Transitions - Sustainable Design: The Science of Sustainability and Green Engineering - page 99

About this time, the Niagara Falls board of education was about to construct
a new elementary school, and the old Love Canal seemed a perfect spot. This
area was part of a growing suburb, with densely packed single-family residences
on streets paralleling the old canal. A school on this site seemed like a perfect
solution, so it was built.
In the 1960s the first complaints began, and they intensified during the early
1970s. The groundwater table rose during those years and brought to the sur-
face some of the buried chemicals. Children in the school playground were seen
playing with strange 55-gallon drums that popped up out of the ground. The con-
taminated liquids started to ooze into the basements of nearby residents, causing
odor and reports of health problems. More important perhaps, the contaminated
liquid was found to have entered the storm sewers and was being discharged
upstream of the water intake for the Niagara Falls water treatment plant.
The situation reached a crisis point and President Jimmy Carter declared an
environmental emergency in 1978, resulting in the evacuation of 950 families in
an area of 10 square blocks around the canal. But the solution presented a difficult
engineering problem. Excavating the waste would have been dangerous work and
would probably have caused the death of some of the workers. Digging up the
waste would also have exposed it to the atmosphere, resulting in uncontrolled
toxic air emissions. Finally, there was the question as to what would be done with
the extracted waste. Since it was mixed, no single solution such as incineration
would have been appropriate. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
finally decided that the only thing to be done with this dump was to isolate it and
continue to monitor and treat the groundwater. The contaminated soil on the
school site was excavated, detoxified, and stabilized and the building was razed.
All the sewers were cleaned, removing 62,000 tons of sediment that had to be
treated and removed to a remote site. At the present time, the groundwater is still
being pumped and treated, thus preventing further contamination.
The cost is staggering, and a final accounting is still not available. Occidental
Chemical paid $ 129 million and continues to pay for oversight and monitoring.
The rest of the funds are from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and
from the U.S. Army, which was found to have contributed waste to the canal.
Cleaning Up Messes
International and domestic agencies have established sets of steps to determine
the potential for a release of contaminants from a waste site. In the United
States, the steps shown in Figure B3.2 comprise the Superfund cleanup process
because they have been developed as regulations under the Comprehensive
Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, more popularly
known as Superfund. The first step in this process is a preliminary assessment
and site inspection, from which the site is ranked in the agency's hazard ranking