Contaminated Love Canal Soil Going to Nebraska Incinerator

- by Richard Pier­sol, March 1, 2015, Lin­coln Jour­nal Star

About a thou­sand tons of con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed soil from the noto­ri­ous Love Canal envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter in New York is being shipped by rail to Kim­ball for incin­er­a­tion because the com­pa­ny that is dis­pos­ing of it ran into objec­tions from Cana­di­ans, who did­n’t want it.

Love Canal, a neigh­bor­hood in Nia­gara Falls, New York, became a sym­bol for envi­ron­men­tal abuse in the late 1970s when it was dis­cov­ered that 22,000 tons of tox­ic waste had been buried there by Hook­er Chem­i­cal Co. and then ignored for decades by local authorities.

Prop­er­ty devel­op­ment, weath­er and the removal of a heavy clay cap released the tox­ic waste and allowed it to leach under the town, lead­ing to wide­spread and severe health con­se­quences, vast lit­i­ga­tion and final­ly, the fed­er­al Super­fund law. 

The exca­va­tion of Love Canal waste from a Wheat­field, New York, land­fill resumed recent­ly, accord­ing to the Buf­fa­lo News. 

The New York Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Con­ser­va­tion said that Glenn Springs Hold­ings, the con­trac­tor on the cleanup at Wheat­field, dropped its plans to haul 1,600 cubic yards of waste by truck to an incin­er­a­tor in Sar­nia, Ontario, owned by Clean Har­bors Inc., the news­pa­per reported.

After res­i­dents and politi­cians in Sar­nia protest­ed, the New York DEC said Glenn Springs decid­ed to truck the waste to CSX Trans­porta­tion, then send it by rail to sites owned by Clean Har­bors in the Nebras­ka Pan­han­dle and in Utah.

Phillip Retal­lick, senior vice pres­i­dent of com­pli­ance and reg­u­la­to­ry affairs for Clean Har­bors, con­firmed about 1,000 tons of soil con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed with residue from pes­ti­cides and her­bi­cides were in the shipment. 

Bri­an McManus, a spokesman for Nebraska’s Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Qual­i­ty, said the waste is expect­ed to arrive this month. The Kim­ball incin­er­a­tion site is along Nebras­ka 71, about five miles south of town. 

The com­pa­ny’s incin­er­a­tion plant has a per­mit to dis­pose of the waste, McManus said, and there’s no rea­son to believe the com­pa­ny is not in com­pli­ance with its permits.

Retal­lick said the com­pa­ny has numer­ous options for han­dling this type of waste, and the Kim­ball plant, which he has been to many times, is ful­ly capable. 

“It’s low con­cen­tra­tion so it’s the residue of the organ­ics in a lot of soil,” he said.

The plant is designed to han­dle the tox­ic mate­r­i­al itself, not just the residue, so there is “a tremen­dous mar­gin of safe­ty,” Retal­lick said. “The con­cen­tra­tion in reme­di­a­tion is much less than in processed waste.”

Clear Har­bors’ web­site says it owns near­ly 70 per­cent of North Amer­i­ca’s incin­er­a­tion capac­i­ty, and its six incin­er­a­tion sites in the U.S. and Cana­da “ensure we can meet any incin­er­a­tion require­ment from any customer.”

Clean Har­bors, based in Nor­well, Mass­a­chu­setts, is a pub­licly trad­ed company. 

The Love Canal sto­ry gripped the nation for years in the late 1970s and ear­ly 1980s. 

Hook­er Chem­i­cal’s dump site in Nia­gara Falls was in oper­a­tion until 1953, after which it was cov­ered with soil.

Rec­ol­lec­tions of the Love Canal dis­as­ter gen­er­al­ly blame Hook­er Chem­i­cal, but local author­i­ties ignored the com­pa­ny’s warn­ings of safe­ty issues when they acquired the land for devel­op­ment, includ­ing schools and hous­ing. Hook­er, now owned by Occi­den­tal Petro­le­um Corp., believed it had been released from all legal liability.

By the late 1970s, birth defects, mis­car­riages and oth­er health con­se­quences led to the rev­e­la­tion by local news media of the mis­han­dling of the tox­ic dump.

It was the first fed­er­al­ly declared state of emer­gency that did­n’t have to do with weath­er or a nat­ur­al disaster. 

Even­tu­al­ly, the gov­ern­ment relo­cat­ed more than 800 fam­i­lies and reim­bursed them for their homes, and Con­gress passed the Com­pre­hen­sive Envi­ron­men­tal Response, Com­pen­sa­tion, and Lia­bil­i­ty Act, known as the Super­fund Act. Because the act con­tained a “retroac­tive lia­bil­i­ty” pro­vi­sion, Occi­den­tal was held liable for cleanup of the waste even though it said it had fol­lowed all applic­a­ble U.S. laws when dis­pos­ing of it.

Law­suits filed by res­i­dents were set­tled after the Love Canal dis­as­ter, but in recent years, new ones have been filed.

The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment also super­vised the ren­o­va­tion of the land­fill, which remains a fenced-off mound today, accord­ing to the Buf­fa­lo News. 

A decade before the dis­as­ter, in June and July 1968, crews from the New York Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion hauled about 1,600 cubic yards of waste from the south end of Love Canal to the Wheat­field site about 5 miles away after dis­turb­ing the chem­i­cals while build­ing the LaSalle Express­way, the Buf­fa­lo News reported.

That’s the waste that would be incin­er­at­ed at Kim­ball and in Utah.