Niagara: A History of the Falls (54 page)

Lois Gibbs herself has said that she was the product of an American educational system that puts strong emphasis on grass-roots democracy. If a citizen had a problem, she believed, she had only to call city hall or the local newspaper and the difficulty would be resolved. She soon discovered that it didn’t work that way. Over the years she met and had to overcome an inflexible attitude of civic and political resistance. Almost immediately, when she tried to transfer her son to another school, she came up against that resistance. No one would take responsibility for doing something that might establish a precedent. If Michael were allowed to transfer, how many others would follow suit? The superintendent of schools, after a frustrating delay, told her the area was not contaminated and there were no plans to close the 99th Street School.

Lois Gibbs was furious. She had a stubborn streak that was aroused when she grew angry. Now, like a mother bear protecting her cubs, she decided on direct action. She would get up a petition demanding that the school be closed.

She was used to having strangers bang on her door selling something, and so were most of her neighbours. She realized that the women, who were home in the daytime, would be more receptive to her entreaties than the husbands, most of whom worked for the very chemical companies that were under fire. The mother instinct was alive in LaSalle that spring of 1978. It had caused Lois Gibbs, so shy she couldn’t face a civic clerk across a counter, to knock on strangers’ doors. It would cause others to join her. The campaign that followed was very largely a women’s movement.

For young Lois Gibbs it wasn’t easy. She felt herself sweating as she knocked timidly on the first door on 99th Street. To her relief, nobody was at home. “What am I doing here?” she asked herself. “I must be crazy.” She turned and fled to her own house. Sitting there in the kitchen with her empty petition still in her hands, she screwed up her courage. She realized she’d been afraid of making a fool of herself, but now she reasoned, “What’s more important – what people think or your child’s health?”

Next day she ventured out again, not as far as 99th but on her own street, where she knew the neighbours. That made it easier. She started out with people she knew and then, growing bolder, worked backwards to 100th Street, and finally to 99th and 97th, the two streets that bordered the old canal.

She soon developed a set speech that took about twenty minutes. The more she heard from those who would listen, the more frightened she became. It seemed as though every home on 99th had someone with an illness. The problem, she realized, involved much more than the school. The whole community was sick. She quickly found herself at the centre of a small nucleus of activist neighbours determined to force the hands of the authorities. The New York State Department of Health held a public meeting that June to announce its plan to take soil and air samples from the first ring of houses – those whose backyards abutted on the canal – and blood samples from the occupants to see if there really was a problem.

Mrs. Gibbs rose to her feet. She had never spoken in public before, but her anger gave her a voice, especially when Dr. Nicholas Vianna warned the audience not to eat any of the vegetables from their gardens. Obviously, there
was
a problem. Dr. Vianna tried to soothe the audience by announcing that a new filtration system running the length of the canal would be installed to contain the overflow wastes leaching out.

But what, Mrs. Gibbs asked, about the underground streams that fed off the canal? “How will your overflow system shut those springs off?” She didn’t get a straight answer.

“How can these kids be safe walking on the playground?” she wanted to know.

“Have the children walk on the sidewalk,” she was told. “Make sure they don’t cut across the canal.”

“How can you say all that when the playground is
on
the canal?” she asked again.

“You are their mother,” Dr. Vianna replied. “You can limit the time they play on the canal.” Lois Gibbs wondered if the doctor had children of his own.

This meeting, and a second equally frustrating one in July, helped bind the residents of the Love Canal area together. The authorities still wouldn’t admit there was a problem, but neither would they say that the area was safe. The neighbourhood was now thoroughly aroused as Mrs. Gibbs and her neighbours stepped up the pressure on the authorities. They shot off letters to state and federal politicians and started to make plans to sue the board of education, Hooker, the city, and the county.

The New York State Department of Health announced an open meeting of Love Canal residents for August 2, 1978. To Lois Gibbs’s anger, it would be held at Albany, the state capital, three hundred miles away. She tried to get the venue moved to Niagara Falls without success and so determined to go to Albany herself.

Armed with a thick sheaf of newspaper clippings and a parcel of junk food, she and Debbie Carillo, a 99th Street housewife who had suffered three miscarriages, drove off with Harry Gibbs at the wheel. For the Gibbs family, it was an expensive journey. Harry was bringing home $150 a week. Babysitters had to be hired. The hotel room alone cost forty dollars. But it had to be done.

At the meeting in Albany the next morning, the health department dropped a series of bombshells. First, the residents were again warned not to eat any of the vegetables from their gardens. Second, the department announced that the 99th Street School would be closed. Then came the big shocker. Commissioner Robert Whalen announced that all children under two and pregnant women should leave the district for health reasons.

In spite of these admissions that a problem existed, Lois Gibbs was furious. The state had not said that it would pay for the evacuation, only that people should move. And what was the rest of the family going to do? She leaped to her feet. “If the dump will hurt pregnant women and children under two, what, for God’s sake, is it going to do to the rest of us? What do you think you’re doing? You can’t do that! That would be murder!”

Whalen did not return to the meeting after a ten-minute break. Mrs. Gibbs had arrived with a list of fifty questions for the health officials. None was answered to her satisfaction. “You’ll just have to be patient,” she was told. “We’re doing more studies.… We’re going to check on that.…”

When the trio got back to Niagara Falls, exhausted, they faced a crowd of angry residents on 99th Street. Hundreds of people were milling about, shouting, screaming, yelling, burning their mortgages and tax bills and calling her name.

