“All tribal officials must strive to act in the Tribe’s best interest, reflecting the struggle and hopes of the previous seven generations of our people, while prayerfully considering the impact of their actions and decisions for the next seven generations of our people.”  Constitution of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape

Here is the scene of an impasse: a situation in which it seems no solution is possible.  A mountain of garbage threatens to collapse into a canal that drains the valley farms.  Streams of bright red leachate, containing high levels of arsenic and lead, seep out of the landfill and into the sluggish river.  The weight of seven million cubic yards of municipal waste, industrial waste, and medical waste pushes down and outward, nudging the river bank forward, slowly choking the stream.

There are no easy solutions.  Large, often competing interests are at stake here.  Immediately upstream are sixteen thousand acres of black dirt farmland, providing essential food for New York.  The farmers are concerned about flooding, and want the canal maintained and kept clear to provide good drainage when the heavy rains come.  Downriver communities, on the other hand, rely on shallow aquifers along the Wallkill River for drinking water, and use the river for recreation as well as wastewater and storm water management. They worry that upstream dredging might destabilize the river banks and the landfill, and send more contaminants their way.

This location demands our attention.  If we look carefully, the place itself has something to tell us, maybe even the solution to the problem.  What can we learn by studying this spot, the junction of Black Dirt, Cheechunk Canal, and Orange County Landfill?  Why are all of these things precisely here?  By considering the historical and geographical roots of the impasse, we may be able to see the bigger picture and come up with more comprehensive solutions. 

The early inhabitants of this region believed that a people had to know their history in order to make good decisions in the present, and that a people must also be ever mindful of the well being of future generations.  Here we will try to apply this long vision method to a particular setting and the choices that have already been made there, as well as those that still face us.

The natural features of the land and river, the qualities specific to this neighborhood, insured that the location would one day become a zone of contention.  The space was sculpted during the last glacial period, when enormous masses of ice covered the State of New York and left the Wallkill Valley buried for about one hundred thousand years.   When temperatures finally began to rise, the ice sheet retreated.  Twelve thousand years ago, New York State was wild with rushing waters, drastically altered landscapes, and huge glacial lakes.  Large and exotic animal species migrated in to fill nature’s former vacuum.  Canada was still frozen and inhospitable.

Moraines were left behind by the glaciers, marking the points of the ice’s furthest advance, or the stages of its retreat, like the Pellet’s Island moraine and the New Hampton moraine, both in the immediate vicinity of today’s landfill and canal.  The mounds are collections of granite boulders and drift, torn by the glaciers from the Shawangunk Ridge, twenty five miles to the west.  The glacial debris that was deposited around present day Denton, New York blocked the northward flow of the melting ice, leading to the formation of a huge glacial lake in this part of the Wallkill valley.   

The lake eventually drained further, leaving behind a bog which backed up for twenty miles, from the New Hampton moraine in the north, to present day Hamburg, New Jersey in the south, where the swifter waters of the upper Wallkill poured down from Lake Mohawk.  North of Denton and beyond the wall of rock, the current of the Wallkill picked up speed again for the remainder of its course to Rondout Creek, then the Hudson River near Kingston. 

In his 1881 History of Sussex and Warren Counties, New Jersey, Richard Snell referred to the middle stretch of the Wallkill from Hamburg to Denton as “one of the crookedest streams in New York State.”  Because there was only an eleven foot drop in elevation, the river meandered back and forth across the wide, flat valley.  The bed of the river contained a series of “limestone reefs” which were from five to ten feet high.  These rock barriers impeded the flow of the river.  But the biggest impediment of all was the wall of glacial rubble at Denton.

In the spring and after heavy rains, the entire valley floor south of Denton was often flooded.  Snell described the post glacial environment:

This vast bog would come to be known as the “Drowned Lands.”  The few hills in the broad flat valley that poked out above the flood waters would one day be called “Islands.”   Initially, the marshy environment was home to many plant species and fish, and to many animals like giant Pleistocene beavers and sloths, flat-headed peccaries, moose, caribou, and reindeer.  Most impressively, the drowned lands were inhabited by enormous mastodons, some of whose remains have been found preserved deep in the muck not too far from our area of interest.  The New York State Museum refers to the black dirt region as “a gold mine” for archeological finds of this kind.   Almost forty mastodon skeletons, from 10,000 to 13,000 years old, have been found in Orange County along the Wallkill River, fairly well preserved in the deep peat and marl.  More individual specimens have been found here, in this one concentrated area, than anywhere else in the Northeast.  

Humans made their way to the same valley before the mastodons disappeared.  When the last glacial period began more than 110,000 years ago, homo sapiens were just starting a long, slow period of dispersion from Africa into Europe and Asia.  It is not clear exactly when, or how, humans first made their way to the Americas, whether by the Bering Land Bridge or across the Pacific or Atlantic.  What we do know is that approximately 12,000 years ago, Paleo-Indians wandered into what is now upstate New York, following the abundant game into the lands newly exposed by the receding ice sheet.   The oldest human artifacts found in New York State were buried in caves on Mount Lookout, only a couple of miles southeast of the present day landfill and canal.
 
Some local archaeologists believe that there was at least one other Paleo-Indian site near the northern end of the Cheechunk Canal, where it rejoins the original channel of the Wallkill.  Here they had found spear points and other artifacts belonging to “Ice Age hunter-gatherers.”  Unfortunately, efforts to explore the possibility that other Paleo-Indian sites are located at the edge of the former drowned lands have been hampered by existing and encroaching development.

Because this land along the river and near the Drowned Lands was so attractive to early humans, It is a fair question to ask whether Native Americans remained in the vicinity until the arrival of European settlers.  Of course there is no written record, and the only traces that remain are the bones and artifacts that archaeologists use to piece histories together.  But there is compelling reason to believe that human activity was continuous along the Wallkill.  Conditions were rich for hunting and fishing.  There was chert for fashioning projectile points.  The hills provided natural barriers, and there were warm mineral springs along the banks.  The location probably called out to humans then, as it has again and again in our own era.

Native American culture evolved through several periods after the ancient Paleo-Indian.  In the Archaic period from around 8000 BC to 1000 BC, Native Americans continued to live nomadically, but developed new tools and increased their population.  In the Transitional and then Woodland periods that lasted until the Europeans arrived, Native Americans settled in communities, built permanent structures, traded extensively, practiced agriculture, and developed a complex cultural life.

When the Contact period began, the Native Americans who lived in the valley had already organized into part of the vast Lenape Nation which extended all along the Delaware River watershed and into the Lower Hudson Valley and Long Island.   At first, the arrival of Europeans did not have much effect on the Lenape along the upper Wallkill, a river that they had long ago named Twischsawkin.  As late as 1698, there were only 219 Europeans and Africans living in all of Orange County, far out numbered by the original inhabitants.  Even by 1723, the Orange County census showed only 1,244 non native residents.  But the slow pace of settlement soon picked up.

Surveyor John Reading was the first European settler to record his contact with Native Americans living in the area where the Cheechunk Canal is now located.  Along with a party of surveyors and military officers, Reading set out in July of 1719 to map the area around the New York and New Jersey border.  He wrote in his journal:

Based on Reading’s description and the location of the Chechong plantation, it appears that the settlement was the original source of the name Cheechunk, which would later be given to the canal.  The settlement was on the Wallkill, three miles outside of Goshen, and about twenty miles from Port Jervis, the same spot where amateur archaeologists claim to have found Paleo-Indian artifacts.  It is where today’s Cheechunk Road, Echo Lake Road, Owens Road, Cheechunk Canal, and original channel of the Wallkill come together.

As the European settler population grew, the native population diminished.  By the time of the American Revolution, less than sixty years after Reading made his visit to Chechong, almost all of the native population of Orange County had either died, been assimilated, or left the region.  Many of the Lenape moved west to Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Ontario.  Most tellingly, the Lenape and their predecessors left very few marks on the land that they had inhabited for almost 12,000 years.  Not unlike the mastodons, the traces that they left behind were fragmentary and buried.  

But even though Native Americans left the land the way they had found it, they contributed enormously to our collective knowledge and culture.  Part of their contribution is a philosophy of life: a way of being in, and living upon, the earth.  The philosophy of the Lenape, just like the Constitution of the Iroquois Nation, promoted respect for the earth and its creatures, as well as a sense of responsibility for generations both past and present.  The idea of making decisions that honor the lives and strivings of the dead, as well as provide for the wellbeing of the unborn, is the essence of the Native American concept of the seven generations.

By an interesting coincidence, shortly after the Lenape exodus from the Wallkill Valley, and only a little more than seven generations before our own time, the European settlers made the far-reaching decision to leave their mark and alter the landscape, looking for ways to drain the Drowned Lands and turn the bogs into farms.

When the post glacial lake began receding more than 12,000 years ago, the lake bed filled in with vegetation which decomposed into rich soils.  The wide and flat valley floor, the intermittent floods and immersions, and the repeating cycle of growth and decay contributed to a thick layer of muck that in some places reached depths of thirty feet.  No surprise, the abundant and rock-free black dirt soon proved to be incredibly fertile, capable of producing bountiful harvests of high quality vegetables like onions, celery, carrots, and beets.  The only problem was water. 

The first farmers in the Drowned Lands raised cattle among the bogs.  It was tricky business that required keeping the cattle up in the high lands, or islands, and out of the swamps.  When there were heavy rains, herdsmen had to round the cows up the hills, or the animals would be swept away.  Many were lost. 

The early settlers of the Drowned Lands had a name for the place that would one day be called Denton: they aptly named it Outlet.  Outlet was where the glacial boulders blocked the Wallkill’s way, much the same way that a plug stops up a drain.  The very first attempt to pull the plug and drain the bogs was made in 1772 by landowners Henry Wisner and William Wickham.  They tried breaking and moving the rocks that made up the biggest ledge impeding the river’s northward flow.

They did not succeed.  The ledge, according to Art Soons who farms the land where the ledge still sits, “is made out of some of the hardest rock imaginable.  For thousands of years it was compressed by the weight of the glacier.  It’s almost impossible to break through it.”  But the early farmers kept trying, raising money in 1775 and again in 1803 to pay for the work. 

By 1804, the scope of the project had expanded so that the farmers were now digging long narrow ditches to help the river drain more water.  In 1807, Drowned Land owners convinced the New York State Assembly to appoint a commission to “raise money by assessment for straightening the Wallkill.”  The commission was given the “full power and authority to remove all obstructions out of the bed of the Wallkill at the outlet of the said Drowned Lands and deepen the river to any depth they should deem proper and to widen and straighten the same from any distance above Pellet’s Island bridge.”  The “commissioners’ ditches” that can be found up river of Pellet’s Island are a result of efforts that began around two hundred years ago.

