Niagara: A History of the Falls (55 page)

She was only partly successful. On February 9, 1979, the new commissioner of health, Dr. David Axelrod, held a public meeting to announce that all families with pregnant mothers and children under two living between 93rd and 103rd streets would be temporarily relocated at government expense. Once the remedial work at the canal site was completed, or when their children passed the age of two, they would be returned to their homes.

This caused another uproar. Mrs. Gibbs badgered the new commissioner. Why only these people? she asked. Why not all women who could conceive? The first forty-five days of pregnancy were the most important, she pointed out, yet many women didn’t even know they were pregnant in that period. Was the state, then, practising birth control? she asked.

One woman at the back of the hall, tears streaming down her face, cried out, “You can’t play games with my life. You have no right to make me stay here.” A man took up the cry. “It’s too late for my wife,” he shouted. “She’s already six months pregnant. What do I do if I have a monster because you wouldn’t move us out?” Axelrod simply said he was waiting for more data to come in. Just be patient, he advised.

Marie Pozniak, who lived immediately north of the canal, did not fit the state’s criteria for temporary evacuation. “Being left behind is the most terrible experience, horrifying,” she told Michael Brown. “You know the dangers are still there. You can’t get away from them; we all have benzene in our homes. It’s a desperate feeling; one of inadequacy. You go out and see someone carrying groceries into their home, in another part of town, and they’re smiling and happy and you resent them for it, because they have a safe home. Yours is dangerous. You’re afraid of your own home. My family is going to pieces and there are divorces all over this place. My husband is so desperate; there is no way he can get us out, no way for him to protect his family, and that gets to him. That gets to everybody.… Most of the doctors around here don’t want to become involved. To be truthful, I don’t think they know enough about chemicals.… My children are upset – we can’t have a garden this year and they’re afraid to go down into the basement. I know a woman who had to take her child for counselling. The kid was afraid of dying.… She had to go too. She’s afraid her children will die.”

Mrs. Gibbs kept up the pressure. She arrived in Albany with a group of supporters and sent in a baby’s coffin to Governor Carey. She appeared on television with Bruce Davis, then manager of Hooker Chemical (now a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corporation), and lambasted him. After the health department released a statement in April admitting the presence of dioxin in the chemicals at Love Canal, she led a demonstration in the area and burned both Axelrod and Carey in effigy. She went to Washington to testify before the Senate hearings on toxic waste.

The national media were thoroughly alerted. Love Canal became notorious. The ABC network broadcast the documentary “The Killing Ground,” greatly distressing the mayor, who said it would destroy Niagara Falls as a tourist area.

Lois Gibbs was no longer intimidated by politicians. The Paigen survey had demonstrated that the chemicals were invading the historical wet areas far beyond the second ring of homes. She now insisted that
all
residents living between 93rd and 103rd streets be evacuated at state expense.

The state moved ponderously. Six months had gone by since Dr. Axelrod had promised that pregnant women and young children would be temporarily relocated, but no action had yet been taken. The Homeowners Association held a candlelight ceremony on the anniversary of its formation. At last, in August, some families who were able to prove illness were evacuated to Niagara University.

The state had already acknowledged that traces of dioxin had been found in seepage from the canal. When Mrs. Gibbs badgered Dr. Axelrod, he was forced to reply that a pregnant woman living in the area bordering Love Canal now stood a 35- to 45-percent chance of miscarriage. Marie Pozniak jumped in. “Are you going to relocate my family?” she asked. After some delay he said, “No.”

A school on 93rd Street, four blocks from Love Canal, was now closed for the new term. More families were insisting on the promised temporary relocation. With students returning to Niagara University, the evacuees – now 150 families – had to be moved into hotels and motels at a cost to the state of $7,500 a day. The evacuees announced they would face jail before returning to their homes.

