EPA will finish only about 40 sites, compared with 87 in the late 1990s. A report due out shortly from the pro-environmental U.S. Public Interest Research Group blames the slowdown on underfunding by the Bush administration and complains that taxpayers, not polluters, are now shouldering most of the costs. (Horinko admits that taxpayers are picking up more of the tab but says the Superfund program has enough money to do its job. She pins the slowdown on today's complicated cleanups.) "There's tons more work to be done," says Gibbs, who has become an environmental activist. But now, --she says, "it's much more difficult to convince the American people that a problem exists."
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Hickory Woods residents like the Blakes don't need any convincing. When they bought their homes, no one bothered to mention that the vacant land across the street was a state Superfund site. Tests have found high levels of toxins like arsenic, lead and polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons in the neighborhood. Linking contamination to health problems has always been controversial--scientists never made definitive connections at Love Canal, either--but residents worry about the effects of the thick black dust they constantly scrape off their window screens. Diane Radder wonders about her son's respiratory problems, her own breast cancer and the 73 rosebushes that died in her backyard, one by one. Other neighbors keep their children off the grass and grow tomatoes in plastic buckets. When her two young daughters developed elevated blood-arsenic levels, Karen Chwalinski took the girls to live with her mother in a nearby suburb, leaving her husband and dog to keep the house occupied. "It's almost like we're separated," she says. "But we can't afford to leave."
Though city officials have acknowledged contamination at Hickory Woods, the state health department declared that it posed "no immediate health risk." The city has launched a $16 million effort to clean up the steel-plant site--as well as a playground and several privately owned lots. "We think we've attacked the biggest environmental threat," says Richard Stanton, a lawyer for the Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency, who insists there's no comparison between the volatile liquid chemical waste at Love Canal and the milder contamination at Hickory Woods.
Still, residents are nervous about living in the area during the cleanup. They hoped Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello would deliver on his 2001 promise to make them "whole." They thought that meant buying up their homes. But with the city in a fiscal crisis of its own, all they've gotten is a $15,000 compensation offer--and that requires them to stay put for an additional five years. "It was a very bad deal," says Richard Lippes, an environmental lawyer who handled Love Canal litigation and has now filed the Hickory Woods lawsuits.
A cleanup could take years. At Love Canal, the EPA, barred from moving the toxic waste, installed "containment" systems to keep it from leaking out. Today parts of the area--including the canal itself, a grassy field that looks like a golf course--are separated from nearby houses by an unmarked chain-link fence. The highest-risk homes were demolished a few years ago, while others were rehabbed and resold. At Hickory Woods, residents find it hard to imagine they'll ever feel safe enough to stay. "I don't trust my government," says Jennifer Blake. And that could be the most lasting Love Canal legacy of all.
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