But the farmers were not getting the results that they wanted.  From 1807 to 1826 they spent approximately $4000, in what, according to local historian Frances Wilcox, “seemed an impossible task.” (The Cheechunk and the Drowned Lands, The Outlet Ditch or Canal Which Changed the Course of the Wallkill, 1925. Excerpt here.) The Commissioners’ ditches were dug for drainage, but they usually filled only with mud.  The ditches produced other unexpected results as well.  In the fall of 1817, hundreds of thousands of eels, weighing as much as eight pounds each, came down through the channels.  George Phillips, a mill owner two miles downriver in Hampton, today’s New Hampton, trapped over two thousand eels in one night, and managed to salt down twenty barrels of them.

Mr. Phillips and the Drowned Land farmers soon learned even more about unintended results, or side effects, that were not part of anyone’s original engineering plans.   In the two miles below the rocky ledge at Outlet, the Wallkill River fell twenty four feet, more than twice the fall of the previous twenty miles.  A number of Hampton landowners, every bit as industrious as their neighbors in the Drowned Lands, took advantage of the drop in elevation to build a dam and a mill pond, and use the resulting hydro power to operate several mills.

At first, the mill owners of Hampton and the farmers of the Drowned Lands were able to work together.  Around 1807, the commissioners could see that their ditching efforts were being thwarted by the dam in Hampton which kept the water level high.  The farmers struck a deal with Phillips to pay him to lower the dam at various times of the year so they would escape flooding.  According to Mr. Snell’s account, Phillips stopped lowering the dam when the farmers stopped paying him.  The river bed ditching was therefore doomed to failure.  A bigger step had to be taken.

In April 1826, the State of New York gave the commissioners power to expand their efforts and dig a channel with the intention of diverting the river.  This was, after all, the great canal building period of New York’s history.  According to Mrs. Wilcox, “The proposed construction of the canal alarmed the people of that part of the valley at Hampton down to Phillipsburgh.  It threatened ruin!  Two hostile parties arose.”  A long and bitter struggle took place between the upstream farmers and the downstream mill owners.  In addition to legal arguments, there were fist fights and threats of greater violence, but in the end, the mill owners could not stop the legislature or their neighbors.  Work on the ditch finally got started in 1829.

Phillips and the mill owners of Hampton had wanted the excavating work to be done in the bed of the river, not in a new channel.  Their livelihoods depended upon the old channel and the mill pond that kept their water wheels turning.  The legislature granted Phillips the right to construct a floodgate at the entrance of the new canal so that the new channel could be closed at certain times of the year to keep the millpond at Hampton filled with water.

The three mile canal, which extended from just above the Pellet’s Island bridge to just above Monhagen Brook’s junction with the Wallkill, was completed in 1835.  It was dug eight feet deep and anywhere from four to twelve feet wide.  During construction, several men were injured by collapsing banks.  One man was killed.  Then it rained hard, and the water rose quickly as it often does in the valley, and washed away the canal banks along with several bridges and roads.  The eight foot by eight foot ditch was overwhelmed, and soon the channel was fifteen hundred feet wide or more in places, while in others, the banks were fifty feet high, or the water was seventeen feet deep.  Hundreds of acres of some of the best farmland in the region were washed away, but soon after, thousands of acres of former bog land were transformed into black dirt farms.

George Phillips’ floodgate at the mouth of the canal was also washed away, and the wider, deeper, swifter canal captured almost all the water from the old channel, from the inlet to the outlet.  In desperation, Phillips took matters into his own hands.  Wilcox wrote:

Thus began what came to be known as the Battle of Cheechunk, or more popularly, the Muskrat and Beaver Wars, which raged, off and on, until around 1870.  The Beavers were the group based in Hampton, the mill owners and industrialists, who, like beavers, built dams.  The Muskrats were the upriver farmers, the ones who depended on open channels, and who, like muskrats, destroyed dams.  Undaunted, Phillips and the Beavers built a second dam.  The Muskrats promptly broke it apart.  Three more dams were attempted, and three more were destroyed, the last one by the force of the river itself.  No one appears to have been killed, but there were several occasions in which guns made an appearance.  The wars were part of Orange County’s Industrial Revolution, Frances Wilcox wrote, “but no history of the county refers to it.”

The courts ultimately ruled in 1871 that no more dams were to be constructed.  The Muskrats had won.  Years later in 1900, there was a lone legal attempt to reopen the old channel and close the canal, but that proposal went nowhere.  The canal prevailed, as did the farmers’ efforts to drain their land.  Snell wrote in 1881: 

Unfortunately, the outcome was not as beneficial for the Beavers and their dependents.  Snell continued:

In 1880, the New York Times reported that at the epidemic’s peak, more than one hundred people were infected with malaria in New Hampton - “once one of the most important places in this county” - and another hundred in Denton.  People were frightened that a disease associated with poverty and the tropics was making an appearance so close to New York City, prompting scientists to take a closer look at the nature and causes of the disease.

But “disease and ruin” were not the only aftereffects of the Cheechunk Canal.  Cheechunk Springs were located near the Wallkill River, three miles from Goshen, and just below the mills of Hampton.  The spring water used to gush out of the ground warm and clean, and was reputed to have healing powers.  In all likelihood, the springs were another of the more significant reasons why unnumbered generations of Native Americans had remained in this neighborhood.  

“Cheechunk,” Mrs. Wilcox wrote in 1925, “is an Indian name, and one hundred years ago, these springs were considered medicinal, being both iron and sulfurous.  People came by ox-teams many miles to obtain this water.”   The American Mineralogical Journal of 1810 mentioned the springs, and its already established celebrity with those seeking cures.  Cheechunk Springs and the baths, inns, and guest houses that grew along side them were as popular as Saratoga.

The culture that grew up around the springs was described in the Warwick Valley memoirs of Eliza Benedict Hornby.  Under Old Rooftrees was published in 1908 when Mrs. Hornby was eighty years old.  She had been born back in the time when work on the canal had just begun.  In one of her reminiscences, she wrote about country doctors, and the cures that could be had at Cheechunk Springs.  

Unfortunately, the springs were located not only on the site of an old Indian village, but in the place where the Outlet Ditch reunited with the original channel of the Wallkill.  When the earth was being torn for the canal, the veins of the springs were inadvertently severed, and the mineral waters dissipated.  The Cheechunk Springs dried up, and quickly faded from memory along with the hotel and the life that had surrounded them.  An attempt was made through the New York State legislature in 1900 to try to reclaim the old springs, but the bill failed.  The canal that destroyed the springs, the hotel, and the farm eventually assumed their Cheechunk name.

After the Cheechunk Canal was completed, the pace of change in the upper Wallkill Valley accelerated.  On the positive side, the canal did what it was designed to do.  Thousands of acres of cedar swamp and bogs were converted into highly productive farm land.  More ditches and drains were dug, and more rich organic soil became accessible.  The canal was respected and properly maintained.  Nutritious food was produced in abundance in close proximity to the largest market in America.  A growing number of farm families were able to support themselves and the local economy through their hard efforts on the superabundant new soil.

In the 1850s, many Irish families emigrated to the valley and grew potatoes in the black dirt.  They were followed in the late 1880's by Polish families who accompanied Father Nowak to the tract known as “The Mission Lands” to establish their farms.  Their labors converted more swampland into the cultivated fields that have come to be regarded as the richest in Orange County.  At the same time, a vibrant farm culture grew up in the valley, steeped in tradition, knowledgable and proud.

Despite the success of the farms and the widespread bounty and prosperity that were evident in the valley, Mrs. Wilcox, the author of the narrative The Cheechunk and the Drowned Lands, expressed misgivings about the canal.  Writing in 1925, approximately mid-way between our own time and the time when the canal was built, she worried that the project may have been a mistake.  She wrote of “the destructive existence of the canal,”  which had taken on a life of its own, and warned that it was going to be up to succeeding generations to keep watch over the channel, and manage it, or the canal would create even greater problems in the future.  It now appears that her warnings were eerily prescient.  We have not been paying attention to the canal, and the problems are indeed getting away from us.

She lamented the fact that the canal had changed the face of the region.  Wistfully, she described the deep ravine in New Hampton, where one could still see “a portion of the foundations of the woolen mills, the fulling and dying factory, the flour mill and an old water raceway running close to the highway to another abandoned grist mill.”  She made it clear in her essay that she disapproved of some of the changes brought by the canal, and wished that things could have been done differently.  The canal brought malaria.  The canal wiped out New Hampton’s industry.  The canal destroyed the springs.

She proceeded to speculate about alternate histories, wondering what would have happened if things had not been done the same way.  What if the canal had not been built, she asked, and the problem of flooding had been confronted differently?  

Mrs Wilcox serves as a human bridge between that time and ours.  When she wrote her history of the Cheechunk, she communicated with people who, as children, had watched the canal being built.  But she was also known, and is remembered by, people who are alive today.  Ninety years after the construction of the canal, and about ninety years before the present, her reflections on contingencies are in tune with our own.  She had asked the same kinds of questions about responsibilities from one generation to the next that we are now asking.

Had the canal not been built seven generations ago, we would certainly not be dealing with the same set of problems that we have now.  But that’s about the only thing we can say with certainty.  We do not know what unintended consequences might have arisen had the farmers sought an alternative.  Would the Drowned Lands still be drowned?  Would New Hampton have become a city while neighboring Middletown languished?  What would have happened to the mills and water wheels of New Hampton had they continued to thrive until their inevitable replacement by steam?  Might Cheechunk have become a world class resort?

The pace of change has made it harder for us to isolate specific decisions and analyze their consequences.  Unlike Lenape culture, Western culture has wholeheartedly embraced the idea of improvability and progress.  Our culture has faith in technology, and we enthusiastically and unquestioningly accept each innovation with open arms, unmindful of repercussions.  The Native American inhabitants of the valley were better able to apply the principle of seven generations because they were not on as rapid a trajectory of change as their new European neighbors.  Native Americans were able to enjoy more continuity through the generations.  Our culture accepts the idea that our grandchildren’s lives will be very different from our own, just as our lives differ from our grandparents’.  Perhaps we allow our uncertainty about the future to serve as an excuse for not considering the spin-off of our actions more carefully. 

Just as the black dirt farmers of the early 19th century could not predict the future consequences of their actions, neither could the farmers of Mrs. Wilcox’s generation predict the outcome of the significant decisions they would soon be making.  In 1925 most farming was done with horses on small family farms.  There were very few tractors.  The coming “green revolution” had not yet changed the face of agriculture.  But soon the introduction of fossil fuels into agricultural production would be as strong a catalyst for change as the canal had been.