Lois Gibbs and her family left their own home on 101st Street and moved into the local Howard Johnson’s. But there was a catch. In order to remain in temporary quarters, all residents had to produce a doctor’s certificate saying that their health was at risk if they went back. It took the combined efforts of Mrs. Gibbs’s association and fifteen churches to persuade local doctors to issue the documents to the evacuees. “The burden of proof has been thrown onto us, not the state,” Mrs. Gibbs declared. “We have to show that we’re sick specifically because of the chemicals coming out of Love Canal. But how can we prove that?”

Once again the governor bent to the pressure and announced that between two hundred and five hundred families would be relocated over the next two years. In November, the Gibbs family reluctantly moved back into their own home while a “revitalization committee” was formed to appraise all homes between 93rd and 103rd streets and purchase them. But then the committee found it couldn’t spend state money to buy the houses without matching funds from the federal government. These did not come for another year. And so another winter dragged on. And that winter, four-year-old Melissa Gibbs almost died of a rare blood disorder.

Lois Gibbs opposed the revitalization plan. She simply could not believe anybody should be allowed to move back close to Love Canal.

4
Taking hostages

On May 17, 1980, the EPA released the results of a study it had made of thirty-six residents of the Love Canal area. The report was devastating. Eleven of the thirty-six were found to have chromosomal damage of a rare type. That meant an increased risk of miscarriage, stillbirths, birth defects, cancer, and genetic damage.

Two days later, a public relations man and a doctor were sent from Washington by the EPA to meet with the community. With the federal government still stalling on matching payments, the residents were in no mood for soothing talk. An infuriated crowd gathered in front of the office of the Love Canal Homeowners Association. “I was afraid,” Lois Gibbs wrote later, “that people were going to tear the neighborhood apart.” With the tension at dangerous pitch and the crowd cursing the EPA, she tried to clear the air by asking the two representatives to talk to the people. “What a mess this is!” she told herself. “Why did I ever move to this neighborhood? When will it be over?”

Her own mood matched the fighting mood of the crowd on the street outside. When Melissa’s life was endangered, Lois Gibbs had resolved never to take her children back to 101st Street. Some members of the crowd were demanding that the two EPA men be held captive. “Let’s see how they like being in this neighborhood!” somebody cried. And at that moment, on the morning of Monday, May 19, 1980, Lois Gibbs, the once retiring Niagara Falls blue-collar housewife, found herself the leading figure in a hostage taking.

She told the two Washington visitors they would be confined inside the building and, to soften the blow, said that that was as much for their protection as for political gain. She had no clear idea of what she should do next. “Why didn’t I watch TV more carefully?” she asked herself, thinking back to other similar crises.

She took them into an office, locked the door, phoned the White House, and let the cheering crowd know what she’d done. Alone in the room with the men and one woman colleague, Barbara Quimby, she waited for Washington to call back. Suddenly there was a crash as something was hurled through the window, covering the floor with glass. Then the phone rang; an EPA representative from Washington was on the line. Lois Gibbs told him she had locked up his two colleagues for their own protection and had described them as hostages merely to quiet the crowd.

Meetings with the district congressman followed, but no word came from the White House. The FBI arrived and threatened to rush the building. Mrs. Gibbs knew that that would be disastrous. In the end, she gave in peaceably. Her congressman had promised to take up the matter with the president that evening. She said she would hold him to that pledge. “What you have seen us do here today will be a Sesame Street picnic in comparison with what we will do if we do not get evacuated,” she told him. “We want an answer from Washington by noon Wednesday.” She hustled the hostages out the back door and bundled them into a waiting police car. She expected to be arrested, but her lawyers told her that if she stayed out of further trouble, no charges would be laid against her. The last thing the authorities wanted was a martyr to the cause.

Three things that exacerbated an already tense situation now happened in quick succession. The EPA released a second study showing that some of the residents who had remained in the Love Canal area had suffered nerve damage. Then the Niagara County legislators, by a narrow sixteen-to-fifteen vote, declined to spend any money, even on the revitalization program. (At that meeting, Mrs. Gibbs became so strident that police had to be called to remove her from the room.) Finally, Occidental Petroleum, Hooker’s parent, held its annual meeting and turned off the microphones of those who tried to speak in favour of a shareholders’ resolution urging the company to take steps to prevent further environmental tragedies. A young nun rose and addressed the chairman, Armand Hammer. “Are you refusing to hear?” she asked. “Yes,” he replied, “I am refusing to hear. Go back to Buffalo.”

