Storing Industrial Wastes.

In the 1930s and 1940s corporations and citizens did not worry too much about what happened to the chemicals left over from industrial processes. While regulations existed, enforcement was haphazard or nonexistent. Corporations such as Hooker Company in Niagara Falls, New York, which made pesticides, plastics, and other chemicals, mostly just sealed them in fifty-five-gallon metal drums and left them someplace nearby. For Hooker one convenient place was Love Canal, a never-finished part of a Great Lakes canal system begun in the late nineteenth century. While children played and swam nearby, Hooker dumped more than twenty-one thousand tons of chemicals into Love Canal, then filled it in with dirt. In 1953 they gave the covered-over lot to the town for an elementary school and a playground.

Early Warnings.

As young families built homes near the elementary school, many noticed...