In 1925 according to the agricultural census, there were 3,706 farms in all of Orange County.  By 2012 that number had dropped to only 658.  While the total number of farming acres in the county went down from more than 533,000 in 1925 to 88,000 in 2012, the average size of an individual farm almost doubled, as did the number of large farms with more than 500 acres.  In 2012,  Orange County farmers had almost $77 million invested in machinery and equipment.  Back in 1925, the cost of farm machinery wasn’t even tallied up for the census.

As we have already seen with the lesson of the muskrats and beavers, almost every large scale human endeavor that brings success also brings with it unintended aftereffects.  No longer dependent solely on the energy of the sun, farmers now relied on petroleum based energy, pesticides, and fertilizers, and were thus able to produce much higher yields.  They also incurred much greater expenses.

Economic pressure brought about by the green revolution has been especially hard on black dirt farmers because their land is profitable for farming, but suited for little more.  One can not build on top of muck lands, not even an international jetport, as the New York Port Authority ultimately determined in the early 1960s.  Once the drowned lands became the farmed lands, there was nothing else to be done with it except plant crops.   Unfortunately, black dirt farming in the valley increasingly meant competing in a volatile and high risk market with little room for error and the constant threat of floods.   A black dirt farmer in 1990 claimed that fifteen or twenty years earlier, it had cost about three hundred dollars to produce an acre of onions which paid him five or six dollars for one hundred pounds.  “Today, it's fourteen hundred dollars to produce an acre of onions, and last fall we only got seven or eight dollars.”  The green revolution created more stress for the farmer.

American farming in general, and black dirt farming in particular, also generated what American farmer and essayist Wendell Berry called, “externalized costs.”  These are aftereffects like pollution, soil erosion, land destruction, and more recently, shrinking bio-diversity.  Berry wrote that these aftereffects are the result of “short term economics,” or what he called, “the economics of self-interest and greed,” because the externalized costs are usually passed on to others.  “People who are concerned about what their grandchildren will have to eat, drink, and breathe tend to be interested in long-term economics.”  Long term economics, he went on, are like “the golden rule across generations.”

Ultimately, because of its dependence on fossil fuels, much of the agriculture practiced in the world today is necessarily based on short term economics and is not always in the best interests of all.  Desperate financial considerations all too often lead to poor choices.  Here as everywhere else, farmers in the black dirt region sometimes employed methods that either intentionally or unintentionally abused the land and soil, fouled the air and water, or exploited farm labor.

Shortly after World War II, western farmers as well as home gardeners adopted the use of petroleum based pesticides like DDT, nitrogen based fertilizers, and genetically altered products before fully understanding what kinds of deleterious side effects they might have.   As we have become more aware of the dangers, we have turned to more environmentally friendly alternatives, but in many cases considerable damage had already been done. 

In 1997, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation conducted a study of the Hudson River’s tributaries, and found that the Wallkill had ten times the concentration of DDT of any of the major and minor tributaries tested, and the highest concentrations of the insecticide dieldrin.  The report was able to pinpoint the source of the pollutants as the black dirt region, while noting that the contamination had spread down the whole length of the river, possibly even into the Hudson and New York Harbor.

We can ask the same kind of question that Mrs. Wilcox asked.  Would the river now be cleaner If the canal had not been built?  It is not difficult to establish a causal link between the construction of the Cheechunk Canal in the 1830s and the DDT contamination of the Wallkill River today, but there are countless other decisions, large and small, that contributed to the DDT pollution as well.  Even when big projects are well intentioned, they can lead to big, unexpected changes.  If nothing else, looking back seven generations teaches us how difficult it is to make a significant decision affecting many lives and entire ecosystems, with the complete confidence that you will do no harm.  Momentous decision making requires a mindfulness which is rarely employed when we rush to build.

Whatever one says about the social or ecological scars left by the canal, the misgivings of Mrs. Wilcox, and the possibility that there was a less intrusive way to drain the Drowned Lands, there are very few people among us today who would fault the early black dirt farmers for building their drainage system.  Fewer still would say, in hindsight, that the canal should not have been built.  The same can not be said, however, about the Orange County Landfill, a monumental mistake from the very beginning. 

In 1974, the government of Orange County, with the approval of the government of New York State, created the seventy five acre landfill within a larger parcel of land, and began accepting municipal garbage at the site immediately.  The landfill was bordered on three sides by the Wallkill River and the Cheechunk Canal, right near the point where George Phillips had built his floodgate at the inlet of the canal about one hundred and forty years earlier.  It was constructed without a liner, the mistaken assumption being that the fine clay and silt beneath the garbage mass would prevent liquid waste from leaking down into the largest fresh water aquifer in Orange County. 

The County had argued that it had a pressing need to find a place to bury its garbage.  Until that time a number of smaller municipal landfills dotted Orange County.  The new county landfill was seen as a way of consolidating services.  From 1974 until the landfill closed in 1992, seven million tons of garbage were carted in from all over the county and deposited at the landfill.  Unfortunately, out of county garbage also found its way in, filling the landfill to capacity well before its time.

  It can not be denied that the residents of Orange County produced a lot of garbage, and that sending it out of the county was neither economical nor responsible.   Given the technology available at that time, and the culture’s reluctance to reduce, reuse, and recycle, landfilling may have been the best solution.   But it made no sense to put a landfill where they did, in one of the most sensitive locations in the county.

Why would anyone build a landfill near a place that was once named Outlet?  Here is located the drain for the upper Wallkill River and the rain waters that fall on the majority of Orange County’s black dirt farm lands.  Here also is a wetland serving as a window into a huge aquifer and potential source of fresh water.   Incredibly, it was common in New York State, in the middle of the twentieth century, to site landfills on top of aquifers.  Several of Orange County’s smaller landfills are sited on top of aquifers as well.  It was not until August of 1985 that the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation issued an order prohibiting the building or expanding of any more landfills on top of aquifers.  The big question is why it took them so long.

Low lying wetlands near rivers and streams were often used for landfills because the land could not be developed for anything else.  Economic as opposed to environmental considerations drove the decision making on where to site landfills, incinerators, and other undesirable and highly polluting projects.   Despite everything the human race had ever learned about taking care not to foul the water downstream because someone might be drinking it, that is exactly what we did. 

In a 1992 interview, Orange County’s first county executive Louis Mills stated that the decision to site the landfill on an aquifer was made by “Rockefeller’s men” in the recently created Department of Environmental Conservation.   By 1995, “Pataki’s men” in the DEC shut the landfill down, refusing to consider the county’s bid to expand the landfill in violation of the State’s new guidelines to protect drinking water.

The second county executive, Louis Heimbach, who was in office for most of the landfill’s life, insisted that the landfill was designed and built with “the best scientific evidence we could muster.”  But everything about the landfill’s construction, location, and operation fails the seven generation test.  Within two years of the landfill’s construction, leachate had already found its way into the adjacent water courses, which should have been no surprise since the aquifer flowed toward the Wallkill.   To make matters worse, the landfill was accepting truckloads of waste illegally, in violation of environmental rules that prevented certain types of garbage from going into municipal landfills.

Carting companies controlled by the Mafia dumped industrial toxic waste from all over the New York metro area into the Orange County landfill, as well as illegal red bag waste from local hospitals including the Keller Army Hospital at West Point.  Landfill employees and state police received cash and gifts as payoffs from the mobsters who owned the garbage trucks.  Tickets that were written by sheriff’s deputies and presented to organized crime haulers disappeared, never making it to court. Toxic and red bag wastes were plowed in along with the rest of the garbage, and landfill leachate was frequently pumped directly into the canal, in violation of state regulations.  Politicians, state and local, knew about the problems and kept quiet.

The same year that the landfill opened, another disposal site only a mile and a half down the Cheechunk was purchased by the Al Turi Landfill Inc.  The forty three acre site was owned and operated by organized crime figures who ultimately were found in 1999 to be "unsuitable" to run a landfill.  The operation of the two neighboring landfills have come to symbolize a period of lawlessness, a time when the police looked the other way and politicians, according to one local sheriff, kept their mouths shut,  “because they were corrupt, incompetent, or scared to death.”

Instead of performing good stewardship of the county’s natural resources, the civic leaders who designed, built, and operated the landfill created a time bomb for future generations.  They had responded to a pressing need for a garbage facility by ignoring more pressing needs for clean water and an unobstructed channel to drain the black dirt.  Building an unlined landfill on top of an aquifer and next to the canal made no sense.  This was, after all, the Cheechunk chokepoint.  Had they forgotten all of their history?  Michael Edelstein, president of Orange Environment, summed it all up when he said two years ago, "You could not have put a landfill in a worse place.”  

“The sewage treatment plants and landfills did not come to the river by accident,” said Ann Botshon, coordinator of the Wallkill River Task Force in 2002.  “In the late 1960s, influential developers and planners decided the Wallkill would be the sewer of Orange County, the place where bad things should drain.”   Peter Garrison, the former Orange County Planning Commissioner, told us the same thing in a 1992 interview, that given all the wonderful things the County could have done with the Wallkill as a resource, they had opted instead to turn the river into a sewer.  Responsible stewardship had been superseded by “poisoning for profit.”

Recent history shows that we have neglected our responsibility to maintain the canal and the landfills.  Love them or hate them, these public works projects can be ignored only at our own peril.   An understanding of the work of past generations, and a desire not to burden future generations should motivate us to care for our infrastructure.  Once we make the decision to build something as significant and as disruptive as a landfill or a canal, it should be understood that we have also made the decision to maintain it properly, or failing that, to dismantle it. 

With the exception of important work done by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1930s, our State and Federal governments have done little to maintain the canal and drainage system, despite its historically vital role in black dirt region flood control.   No one seems to be paying attention except the farmers.  They are worried, and rightly so.  The black dirt region has flooded with a terrifying regularity over the last hundred years, overwhelming the farms and destroying the crops.  As National Geographic described the rising Wallkill in 1941, “Floods come up fast, stay long, and recede slowly.  If the waters stay too long, the seed and onions rot; if the run-off is too fast, soft dirt, seeds, and onions go with it.”

The farmers also feel abandoned.  They believe they have an understanding with the government to maintain the canal because the job is too big for the farmers to undertake themselves.  If you want farms, they argue, you have to help us protect them.   The farmers want the government to dredge the canal, clear the banks, and open and maintain the feeder channels.  They are waiting for any kind of help, even though it’s generally understood that nothing short of a massive engineering project will solve the problem. 

In the 1930s, the United States government initiated many massive engineering projects, with programs like the Works Progress Administration designed to put millions of unemployed people to work rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure.  Near the flood prone Wallkill, men working for the Civilian Conservation Corps dug trenches, widened channels, removed obstacles, and added more ditches.  The State of New York designated 16,000 acres of black dirt as an Agricultural Drainage District.  Delegates from the newly formed Wallkill Valley Drainage Association appeared before the US Senate Commerce Committee in 1937 to ask for additional funds to continue the work of flood control in the black dirt area, including the removal of natural barriers below Pellets Island, the future site of two landfills.