Now she found herself, microphone in hand, making the first real public speech of her life, trying to answer the questions that poured from every side, trying to explain what had gone on at the Albany meeting. She spoke haltingly, prefacing and ending each sentence with “Okay?” – only too aware that she was a rank amateur at her self-appointed job. The best she could do was to tell the crowd that the department of health would be holding a meeting the following night in the 99th Street School.

That meeting was as tumultuous as the street scene. Again there were few hard answers. The night after that, in the firehall on 102nd Street, the Love Canal Homeowners Association was formed, and Lois Gibbs was propelled into the presidency. As she took the chair, she asked herself, “How am I going to get through this evening?” But she managed to set four goals for the new association:

1. relocation of all those who wanted to leave the area,

2. an effort to prop up property values,

3. a proper clean-up of the canal, and

4. testing of the soil, air, and water throughout the entire area to see how far the contamination had spread.

On August 7, President Jimmy Carter lent strength to her cause by declaring a federal state of emergency at the Love Canal dump.

3
The long crusade of Lois Gibbs

By the time the governor of New York, Hugh Carey, made a personal visit to the Love Canal, Lois Gibbs had become the personification of an all-out, no-holds-barred campaign. Her small house was jammed with people. Her phone never stopped ringing. Every network as well as the local television stations and every major newspaper were sending people to interview her. The timid young housewife was transmuted, over the months that followed, into a shrewd, tough lobbyist, a forceful public speaker, and a skilled organizer with an ability to manipulate the media. She peddled T-shirts reading
“LOVE CANAL, Another Product from Hooker Chemical”
She turned up on television talk-shows; she learned to talk to politicians in their own language. She made enemies; at one point, her door was kicked in. She rarely had time for her children. It seemed she was never home. Dinner was invariably late. The transformation to shrill activist came slowly. When Governor Carey made his first visit on August 7, she felt intimidated. “My God,” she thought, “what am I doing talking to this guy? I can just tell he hates my guts.” She had never seen so much television coverage. This is an election year, she reminded herself, and the governor has to take some public action.

As Carey got up to speak, the residents of Love Canal began to scream: “You’re a murderer! You’re killing our children!” And then Mrs. Gibbs suddenly heard what she would never have expected to hear. The governor announced that the state would purchase 239 homes – the first and second rings of houses around the canal – and pay for the relocation of the residents. If their basements were contaminated and they had furniture there, the state would pay for that, too, he promised.

Lois Gibbs noticed that one of the governor’s key assistants seemed to be in shock. Clearly, he hadn’t expected such generosity. Faced with the outcry from the residents, Carey had blurted out a solution the state couldn’t afford. He had promised to spend more funds than he had federal money to cover. Carter’s federal emergency announcement covered only a narrow band of homes and the Federal Emergency Management Administration refused to pay any expenses outside that boundary.

The governor had so far promised to move only the people in the homes immediately adjacent to the canal. Many others wanted to be moved too, and when this was made clear, Carey announced that if contamination and health problems were proven in areas farther away from the canal, the state would also purchase those houses.

Two days later, Lois Gibbs got her first lesson in political promises. State officials told her they were not going to buy any homes in Ring Two. They would relocate only people from Ring One. They insisted the governor hadn’t said what the entire audience, including the newspaper reporters, had heard him say. Over the next six months, Lois Gibbs took a new and practical course in civics, markedly different from the one she had been given in high school. She discovered that the state’s word meant nothing, that she could no longer believe what she was told, that promises were made merely to pacify her, and that rather than retire from battle, as she had hoped, she would have to keep up the fight every single day.

Love Canal: the emergency declaration area

The governor had promised to move all those who were ill, even if they lived in the outer rings of the canal site. This turned out to be a false promise: no one in that category was to be relocated. Lois Gibbs went to Washington; she wrote to senators, congressmen, and state representatives. She badgered the health department and picketed the new attempts to clean up the canal, which she thought were useless. As a result, she once found herself in jail overnight.

With the help of Dr. Beverly Paigen, a prominent scientist, Mrs. Gibbs conducted a survey of her neighbourhood, proving to her own satisfaction that the disease-producing chemicals had invaded the swales, those low-lying channels that spread out from the canal. In spite of this, the government stuck to its belief that a filtering system and an eight-foot wire-mesh fence around the canal would solve all problems.

Bit by bit, Lois Gibbs’s organization was making an impression. The state at last agreed to purchase the second ring of homes, bringing the number of families to be relocated to 239. In October, the remedial drainage and filtration program finally got under way. The state sent in gangs of workmen to uproot trees, tear down fences and garages, and remove swimming pools. It planned to lay drainage tiles around the borders of the canal to divert leakage into wells from which the contaminated water could be drawn and filtered through activated carbon. After that was done, the canal was to be covered with a cap of clay and planted with grass.

The state had announced it would buy no homes outside the official two-ring zone of contamination, a decision that left some five hundred families, including the Gibbses, in jeopardy. Sump-pump samples taken from 100th and 101st streets showed traces of several of the chemicals found in the old canal. In September, the state itself had admitted, after tests of soil samples, that there had been an extensive migration of potentially poisonous materials outside the immediate canal area. Dr. Paigen reported that in 245 homes outside the evacuation area, she had found thirty-four miscarriages, eighteen birth defects, nineteen nervous breakdowns, and ten cases of epilepsy. Lois Gibbs stepped up the campaign to have more families moved.