With the situation heating up, Washington acted. President Carter declared a second state of emergency at Love Canal covering a much larger area. Funds were set aside under the Disaster Assistance Administration to allow the evacuation (but not the purchase) of 728 homes in a fifty-square-block area – far more than had originally been contemplated. The residents would be removed “temporarily,” but Lois Gibbs was convinced that most would refuse to return.

One Love Canal resident, Ann Willis, wrote of her own feelings in a dramatic lament: “Take another deep breath. Yes, you feel giddy: your heart races; nausea hits you. It is I, myself, that’s been vandalized.
Now
you feel the pain. You want to scream out: you open your mouth and nothing comes out. You open the door of your house and you look up the nice street, and you rush to your car and you cry. Yes, your very existence has been vandalized. You look up and down the street once again; your house is noxious; their houses are noxious; the whole outside is noxious! You want to run! But where? You want to scream! But at whom? I don’t want a Love Canal house; I don’t want to be a Love Canal victim. But, Oh God, I am.”

The struggle was not yet over. Once again, the residents were out of their houses and back into motels of their choice, with the government footing the bill. The unsettling effects of this nomadic existence took their toll. Marriages were shattered. Families broke up. The activist wives, obsessed now by the Love Canal struggle, found themselves at an emotional distance from their husbands, many of whom owed their livelihood to the chemical companies. Some small children, after watching television news programs that displayed a backdrop of skull and crossbones, hid under couches or beds and refused to come out. Others were shipped off to relatives hundreds of miles away. With her own marriage threatened, Mrs. Gibbs set out to campaign for permanent relocation.

When she appeared with her followers on the “Phil Donahue Show,” she briefed each one carefully on what to say. She had learned the hard way how to get a point across economically and dramatically. In July, she embarked on a speaking tour of California, which Jane Fonda and her husband, Tom Hayden, helped organize. Lois Gibbs raised enough money to rent a bus for her people to attend the Democratic National Convention in New York. They called themselves the Love Canal Boat People, and, encamped in a strategic spot near the convention hall, cried out their slogan: “President Carter, hear our plea./Set the Love Canal people free.”

The president had yet to sign a bill authorizing purchase of the Love Canal homes and matching the state funds with federal dollars. On the ABC program “Good Morning, America,” Lois Gibbs accused the EPA and the Carter administration of washing their hands of the entire affair. Ten days after the program was aired, she was told that Carter himself was coming to Niagara Falls and wanted her to be present when he signed an agreement with the state to appropriate $15 million to buy 564 homes in addition to those in the first two rings next to the canal. It was, after all, an election year.

The rest was window dressing. At the crowded meeting in the Convention Centre that followed the signing of the agreement, the president and the governor both spoke. In the midst of Carey’s speech, Carter invited Mrs. Gibbs onto the stage while the cameras clicked. She took advantage of that moment to lobby the president for low-interest mortgage money.

By February 1981, more than four hundred families had left the Love Canal area, never to return. Hundreds more were preparing to leave. Some – most of them childless – decided to stay.

Lois Gibbs has won her fight, but not without cost. She had begun as a full-time housewife, with the dinner on the table promptly every night, with her children cared for, with the laundry and household chores done. During the Love Canal battle, all that changed. Harry Gibbs found himself coming home night after night to no dinner; his clothes went unwashed for a week; the house was in disarray; and the two children were consigned to his care while his wife picketed, organized, spoke at demonstrations, and appeared on television – a minor celebrity with a firm set of goals.

He bore it all patiently, even going to Albany with his wife when she needed him. Like many blue-collar husbands, he had seen the women’s movement, and Lois’s part in it, as a temporary disruption. Once it was over – and now that they were moving away permanently it seemed to be over – he expected their life to return to its even tenor.