Assistant New York State Attorney General Timothy Cohan, who attended the full day hearing along with members of the farmers’ association, stated that the Senate had a duty to continue the project.  “If it is nothing else, it is a moral obligation.”   The positive response from the Commerce Committee, and the commitment from the State of New York to plan, construct, and maintain the drainage channels were the strongest assurances the farmers ever received.  In fact, the State established legally binding requirements to keep the ditches clear.

Nonetheless, the promises were not kept, the obligations not met.  The channels were often neglected, and the canal was allowed to become overgrown while its important function was ignored when the landfills were permitted alongside it.  After a particularly devastating flood in the spring of 1983, the Army Corps of Engineers came back to the Wallkill Valley and did some brush snagging and clearing along the canal banks.  The Corps conducted a study which concluded that additional dredging was necessary along with the possibility of modifying the channel.  They promised to return once they had secured the necessary funding.  They have not been back yet.  

The floods, however, have come back again and again over the years, with increasing frequency and ferocity, twice in 2005, again in 2006.  The following year, the “worst storm ever” flooded three thousand acres of black dirt farmland, prompting one farmer to say, “I can handle competition, but farming on a riverbank is farming next to a terrorist, and I can’t handle that.”  The farmers again appealed to the DEC and to the Army Corps for help.  Then came hurricane Irene and tropical storm Lee in 2011 which put some of the farms under fifteen feet of water.  Governor Cuomo came to the black dirt to survey the damage of the two storms, acknowledge the important work that farmers do, and assure them that “we are doing everything that we possibly can do.”

State and Federal financial aid was handled through the Wallkill River Maintenance Agreement  that the Army Corps and the DEC had established in 1987 with Orange County and the townships of Goshen, Minisink, Warwick, and Wawayanda.  Under the arrangement, the County was charged with clearing and stabilizing a twelve mile reach of the Wallkill River from Oil City Road on the New York and New Jersey border in the south, to county route 37 and the Pellets Island Bridge in the north.  The DEC established the scope of the work and performed oversight. 

Over the years, farmers have grown more frustrated with the government’s lack of commitment.  State elected officials have promised more money for flood control, but have provided only enough to finance small mitigation projects, not the dredging and channel straightening that many of the farmers see as the only longterm solution.   While they wait for the Army Corps, the farmers have been aggressive in promoting whatever short term flood control projects are offered to them.  They have taken the initiative in suggesting new flood mitigation plans, like utilizing idle land in the river’s flood plain to absorb rising waters.  “The farmers are the guys out there every day and know the drainage issues better than anybody.  We see different things and know how the water flows,” a black dirt farmer told the NY Farm Bureau in 2013.

The farmers also felt that the County was moving too slowly on the channel maintenance work.  Eventually, administration of the project was turned over to the Orange County Soil and Water Conservation District.  The OCSWD had produced the Wallkill River Watershed Conservation and Management Plan in 2004, which advocated for broad based and intelligent watershed planning.  The report they wrote attempted to address all the major concerns of communities up and down the length of the Wallkill. 

Even while considering the health of the entire watershed, the OCSWD was still very sympathetic to the concerns of the black dirt farmers.  They acknowledged that poorly run farms can hurt the environment, citing the pesticide pollution of the Wallkill as one example, but they also realized that well managed farms provide better protection for fresh water and wildlife than any other land use.   Their Wallkill River management plan, therefore, supported “continued efforts to implement flood control measures for protection of the Black Dirt agricultural lands.”  

Orange County Soil and Water acknowledged that there were going to be periodic floods no matter how wide or deep a channel was dug.  The slope of the valley floor was too shallow to avoid such occurrences.   Their overarching goals were to do what they could to help the farmers control flooding, and at the same time, enforce practices that would help restore the river’s ecosystem, and conserve the soil and water.

Recently the OCSWCD and the Wallkill Valley Drainage Improvement Association have been trying to persuade the County and the State to extend the boundary of the 1987 drainage agreement another two miles north from the Pellet’s Island Bridge to route 17M.  This way they would be able to stabilize more of the channel and keep it free from brush and debris, just as they had from Pellet’s Island south to New Jersey.

Moving the boundary north makes perfect sense.  Anyone acquainted with the history of this corner of the world knows that the Cheechunk Canal bypass is crucial to the drainage of the entire valley, but because of the arbitrary boundary, the reach north of the bridge has become overgrown with vegetation and debris which blocks the water’s flow.  Channel clearing further upstream has little effect if the water course near old Outlet is backed up.  All of this was common knowledge in the 1840s.  Why wasn’t that knowledge applied in 1987 when the maintenance agreement was made and the boundaries were drawn?

The Pellet’s Island Bridge boundary line was drawn only one half mile upriver from the Orange County Landfill when the waste site was in full operation and breaking laws on a daily basis.  In the 1980s trucks owned by mob carters were often lined up at the landfill gate.   Payoffs were being made, tickets were being squashed, and environmental regulations were being violated.  Two independent witnesses testified that around 1986 and 1987, they saw county workers pumping landfill leachate down the river bank and into the Cheechunk, and that the violations were being committed with the knowledge of sheriff’s officers and the New York State DEC.

It is not unreasonable to suspect that the arbitrary Pellet’s Island boundary was drawn by the County and State to keep other parties from getting close to the landfill, particularly its backdoor on the canal where illegal activity was taking place.  Not surprisingly, the County and State still don’t want anyone getting too close.  The OCSWD’s recent efforts to have the drainage management boundary moved north have been met with resistance.  Questions they asked more than a year ago have not been answered.  “Current thinking is to exclude the landfill area,” one frustrated board member observed a month later.  “The County feels if it goes to that part of the reach, the DEC might tell the County to fix the bank.”  

As of this summer, it was still unclear to Soil and Water’s board whether the landfill side of the stream would be included in the boundary extension. “It should be for effectiveness of maintenance activities,” one member stated, “but the sensitivity of this area comes into play.”   The river bank along the landfill is extremely sensitive, sloughing into the Cheechunk and leaking chemicals.   But is it the environment’s sensitivity that primarily concerns the County and the State, or is it the politically sensitive history of the landfill and their current lack of effort to maintain it properly?

The black dirt farmers are more observant of the Wallkill and its floods than any other interest group, and to their credit, they are the most outspoken.  But they have nothing to gain by calling attention to the landfill.  If they do, they run the risk of slowing down their drainage efforts.  The landfill, if properly addressed, could easily delay any further dredging attempts because the landfill is unstable.

Concerns about the landfill have been expressed by environmental activists like Michael Edelstein, president of Orange Environment, who calls the Orange County and Al Turi landfills ticking time bombs.   Edelstein knows his history.  “This landfill property is literally sitting right in the most crucial place for water evacuating from the Wallkill.”  He is worried that the heavy mass of garbage in the unlined landfill could “breech the outer wall and ooze into the canal, thus pinching off the waterway.”

Consider what that could mean.  Were the landfill to collapse during a flood, the water could be forced back upstream, inundating thousands of acres of black dirt with river water bearing concentrations of landfill waste.  Downstream the choked off flow could be overrun by the effluent of several municipal sewage treatment plants.  The damage could be disastrous and lasting.  Already there are indications that these nightmare scenarios are not far flung fantasies.  The number of visible seeps of leachate into the Cheechunk has grown over the last few years, and the bank of the river below the landfill is sloughing outward into the channel.  The landfill is sinking and pushing outward.

Yet, the State of New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation and the Government of Orange County, the two entities charged since the landfill closed in 1993 with monitoring and maintaining the site, appear to have been negligent in their duties.   In 2012, the DEC cited the County for poor management of the landfill and failure to comply with reporting requirements.   According to the DEC, a new reporting procedure that had been implemented in 2004 was not being followed by the County.  The letter sent to the  County’s Deputy Commissioner for Public Works was a reminder that, “The County has not complied with its legal obligations regarding the operation and maintenance of the landfill site nor the associated reporting obligations required by the Consent Order.” 

Despite correspondence going back and forth since then, progress has been slow.  The DEC determined in early 2013 that the seeps coming out of the bank below the landfill were impacted with landfill leachate.   But a few months later the County was still on record stating that “the data does not indicate a release from the landfill has or is currently occurring.”   Unsurprisingly, therefore, they had no plan in place for dealing with the seeps.

The DEC sent a letter to Orange County in the Fall of 2013 documenting the DEC’s conclusion that the seeps consisted of leachate or leachate-impacted groundwater.   On October 31, 2014, the County submitted to the State a Seep Mitigation Plan and Engineering Report including plans for how to deal with the leachate.  The State found the report deficient and sent it back to the County for “repackaging.”   

As recently as September, the current Orange County Executive, Steve Neuhaus, dismissed claims that landfill leachate was seeping into the Cheechunk.  “These are the ghosts of landfills long ago and if there is any leachate it will definitely be addressed.”   Given the recent communication between the State and County establishing that the seeps along the Cheechunk contain leachate, and given the established history of leachate seeps along the canal dating back to 1976, the County official’s remarks appear to be disingenuous. 

Presently, it is anticipated that the revised Seep Mitigation Plan could be submitted by the County as soon as December 2014.   In the meantime, any attempts to address the sloughing of the banks as the landfill slides toward the canal have been postponed until after “addressing the leachate seeps.”   Inclinometers that had been installed to determine if the bank is shifting are no longer functioning.

In other words, little has been done to address the problems so far.  The State has cited the County again and again for failure to maintain the landfill, but there are no repercussions for violations, and conditions remain the same.  While the two governments continue stalling, other groups have been pressing for action.  Farmers pushed Orange County Soil and Water to undertake the Pellet's Island channel clearing project south of the boundary and in the vicinity of the landfill.  The results have been mixed.  Brush and small trees were removed from the bank opposite the landfill, but there have been questions about the project’s effectiveness.  Additional questions about authority and jurisdiction have dogged the project as well.

Another group pushing for solutions has been Orange Environment which commissioned a biological study of the Wallkill River in the early 1990s.   Looking at both the health of the ecosystem and the drainage problems plaguing the black dirt region, their report suggested exploring long term remedies.  “Restoration of the Wallkill to its original meandering channel would greatly enhance the stream quality there and downstream.”   In addition to putting the Wallkill back into its original channel, the study also suggested the creation of wetland buffers along the channel to absorb and clean flood run off.

