It’s been almost 50 years since the Love Canal environmental disaster, but some current and former residents are concerned the decades-old issue could be resurfacing.
“It's like the sequel, but the same storyline," said former residen Nathan Korson. "I mean, let's be completely honest on it.”
Korson moved his family from Niagara Falls more than 10 years ago, with worries about living a few streets from Love Canal. Korson’s son, Logan, has Mosaic Trisomy 5P and other health complications, like heart issues, so the fear was that being near Love Canal could make things worse.
Joseph Colato lives outside the area deemed to be unsafe, but that hasn’t made him feel better about finding chemical residue in his basement after heavy rains.
“Last year, it rained (really) hard, and I got some water down there. Once the water went away, it left this white residue, this white stain on the concrete down there," he said. I've never really seen anything like that. I didn't know where it was from, I knew it came kind of from the ground, from that storm, so I really just don't touch it … It's not easy, sometimes, living in a house where you're afraid to step on something or touch something in your own basement.”
Colato been living in the home almost 20 years but sticks around because he feels it’s too late to leave.
The Love Canal site was covered with a 3-foot-thick clay cap in 1980. Then a polyethylene liner was added in 1985 that was 41 mils, or about 4-hundreths of an inch thick.
“We've had the cover over it for over 40 years,” said Michael Basile, the Environmental Protection Agency’s community involvement coordinator for Love Canal.
There is no defined lifespan on how long the liners can last, he said.
“You would have to have some very sophisticated equipment to go into the ground, to penetrate both the synthetic liner and the 40-mil cover of the cap," he said. "And that's what's used today at all landfills, whether they're hazardous waste or municipal landfills in the State of New York, to protect human health and the environment.”
A prior Congressional investigation voices concerns that the liner should be replaced within 20 years.
EPA engineers maintain there’s no worry of the liner needing replacement, Basile said.
Some people did choose to keep living in areas that were contaminated even after the other homes were demolished, but those people were aware of the risks, Basile said.
But not everyone has had that chance.
The Korsons lived near Love Canal in the mid-2000s. No one told Nathan Korson the area was potentially dangerous, but he started to ask questions when there were concerning smells in the area, he said.
“The same stuff's happening again as what happened originally during Love Canal. Government's doing the exact same thing," he said. "EPA, DEC, ‘Oh, we'll be happy to sit down and talk with you,’ and then as soon as they sit down and talk to you, ‘We'll get back to you.’ and they never talk to you again, and they avoid your phone calls. They don't respond to your emails.”
In his time as a community liaison, Basile says he has not received any complaints from residents in at least five years.
The EPA also does regular testing at Love Canal, providing monthly readings from more than 100 stations that read the site’s groundwater chemicals, Basile said.
“There's no way that any waste is going to percolate north, coming up toward the ground level at Love Canal. And if there ever was any waste doing that, the monitoring wells on the top of the canal, and you could look through the chain link fence, you would see the monitoring wells," he said. "If there was a problem, we would be communicating with the responsible party. And there have been no reasons to do that.”
According to the Congressional investigation, there’s the potential for error if groundwater is the only thing being tested.
Basile says air quality testing is also done any time work is done at the site. There were no air quality concerns when the most recent tests were done, he said, but that was more than 10 years ago.
The EPA files reports every five years with groundwater chemical results, and no chemical concerns were reported from the beginning of 2024.
