Superfund's Toxic History: How America's Most Contaminated Sites Were Created

In the early 1940s, the Hooker Chemical Company purchased a retired section of canal in Niagara Falls, New York — a 16-acre trench that had been dug and abandoned in the 1890s as part of an industrial development scheme. Between 1942 and 1953, Hooker disposed of approximately 21,000 tons of chemical waste in the canal, including carbamates, chlorinated benzenes, dioxins, and other industrial byproducts. When the canal was nearly full, it was covered with clay and sold to the Niagara Falls Board of Education for $1 — with a deed clause noting the chemical waste and attempting to limit liability.

The Board of Education built an elementary school on the site. The surrounding land was developed into a residential neighbourhood called Love Canal.

For decades, chemical waste leached through the clay cover and worked through the soil toward the basements and backyards of the homes built around it. By the mid-1970s, children were playing in puddles that turned their feet red, mysterious corroded drums were surfacing in backyards, and residents were noting elevated rates of miscarriage, birth defects, and illness. Nobody in authority was listening.

Lois Gibbs was a 27-year-old housewife with no background in science or activism when she began asking questions about the illnesses in her neighbourhood in 1978. What she had was a dogged insistence on being taken seriously, a talent for organising the community around her, and a willingness to confront authorities who preferred the problem to stay quiet.

Her son Michael had been enrolled in the elementary school built over the waste site. After she read a local newspaper article about the chemical waste beneath the school, she pulled him out of the school — and then began surveying her neighbours, mapping illnesses, and building the epidemiological picture that the government had failed to construct.

The community epidemiology Gibbs's door-to-door surveys found elevated rates of miscarriage, stillbirth, and birth defects on the streets closest to the original canal. She found that the patterns of illness tracked the underground swales — the old creek beds — that carried leachate away from the central canal site. Her maps anticipated the formal epidemiological studies that followed.

When New York State health officials visited and dismissed her findings, she escalated to the federal level. When the EPA came and hedged, she escalated further. In August 1978, Governor Hugh Carey announced the evacuation of the 239 families nearest the canal and the purchase of their homes. Two years later, President Carter declared Love Canal a federal emergency and 900 more families were evacuated.

The Superfund connection Love Canal was the event that created CERCLA — the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act — signed into law by President Carter in December 1980. The legislation established the federal Superfund programme for cleaning up contaminated sites and established the principle that responsible parties, not taxpayers, bear the cost of remediation.

The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act — CERCLA, enacted in 1980 — is one of the most consequential pieces of environmental legislation in US history.

What CERCLA established: • Federal authority to respond to hazardous substance releases and compel cleanup • The National Priorities List (NPL) — the list of the most contaminated sites in the US, currently containing approximately 1,300 sites • Strict liability for responsible parties — meaning that companies that contributed to contamination are liable regardless of whether their dumping was legal at the time • Joint and several liability — meaning any responsible party can be held liable for the entire cleanup cost and must seek contribution from other parties separately • A trust fund (the Hazardous Substance Superfund) initially funded by a tax on chemical and petroleum industries

The programme's achievements The Superfund programme has completed remediation at over 400 NPL sites and has ongoing cleanup at the remaining sites. The programme has removed or contained contamination from some of the most severely polluted places in the United States.

The programme's failures The superfund tax that originally funded the programme expired in 1995 and was not renewed until 2021. During the intervening 26 years, the programme was funded from general treasury appropriations at levels insufficient to accelerate cleanup. Hundreds of sites have been on the NPL for decades without completed remediation, in some cases because the responsible parties have gone bankrupt or cannot be identified.

The Superfund programme's achievements and limitations are both directly relevant to people using PollutionProfile's Historical Exposure Recorder to understand their environmental history.

What the Superfund database tells you For each NPL site, the EPA maintains: • A site description including what contaminants are present and at what concentrations • Health assessment documents from ATSDR identifying the chemicals of concern and their potential health effects • Cleanup status and completed milestones • Operable units — the specific areas or media (groundwater, soil, surface water) being addressed

The limitation of NPL-only searches The NPL contains approximately 1,300 sites — but there are an estimated 450,000 contaminated sites in the United States that are not on the NPL, including state-regulated brownfields, underground storage tank sites, and contaminated properties undergoing voluntary remediation. NPL-only searches miss most contaminated sites.

Lois Gibbs's ongoing work Gibbs founded the Center for Health, Environment & Justice in 1981 — the organisation that has supported community groups fighting contamination across the US for over four decades. Now 74, she continues to work with communities facing the same basic pattern that Love Canal presented: corporate waste, inadequate cleanup, community illness, and the long fight for recognition and remediation.

PollutionProfile's Historical Exposure Recorder cross-references your address history against the Superfund database, the TRI, and ATSDR health assessment data — providing the starting point for understanding whether your residential history intersected with any of the contaminated sites that Love Canal's story created the legal framework to address.