This, then, is the scene of the impasse.  We are in trouble if we do nothing.  The farms will continue to flood, and more farmers will be forced to sell.  The landfill will succumb to erosion and gravity and settle into the river.  On the other hand, aggressive channel dredging runs the risk of speeding up the pollutants that are heading downstream, and further runs the risk of destabilizing the landfill.  And just to complicate things, major development projects are encroaching on this contaminated and archaeologically sensitive area.  Despite objections, developers are planning a factory, close to the Al Turi landfill and the dried up Cheechunk Springs, that will produce vegetarian convenience foods for an international market.  Many of the competing views, claims, and solutions being offered today are reminiscent of the long ago Beaver and Muskrat conflicts over the same stretch of flowing water.

Now is the moment to be seeking a seven generation solution that fairly and inclusively addresses the problems posed by this location.   If the Army Corps of Engineers is indeed conducting a study to come up with a more permanent plan, they must look at the whole picture and take the two closed and leaking landfills into consideration.  The County and the State must take their responsibility for the canal and county landfill seriously, and be more forthright about the problems the landfill poses.  This is our greatest challenge: to act like the past has something to tell us, and the future really matters. 

In the Lenape language, the word cheechunk translates as either mirror or soul depending upon the regional dialect.  We might do well to take this hint and search for our own reflection in the Cheechunk.  Looked at correctly, the three mile stretch of waterway that we have been considering can serve as a mirror into who we are, where we’ve been, and what we are becoming.  You can learn a lot about people by observing the way they treat their land.

*It should be noted that there is no established standard for manganese in class C streams.  However, the amounts of ammonia and arsenic found in the leachate seeps exceed accepted standards.

See also: Shouldn't this leachate be investigated?  And:  State slams Orange County on landfill

“The power that the madmen hold is power of an order that the sane alone know that they are not sane enough to use.”  Lewis Mumford, 1946

“Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly Cesium out of Love Canal…”   Alan Ginsberg,1980

On August 6, 1945, hours after American forces exploded the most powerful bomb in history over Hiroshima, Japan, instantly annihilating more than 80,000 people, President Harry Truman delivered a speech to the nation and the world, revealing for the first time the existence of the Manhattan Project.  He said that the blast was caused by “an atomic bomb.  It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.  The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”

He went on to talk about the sustained effort that was required to build the bomb in war plants scattered across the country.  “Employment during peak construction numbered 125,000 and over 65,000 individuals are even now engaged in operating the plants.  Many have worked there for two and a half years.”  The work, he went on to say, cost over $2 billion and needed to be shrouded in secrecy.  “Few know what they have been producing. They see great quantities of material going in and they see nothing coming out of these plants, for the physical size of the explosive charge is exceedingly small.”

In fact, the total amount of uranium 235 required to build Little Boy, the bomb that had been dropped earlier that day, was less than 150 pounds: 86 for the bullet, and 57 for the trigger with which the bullet collided.  But it had taken extraordinary effort to produce this one armful of enriched uranium.  In its natural state, the richest ore contains only about 1 in 500 parts uranium, so the ore first had to be chemically refined to pure uranium.  The uranium metal that is produced during refinement is made up of more than 99% uranium 238.  Only the rare uranium 235 isotope, with its unstable nucleus, can be used to produce the rapid fission reaction required for the bomb.  Therefore, the refined uranium metal next had to be enriched through a series of steps using heat, gaseous diffusion, and particle accelerators to separate the lighter uranium 235 from the heavier 238.

The scientists of the Manhattan Project had to be provided with enough 90% pure uranium 235 to reach what they called critical mass, that is, the amount of uranium necessary to guarantee a chain reaction of neutrons splitting atoms, releasing more neutrons splitting more atoms, leading to the explosion of energy that the scientists desired  - all within a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.  As it was, Little Boy was something of a dud with only about two pounds, or about 1.5%, of its enriched fuel undergoing fission before the detonation blew apart all the remaining material.  Fat Man, the bomb dropped over Nagasaki three days later, was triggered by plutonium and was much more effective.

Truman did not speak in any detail about the bomb, of course.  He believed there was a need for continued secrecy.  He spoke instead about “scientific brains” working together to create the “greatest marvel” and the “greatest scientific achievement” in world history.  “Both science and industry worked under the direction of the United States Army, which achieved a unique success in managing so diverse a problem in the advancement of knowledge in an amazingly short time.  It is doubtful if such another combination could be got together in the world.  What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.”

According to the President, all of this was accomplished with very little risk to the men and women who worked in the plants. “Although workers at the sites have been making materials to be used in producing the greatest destructive force in history, they have not themselves been in danger beyond that of many other occupations, for the utmost care has been taken of their safety.”

Truman mentioned a few of the atomic production sites, like Tennessee, Washington, and New Mexico.  He did not mention the plants in the Niagara Falls Frontier or their role in refining the uranium that was passed on to the other Manhattan Project sites.  Perhaps he did not mention Niagara because the work that was performed there doesn’t capture and excite the imagination the way diffusion plants, breeder reactors, and testing laboratories do.  What happened at Niagara Falls was basic, brute and earthy.  The work was dirty, loud, foul smelling, sometimes dusty, sometimes steaming.  Tons of raw ore were pulverized, bathed, drained, precipitated, and baked.

Even though the Niagara Region’s role is not as well known as those played by Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, or Hanford, all of the sites shared a similar history, and contended with similar problems and policies.  And just like the other Manhattan Project sites, the Niagara Frontier is still contaminated with radiation.  The problem at all of the sites has been compounded by the policy of secrecy that Truman identified back in 1945, and that has remained with us ever since. Much of what the Manhattan Project did and much of what it left behind is still unknown.

Therefore, in 1979 when The New York State Assembly Task Force on Toxic Substances began its investigation into whether the Army had been involved in the contamination of Love Canal, the members had only a limited idea of what they would find.  Almost 35 years after World War II and Harry Truman’s speech, Assemblyman Maurice Hinchey, chairman of the Task Force, along with the other assemblymen on the committee, Joseph Pillittere, Matthew Murphy, and Pete Grannis, began their inquiry.  Aided by investigator A.J. Woolston-Smith, the members of the Task Force began inquiring into the war time activities of the US Army around Niagara Falls, particularly the waste disposal activities of the Chemical Warfare Services and the Manhattan Engineering District, better known as the Manhattan Project.

After an intensive 20 month investigation, the Task Force submitted their findings to the Assembly in a lengthy report, The Federal Connection: A History of US Military Involvement in the Toxic Contamination of Love Canal and the Niagara Frontier Region.   The Report boldly contradicted the Army’s contention that it was not responsible for any contamination.  It told the story instead of “an incredible, occasionally surreal, history of federal mismanagement, exploitation, and despoliation of widespread sections of one of the most beautiful and productive regions of New York State.”

The report claimed that the Army had misled workers and put them in danger, conspired with industrialists to deceive local officials and the public, and ultimately put the entire population at risk with its carelessness and subsequent cover ups.  The Task Force, in other words, had not come to the same conclusion about the triumph of science, industry, and Government that Truman had reached.  Instead, they accused the US Government of a criminal cover up.

Today, in the year 2014, thirty five years after the Task Force investigation which came thirty five years after the war, A.J. Woolston-Smith, or Smitty as he is usually called, still talks about The Federal Connection and his investigations around Niagara Falls.  Sometimes he comes to visit me at home, and we sit across from each other at the kitchen table to have what Smitty likes to call a chin wag, or a long chat.  He stopped in one afternoon a few weeks ago, and we talked until well after dark about his work with the Task Force.
 
“The people in Niagara Falls knew they had been screwed.  They knew they were war victims too,” he told me.  “All of the Niagara Falls Frontier looked run down back then, around the time of Love Canal.   It looked depressed.  Exceptionally depressed.  There was high unemployment in the late 1970s.  The roads were torn up and potholed.  Some of the factories along Buffalo Avenue were still open, but barely open.  There was only a whisper of smoke coming out of the stacks.  Hooker and DuPont looked dilapidated.   There were sheds and empty kennels near many of the plants.  These used to be filled with guard dogs.”

Arthur James Woolston-Smith was born in New Zealand in 1926, and came of age just in time to leave home and go to war.  Smitty served with both the British and American navies.  After the war, he moved to New York City, and set up a consulting service with some of his old navy contacts.  He took on a number of interesting cases investigating the mob, drug companies, and the NY/NJ Port Authority.  It was through one investigation into Pfizer Pharmaceuticals that Smitty met New York State Assembly Speaker Stanley Steingut, who later hired him to do government work.  The Speaker liked Smitty’s investigative style and called him “The Professor.”

When Stanley Fink, the next Assembly Speaker, appointed Kingston Assemblyman Maurice Hinchey to chair the Task Force, he assigned A.J. Woolston-Smith to go along as investigator.  The Manhattan project had been a joint venture between the US and England with limited participation by Canada.  Smitty had contacts in the military of all three nations.  He was just the man for the job.

“One of the chaps that I knew, in fact, he was the only person in the US government who would talk to me,” Smitty admitted, “was a Captain in Navy War Assets Disposal and a CIA man.  He talked to me about the LOOW and Army dumping at Love Canal and the bra factory on Buffalo Avenue.  He had been a friend of mine.  Former FBI and former security at the Brooklyn Navy Yards.  The Government eventually sold the plants at the LOOW.  He said that he had been warned by the men stationed out there not to light a cigarette, or he could blow the place up.  The Government did not clean up the plants, but sold them with the understanding that the new owners would have to clean the contamination themselves.”

“You know,” Smitty told me with a wry smile, “All of these people in the atomic establishment have a pretty high view of themselves, but we could see that they had made a mess of everything and were taking no responsibility for it.”  I asked him if he had ever been scared of the Feds because of the work he was doing back then, or if Hinchey was frightened that he might be destroying his own political future. “No,” he shrugged and said.  “We just bashed on.  Maurice thought it was important that the people knew the truth.”

Job number one for the Task Force was to determine if the Army was responsible for any of the contamination at Love Canal.  Accordingly, Smitty began his work by talking to the neighbors.   “I went to talk to various people in the Town of Wheatland and the City of Niagara Falls, and the people who had operated the bulldozers at Love Canal.  Town maintenance workers.  They told me about the pig men and everything else.  The Army had not talked to many of these people when they conducted their own investigation a year earlier.”  

According to The Federal Connection, the eyewitnesses with whom Smitty had spoken established, “conclusively that Army personnel openly, concertedly and repeatedly disposed of drummed materials at Love Canal.”

One eyewitness, Ms. Lucinda McCombs, testified before the Task Force that her children had come running into the house after playing near the Canal one day to tell her about “funny men” with “faces that looked like pigs” down by the Canal.  She ran out to see for herself and saw “brownish green colored trucks” and men “with the same colored clothes, except that they wore gas masks, and they were dumping containers into the Love Canal.”

A similar story was told by Mr. Alfred Jones who testified to the Task Force that he used to swim in Love Canal during the summer of 1942 when he was 12 years old.  One time he saw “an army two and a half ton truck” with soldiers on it dumping drums into the Canal.  It was the only time he saw it happen, but he remembered it vividly because the next time he went swimming, his “skin started burning, and whether it was caused by them or not, the chemicals whatever… we had to quit swimming because it burned our skin.”

Another witness, Ms. Mary Wahl, reported seeing Army vehicles as well as numerous trucks owned by private companies going into Love Canal in the early 1940s.  She said that many of the trucks were red colored Hooker trucks, and that a few were from Mathieson Alkali, but that “dozens” were “green-colored, open-backed trucks with the words ‘Army Ordnance’ written on the doors” and “always carrying at least two armed soldiers.”  The trucks rolled by her house slowly.  She never followed them down, but she noted that when the trucks went in, “they were loaded with drums,” and when they came out, they were empty.  Children who went down to the Canal to play told her that armed soldiers told them to “stand back”  because they had chemicals there.

Ms. Wahl remembered watching out for the titanium trucks that came once a week because they kicked up a fine powder that made it very difficult for the neighbors to breathe.  But she also testified that her neighbors had grown numb.  “At night you’d hear these big explosions.  We used to say, there goes the Canal again and we would all go back to sleep… It got so the firemen did not even bother.”

Mr. Ruben Licht, a former Army staff sergeant and DuPont employee, testified that on several occasions he followed Army trucks into Love Canal in 1946 or 1947.  According to Mr. Licht, they were green trucks with removable wooden stakes on the sides and a white star on the door, and “usually carried four soldiers.  Two soldiers guarded the end of the roadway leading to the Canal, while the other two rolled the drums off the truck and pushed them into the Canal.”  He also testified that on one occasion he approached the truck, and the guards told him not to go any further.  He recalled being surprised that the men were wearing side-arms in peace time.

There were other witnesses who told the same stories with the same details.  Mr. Arthur Tracy was able to identify some of the trucks that were dumping at Love Canal as the same trucks that were parked at the Niagara Falls Chemical Warfare Plant on Buffalo Avenue.

“I kept doing interviews and locating installations in Niagara,” Smitty told me.  “MIT chaps and others knew what was going on there.  Many people knew.  At first, people were reluctant to talk to me.  I made them understand that I was not out to get them.  A lot of the people around Niagara were afraid that the Government was going to come after them, especially after the stand off in the spring of 1980.  That’s when some of the Love Canal residents held two EPA officials hostage for several hours, demanding that President Carter evacuate all the families from the contaminated area.   The residents were soon surrounded by FBI agents who looked like they were going to arrest them.”

“But the people’s greatest fear was of what lay underground or in their drinking water.  By the time we were doing our investigations in late 1979 and 1980, health problems were starting to crop up: miscarriages, blood diseases, rashes.  People were already starting to notice cancer clusters in the neighborhood.  Their fear of radiation and contamination was greater than their fear of the Government.”

“But even more than fear,” Smitty continued, “a lot of the people were angry.  Now that they were figuring out what was going on, and what had been done to them, they were mad at the politicians.”

Smitty recalled going from house to house, talking with the homeowners and getting their stories.  “I spoke with the many complainants in the Love Canal neighborhood about their basements filling up with black stuff.  Lois Gibbs, the leader of the neighborhood group, talked to other Task Force people about the black ooze in her basement.  One time she was talking to a bunch of her neighbors, telling them that ‘there’s a fellow going around here who knows everything.’  She was talking about me, and didn’t know who I was or that I was standing right next to her.”

“The black ooze was really something,” Smitty recalled.  “I got the stuff on my fingers once.  They were doing remedial work at the Canal.  Approved by the EPA.  Water and black ooze were being pumped out of Love Canal into another channel under the road where it flowed into the Niagara River.  I put my hand in the water, and the black ooze was hot and burned.”

Among the interviews that impressed Smitty the most were the ones that he did with “the Love Canal Gang”: Donald Harris, Fred Downs, and the Jones brothers, William and Lawrence.  All four were young boys in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and they used to play and swim near the Canal when the weather was warm.  Their individual testimonies, though given separately and many years after the fact, were consistent with each other.  The details that they remembered had obviously made deep impressions on them.  They recalled the trucks and jeeps that came down to the edge of the Canal, the soldiers who were in them, and the heavy white gloves that the soldiers wore.  They remembered the odd shaped barrels and how the Army men handled them gingerly, and how the men approached the boys and chased them away.

One of the Canal Gang boys, Fred Downs, testified that one time when the Army vehicles came down to the Canal there was an argument.  “I remember that there was swearing between the Army guys and a man that was not in the Army who operated the machinery.  It appeared that this was not part of the man’s job or he was not getting paid for it or something like that.”  The man that Fred was probably referring to was Frank Ventry, a bulldozer operator.  It was Ventry’s testimony that finally convinced Smitty.

Frank Ventry had operated a bulldozer at Love Canal in the late 1940s for the City of Niagara Falls.  He testified that on one occasion an Army truck arrived at the Canal accompanied by a jeep carrying a captain who was wearing a sidearm.  Ventry was on the other side of the Canal, pushing dirt with his bulldozer.  The captain ordered him to approach.  But as a former combat engineer with no love for captains, Ventry refused.  “The Canal was wet, and kind of soupy and I didn’t like to walk in it and neither did he.”  The captain sent a sergeant over with the message: “He wanted me to make a pile of dirt, soft dirt, so he could unload the drums without injuring them and I did that.  That is how I remember the Army dumping there.”

He went on to describe the long heavy gloves that the men wore, and the odd beer keg shaped drums that were being gently unloaded.  He was asked to bury the drums in the deepest part of the Canal.  He was told that the truck came from the Chemical Warfare Plant on Buffalo Avenue.

On many occasions, Assemblyman Hinchey accompanied Smitty as he did his investigative work around Niagara Falls.  “The interviews with the people were what moved Maurice Hinchey,” Smitty recalls.  “He was inspired to action by their voices.   He took to heart the stories they told us, and it motivated him to push on with the investigation.   I think that the time we spent up there established the pattern for what he continued to do as an Assemblyman for the rest of his time in Albany.  He later held quite a few public hearings that investigated organized crime, and he relied on the testimony of people who were living it, witnessing it, being hurt by it.”

“Hinchey and I and the rest of the Task Force thought that the information that came from our witnesses, and the way their stories all supported each other, proved conclusively that the Army had dumped at Love Canal, but we needed to have more.  We needed to show that the chemicals that still remained in the Canal came from plants that were connected to the Army.  And we also had to make sure that every single statement that we made could be proven, or we could be in a lot of trouble, both politically and legally.”

The Task Force compiled a list of Manhattan Project and Chemical Warfare Service sites around Niagara Falls, along with an inventory of the wastes that they had generated.  They wanted to see if the toxins that were produced in the MED and CWS plants matched up with the chemicals that were showing up in Love Canal.

• The Niagara Falls Chemical Warfare Plant (NFCWP), operated first by DuPont and then by Hooker, manufactured impregnite for the Army.
• The Northeast Chemical Warfare Depot stored war materiel on the site of the former Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (LOOW).
• The Thionyl Chloride Plant, operated by Hooker, manufactured reagents for the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS).
• The Dodecyl Mercaptan Plant, operated by Hooker, contributed to the production of synthetic rubber for the Rubber Reserve Company, paid for by the government-sponsored Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
• The Hexachloroethane Plant, operated by Hooker, contributed to the production of smokescreen for the CWS.
• The Arsenic Trichloride Plant, operated by Hooker, produced chemical warfare gas for the CWS.
• The P-45 Plant, operated by Hooker, shipped tank cars of hexafluoroxylene to Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project (MED).
• The Ceramics Plant, operated by Linde Air, processed uranium ore to uranium oxide then to uranium tetrafluoride for the MED.
• The Electrometallurgical Company Plant, owned by Union Carbide, converted uranium tetrafluoride to uranium metal for the MED.

In addition, several large chemical companies had contracts with the Army during the war.  DuPont, for example, filled 45 war supply contracts worth over $15 million from its Niagara Frontier plants alone.

“I asked a lot of questions,” Smitty explained to me, “and found out who owned what property, and often it turned out to be the Manhattan Project or the intelligence services.  I learned all of this from people who lived or worked along Buffalo Avenue.  Maurice and I also talked to municipal officials, and I would go through town records to look at deeds and ownership records.”

“People knew that it was all secret government work that had been done in those factories, and they knew it was hazardous.   The dogs gave it away.  The people would tell us, ‘you always saw soldiers and guard dogs at the plants.’  The people knew that something was going on and that it all had to do with the war.”

“We wanted to take a close look at the plants on our list and show what kinds of materials they produced as well as what kinds of waste.  We also wanted to determine how deeply the Army was involved in the process of disposing of that waste.  We wanted to see how much the Army knew about what was going on in those plants.”  

I asked Smitty if he was surprised by what he found.  “Oh yes.  The list of plants that we made was a work in progress.  We kept discovering more and adding them to the list.  The Army didn’t just hand the list to us.  They denied things, like manufacturing phosgene during the war.  We had to find it out for ourselves.”

The first plant that the Task Force explored in The Federal Connection was the Niagara Falls Chemical Warfare Plant on Buffalo Avenue.  The DuPont chemical company operated the plant for the Army from 1942 until it closed in 1945, manufacturing impregnite, a substance with the code name “CC-2.”  The Army impregnated uniforms and protective clothing with the secret chemical compound to make the wearer impermeable to gas warfare attacks.  

Until the end of the war, the NFCWP flushed all of its liquid wastes down the sewers despite the objections of city officials and neighbors.  The "liquors" emitted noxious chlorine and acetic acid fumes that killed all the trees and shrubs around the factory.  For every 100 pounds of impregnite that were produced, 48 pounds of this highly toxic liquid waste were also generated.   Solid wastes containing the same toxins were packed into thousands of 55 gallon drums and hauled by DuPont to one of their own nearby landfills, Necco Park.

This arrangement changed during the Korean War, however.  From 1951 until 1953, Hooker Chemical re-opened the Niagara Falls Chemical Warfare Plant for the Army in anticipation of more war time demand for impregnite.  Hooker, like DuPont, dumped their liquid wastes down the sewers, but they dumped their drummed wastes into their own landfill, which happened to be Love Canal.  The Task Force determined that much of what Hooker dumped into Love Canal was done under contract for the Army.  

All of the chemical wastes generated at the NFCWP were found in samples at Love Canal.  Of particular interest were the anilines, like chloraniline, chloroaniline, and dichloroaniline, signature chemicals that would not appear in Love Canal for any other reason than as by products of impregnite production.  The Army had access to the same lab results in 1978 that the Task Force later used, yet the Army had failed to make the obvious connection between impregnite production and the aniline wastes in Love Canal.  When questioned about this later, one of the Army investigators replied that he didn’t remember seeing any of these chemicals on the list.

The Task Force was learning quickly that federal record keeping was haphazard or nonexistent.  No one had ever done a similar inventory of the chemicals manufactured and the wastes generated in the Niagara Frontier’s war plants.  The Task Force had figured out that much of the toxic waste in the region had been generated in Government owned and Government equipped plants that had produced material exclusively for the Government.  The lawyers on the Task Force argued that the Government was clearly liable for any damage to health and the environment.

But at the same time, the more the Task Force learned, the more questions they couldn't answer.   The most disturbing question of all was this:   “The documents revealed that the Army Ordnance Department, the Chemical Warfare Service and the Manhattan Project were all heavily involved in chemical production and uranium processing in the region.  What, then, had become of the chemical and radioactive wastes these projects necessarily had produced?”

For a year, Smitty dug into boxes and files.  He visited the National Archives as well as the Center for Military History in Washington, D.C.; the National Federal Records Center in Suitland, Maryland; the Edgewood Arsenal in Aberdeen, Maryland; headquarters of the Army Corps of Engineers and the General Services Administration, both at Federal Plaza in Manhattan; the records of the City of Niagara Falls, of New York State, the Niagara County Clerk’s office, and the records of corporations like Hooker, DuPont, and Linde Air.  

Smitty remembered, “I was going back and forth from Niagara Falls to Albany and sometimes to Maryland and other federal records depositories.  Everywhere I went, the archivists were cooperative.  Do you know what?  They wanted me to know what happened.  They helped me find the records I was looking for.  It didn’t hurt that I was a veteran and had been in the service during the war.  But people wanted me to find things out.  They wanted it all known, all this business that happened during the war.  One archivist told me that I was on the side of the angels.  The reason was because the problem was enormous, and no one was doing anything about it.”

Immediately after World War II, the military had to dispose of mountains of surplus war materiel.  A great deal of it was highly toxic.  Bases were closing, and large inventories of poisons and useless weaponry had piled up in many of them.  All too often, nothing was done with the surplus, or the wrong things were done with it.  Poisonous gases and radioactive wastes were dumped into the ocean.  Radioactive and chemical wastes were left unattended, contaminating both air and water.  A 1948 Chemical Corps Disposal Manual instructed soldiers how to dispose of excess impregnite.  One is told to either scatter it on the ground and wait for the rain, or bury it in a pit at least three feet deep, or burn it on a day when the wind will carry off the chlorine gas.

The root of the problem, according to the Task Force, was “the War Department’s inability or disinclination to allocate sufficient funds for the storage of toxic agents or for their proper disposal.”   It wasn’t until people in various parts of the country started injuring and killing themselves by accidentally stumbling upon, and setting off, abandoned and forgotten mustard gas canisters, contaminated pipes, and unexploded warheads, that the Army began to realize that it had a liability problem.   Only then did the War Assets Administration begin to show some restraint in the way it disposed of contaminated properties - but not very much restraint.

In the Niagara Frontier beginning in 1944, surplus and contaminated war materiel was shipped to the Northeast Chemical Warfare Depot, the second site on the Task Force’s list.   It was built on the LOOW, the former TNT manufacturing plant that had operated for only nine months in 1942.  The scattered buildings and igloos that had been used for TNT production and storage became the resting place for incendiary bombs and other military throw aways.   Impregnite found its way into the depot too, since far more was produced than was needed during the war, past experience having proven to be an ineffective guide.  The Task Force speculated that impregnite from the  storage depot might have been dumped in Love Canal, since the white powder packed in white cardboard canisters matched the descriptions supplied by several eyewitnesses.

The Task Force soon learned that the Army was using the same sloppy practices at the other sites on Smitty’s list, not just the LOOW.  Hooker’s thionyl chloride plant generated large quantities of highly toxic and explosive toluene solvent wastes along with thionyl chloride residues in the production of phosgene, which was like mustard gas.  These wastes were packed in over sized drums and hauled to the Hooker landfills including Love Canal which opened in 1942, the same year that the plant opened.  In all likelihood, these were the drums that the boys in the Love Canal Gang watched the soldiers push into the Canal, and that Frank Ventry buried in the deepest parts.  They may also account for the explosions that Mary Wahl and her neighbors heard at night.

The top secret, heavily guarded P-45 plant was built in 1943 and was code named “the bra factory” in order to confuse it with another military plant named P-45 which manufactured undergarments for female soldiers.  It was operated by Hooker and generated  both drummed and liquid waste.  The liquids went down the sewers, and there are no records of what happened to the solid wastes.  Next door to P-45, the MED built another plant whose sole function was to remove a whitish oxide from uranium slag that had been sent over from the Linde plant.  After the slag was washed with hydrochloric acid, it was sent back to Linde.  The waste, however, went into the sewers, tiny radioactive particles included.  

The Electromettallurgical Company which converted uranium tetrafluoride into uranium metal also generated a liquid waste that was slightly contaminated with uranium.  It too was poured into the sewers.   “We were seeing a pattern.  There was no accountability when it came to disposing of all of this waste,” Smitty said.  “And there was a lot of waste.”

The Task Force believed that they had also solved the mystery of how cesium made its way into Love Canal.  The radioactive isotope, cesium 137, showed up in a radiological survey of Love Canal performed by the New York Health Department at around the time of the first clean up.  It was located in a large concentration behind the 99th Street School.  The cesium was found in soil that was different from the surrounding soils and relatively close to the surface.

Cesium 137 does not appear anywhere in nature.  It occurs as a result of fission experiments using uranium or plutonium.  Such experiments were carried out at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in Schenectady, NY, a MED site.  Surplus cesium 137 from Knolls was stored at the Chemical Waste Depot at the LOOW.  As a result, there were traces of cesium 137 all around the LOOW.  While the Task Force was not able to prove it, the best hypothesis for how cesium 137 got into Love Canal is that fill from the LOOW was used as cover after pits were dug to remove barrels of waste near the 99th street school adjacent to the Canal.

“We had taken things as far as we could,” Smitty told me.  “We had witnesses, we had documents, and we had the inescapable fact that the chemicals that were showing up in Love Canal matched the waste streams of facilities that had been operated for and by the Army during the war.  The only thing we could do next was point out how sloppy the Army had been, or rather, how cavalier they had been about the whole matter.”

The members of the Task Force had realized that the Army was thoroughly involved in widespread contamination, most of which was never acknowledged, recorded, or shared with State or local officials.  Based on their findings in the early stages of their investigation, they concluded that the Army had not done a credible investigation of itself.

The Army had conducted its investigation and wrote its report on the insistence of Congressman John Lafalce in 1978, shortly after Love Canal first began making headlines.  The entire Army investigation took only three weeks.  The Task Force maintained that an adequate investigation could not possibly be performed in that short amount of time.  The Army had employed, “hectic, haphazard methodology.”  The Federal Connection concluded that, “The Army’s investigative emphasis, it seemed, was not on uncovering new evidence, but on refuting the old.”  The Army did not do a thorough examination of records, nor had they sought out additional witnesses or people with knowledge.  They also did not review their own witness interviews, never following up on what had been told to them by Frank Ventry, the bulldozer operator.

The Army also got a lot of the facts wrong.  For example, the Army investigative report assumed that dumping began at Love Canal in 1947, when it actually started in 1942.  Another misstatement was that there was no phosgene production in Niagara Falls after WWI.  The Task Force was able to demonstrate that this was not true.  Hooker produced 274,000 pounds of the gas in 1943, with similar amounts in 1944 and 1945.  In addition, Niagara Chlorine produced 2,223,000 pounds in 1943 alone.  To the Task Force, this consistent failure to get the facts straight was a clear indication of a “serious flaw in either the Army’s investigative methodology or its execution.”

Most incredibly, the Army did not look at any activities of the Manhattan Project when it conducted its investigation and wrote its report.  They argued that it was not their job to include the MED since the Manhattan Project records had been taken over by the Atomic Energy Commission.

The Army argued several times that it had “no involvement” in the contamination of Love Canal. The claim was made in their 1978 report, and it was made again in response to a preliminary findings report from the Task Force.  The Task Force members knew that the Army’s assertions were not true.   They wanted to show next just how deeply involved the Army actually was in the maintenance of the plants and toxic waste disposal.  To that end, the next section of The Federal Connection demonstrated in vivid detail how the Army and managers of Linde Air Products conspired together to dispose of 37 million gallons of radioactive waste in underground wells.  The Task Force hoped the story would serve as an example of how the system worked as well as the Government’s culpability.

“It was our responsibility as a government entity to establish responsibility.”  Smitty explained to me.  “We were told: go in there and find out just who was responsible for the mess in Niagara Falls.  It was our mandate to establish that responsibility.  We thought the Linde story did a good job of showing just who was making the decisions.”

A Freedom of Information Act request made by the Task Force led them to their startling discovery about the Linde wells in documents from the Manhattan Project archives.  They learned that the radioactive dumping took place from 1944 to 1946 in the shallow wells on the Linde Air Products site in Tonawanda.   Based on the documentary evidence, the Task Force concluded that, “MED officials, all Army personnel, were intimately involved in the decision making regarding the disposal of these liquid wastes.”  

The documents also proved that both Linde and MED officials were well aware that injecting the waste “would permanently contaminate Linde’s wells and probably the wells of Linde’s neighbors in the surrounding region.”  The most damning conclusion, however, was that, “This method of disposal was selected precisely because the source of the underground contamination could not readily be traced back to Linde or the Army.”

Throughout the time that the Task Force was doing its work, no one had ever mentioned those wells.   No one had indicated that they even existed.  Yet both the Army and Linde had been intimately aware of them.  “The very existence of the Linde wells seems to have slipped through some crack in the bureaucratic structure to evade detection,” The Federal Connection concluded.

The Task Force did not pull punches in their report: “Reviewed in chronological perspective, these documents provide a fascinating ‘micro-history’ illustrating the manner in which Manhattan Project policies regarding the problem of waste disposal were executed in the Niagara Frontier Region.  The classic ingredients are all present here - the continued use of untried methods and primitive technology until the threat of financial and environmental ruin became a reality; the pressing demand for uninterrupted production, at any cost; and, at every stage, the tightening of the purse strings when it came to providing adequate funds for safe disposal.”

Linde had experience in the ceramics business, working with uranium ore which was used to make the salts that were used in the production of ceramic glaze.  Linde’s role in the Manhattan Project was to take tons of uranium bearing ore, both American and African, refine it down, then move it on to the next processing plant.  Refinement was done in three steps.  Step one produced a black oxide, which was sent to Hooker for an acid bath, and was then sent back to Linde.  Step two produced a brown oxide, or uranium dioxide, and step three produced uranium tetrafluoride, a green salt, which was sent to Electromet.

Step one commenced at the Linde ceramics plant in July 1943 and continued until July 1946 when supplies ran out.  By the time they were finished, Linde had produced 2,248 tons of black oxide which also meant they generated about 8000 tons of uranium ore sludge containing .54 percent uranium.  Most of this solid, slightly radioactive sludge was hauled to the nearby Haist property where it was dumped and buried and started leaching toward the Niagara River.  In 1960 the Government sold the Haist dump to Ashland Petroleum which then built a tank farm on top of it.

The sludge from the higher grade African ore was sent to the LOOW for storage.  Together, the sludge and residues at both sites and those at the ceramics plant, which the Manhattan Project sold to Linde after the war, contained approximately 107,000 pounds of uranium.

While the solid sludge generated by step one can be accounted for, there is no record or trace of the “highly caustic radioactive liquid wastes that were flushed down the wells.”   When the plant first began production, the liquid was discharged into the City of Tonawanda sewer system.  City officials soon got into a battle with Linde, that lasted through April 1944, because the caustic radioactive discharge was affecting the acidity of the water.  Linde had to find another way to dispose of the liquid after the City threatened to “bulkhead the Linde sanitary sewer entirely.”

Linde had two options.  The first was to discharge the liquid into the storm sewer, as opposed to the sanitary sewer, where it would empty into Two Mile Creek, pass through a public park, and then into the Niagara River.  The second option was to pump it into underground wells that Linde had drilled to supply cooling water, but that were found unfit for use.  Linde eventually ended up doing both.

In an extraordinary letter, from the Assistant Superintendent of the Linde Plant to the Army, the two alternative methods of disposal are presented, and the first option - the sewers - is discounted because “of probable future complications in the event of claims of contamination against us.”  The Linde official went on to advocate for the second plan - the wells - because, “It is considered impossible to determine the course of subterranean streams, and therefore the   

responsibility for any contamination could not be fixed.  Our law department recommends that this method of disposal be followed.”  The company was concerned about liability.  They did not appear to be concerned with what the chemicals might do to the water and everything that lived near it.

The reply from the Army, signed by Captain E. L. Van Horn, Army Corps of Engineers, is even more extraordinary in that he told them to choose whichever option they wanted.  He had no objections.  But then he went on to write, “… even though we might not be liable from a legal standpoint, we might from an ethical point of view be doing something which will effect the production of other war plants, and could be severely criticized for our actions.”  The War’s 

demands determined all right and wrong and superseded all other questions.   The two parties were not thinking about the land and people of Niagara Falls, nor were they looking very far into the future.  

The Task Force demonstrated that Linde and the MED misled City and State officials about the composition of the caustic liquid they had been flushing down the sewers.  The Army and Linde had neglected to make any reference to the particles of uranium oxide.   Failure to mention the radioactivity was typical of the MED’s policy of concealment.  The MED always divulged as little as possible.  

“Linde’s neighbors were not asked their opinion,” the Task Force wrote in one of the more pointed passages of The Federal Connection. “The need for secrecy, given wartime conditions and the urgency of the Manhattan Project, was perhaps understandable.  What is inexcusable, however, is that the cloak of secrecy seems to have been used to conceal pertinent, ostensibly non-secret information from those who had a ‘right to know.’”

For the next two years, 1945 and 1946, the Linde wells kept clogging up.  Each time it happened, which was often, the wells had to be shut down and cleaned, while the effluent was discharged into Two Mile Creek.  No matter what Linde and the Army tried, the wells continued to clog.  More wells were dug, and they immediately started clogging too.  Linde was forced to dump its radioactive effluent into a drainage ditch along the side of its property, where it would eventually run off into Two Mile Creek.  The wells kept backing up.

Linde did not like being forced to dump their wastes like this.  The ditch was unprotected as it ran into the creek and through the public park and golf course.  Linde officials asked the MED repeatedly for permission to dig more wells.  The Army repeatedly denied permission, stating that it cost too much money.  The pressure under which Linde officials were operating, as well as their fear of ruin, is evident in this 1945 Linde memo:  “We are unwilling to divert this hot lye water effluent to Two Mile Creek because of the liabilities involved, although the Army has requested that we do so in spite of their unwillingness to write us a letter ordering us to put the effluent in the creek and absolving us from any legal action, criminal or civil, which might result.”  The memo also provides insight into how the Army avoided responsibility; it serves as an example of the cold and bloodless relationship the Army maintained with its partners.

“Incredibly, despite Linde’s warnings of danger and scientific analysis,” the Task Force wrote, “MED recklessly continued to dispose of its hazardous liquid wastes into Two Mile Creek.”  And in all the time since those events occurred, the Task Force noted, from 1946 until the publication of The Federal Connection, nothing had been done to those wells or the ditch.  Nothing.  There were no records, nor had there been any attempts to call attention to the wells or the need to inspect them or determine a clean up plan.  They were never mentioned, by anyone.  

“What we were talking about with the Linde wells, way back then, was just like fracking,” Smitty reflected.  “We were questioning the wisdom of injecting waste into wells in the first place.  The dolomite rock below the surface in the Niagara Region can be dissolved very easily.  Who knows where that caustic effluent goes when it gets down into the ground water?  It’s the kind of thing that  Hinchey and I saw at many of the war plants.  In each case they flushed their chemical wastes into the sewers or into the ground.  Maurice became a strong opponent of fracking.  We all did.  It’s an attitude we developed at Love Canal.”

With the Linde story, the Task Force had documented the Army’s willingness to take risks and plunge into the untried and the unknown, with little thought for the consequences.  By forcing the contaminated liquor into the wells, the Army and its industrial partner were conducting irreversible chemical experiments on the environment, taking risks which they did not completely understand, but which they knew were dangerous.  The Task Force demonstrated next that the Army also did experiments on the soldiers and civilians who worked on the Manhattan Project, exposing them for long periods of time to excessive levels of radiation when there was very little that was known about the effects.

Scientists understood in the early 1940s that high doses of radiation were deadly, but they did not yet fully understand the cumulative effects of continuous exposure to lower levels.  By the time the Task Force began their investigations in the late 1970s, the dangers of low level radiation exposure were much better understood.  Nevertheless, the Army had not looked back, and the Task Force harshly criticized the Government for it.  “Even though studies have resulted in better worker protection, little is known about the health histories of workers who were exposed during World War II and after in Western New York.  The men and women who worked at Linde Air Products and Electrometallurgical Co., and later at Lake Ontario Ordnance Works, Simonds Saw and Steel, Bethlehem Steel and other locations may have been the unwitting casualties of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini atoll, and the Cold War arms race.”

According to one war time Hooker employee, Fred Olotka, who worked in the plant that processed the uranium slag sent over from Linde, the workers were never told that they were handling uranium.  “In those days, we had no idea whether this material was radioactive.  We did not know it was uranium… it had to be after the war effort had ended that they indicated to us what the materials were that we have handled and where they went.”  The truck drivers who hauled the radioactive sludge from the ceramics plant to either the Haist property or the LOOW were never told what they were carrying, nor that it might pose any kind of danger to them or the neighborhoods through which they passed.

“Whatever their sacrifices may have been, it has gone unacknowledged by Federal authorities," the members of the Task Force wrote.  "There is no evidence that officials have ever looked into the health histories of these workers.  Clearly the secrecy and internal security of the Manhattan Project meant that workers who were exposed to radiation were unaware of what was happening to them.  Without the knowledge of the materials they were working with, the workers were unable to advocate on their own behalf for safer, cleaner working conditions.  The         amount of danger which workers confronted in the workplace was decided by scientists and engineers based on experiments with laboratory animals, for the most part…. At times, the needs of the war effort forced worker safety into a lower priority than might have been the case in peacetime.”

In other words, the workers were as expendable to the Army as the wells, the aquifer, the Niagara River, and the Falls themselves.  Exposure rates were not kept ALARA, or “As Low As Reasonably Achievable,” but as high as they could reasonably justify.  Put simply, more work gets done if you are less encumbered with regulations.  The Task Force came to the conclusion that the “science” that was used to justify the exposure rates was based on “hearsay,” not evidence.  It was a matter of finding whatever science could be used to justify the original plan.


“There was a clear realization that safety could be had only at the expense of production, and the needs of the war effort superseded the obligations of the project to protect its workers.”  The Task Force insisted that the very least that the Army could do for the men and women who had loyally served their country was to conduct a thorough health study.

“I don’t think that ever happened,” Smitty noted grimly.  “I don’t think they ever really acknowledged what they did to the civilians who worked in the plants.  And to their families.  When I talked to people around Niagara Falls, they had a much better understanding than they did 35 years earlier, during the war, about the dangers of radiation exposure.  And they knew that they had been exposed.  People had serious questions about their health, and wanted to know if they were in danger, or if the government was going to do anything about it.  But as you know, government health officials will tell you that there are many things that can cause cancer.  So unless a study were done to link the cancers directly to the exposures, all the people could do was speculate, and worry. They weren’t going to get any help.”

The Task Force had only one more story left to tell in The Federal Connection, and that was about the LOOW, or Lake Ontario Ordnance Works, a large tract of land in the towns of Lewiston and Porter, eight miles north of Love Canal.  “This we saved for last,” Smitty told me, “because it kind of sums everything up.  Here you see the big picture.  You see the Government’s total disregard for the environment and all the people, not just the ones who worked in the plants, but everyone who lived nearby.  They made a complete mess of the place, then couldn’t even get their stories straight.”

The Task Force put it this way: “Part of the LOOW story that has never been told, prior to this report, is the way in which the conditions at the LOOW were created and fostered by federal policies.  Documentary evidence compiled by the Task Force discloses the extent of federal mismanagement at the site, as it is manifested by sloppy record-keeping procedures, inadequate mapping of buried wastes, and technological primitivism with regard to waste storage and disposal.”

The history of the LOOW is brief, but disastrous.  In early 1942, the Army condemned 7,567 acres of mostly farmland to create the LOOW.  The Army gave the farmers thirty days notice to move out.  125 farmhouses and 538 barns were burned or demolished, except for those that could be used for the storage of TNT.  Over 7500 workers, 33 miles of road, 500 structures, a power plant, hospital, fire department, and a water supply adequate for a city of 100,000 were all put in place.  But the plant ceased operation after only nine months, at a cost of $27 million.  The anticipated use of TNT never materialized.  

Even though the LOOW was only used for a short time, the Army’s activities managed to badly contaminate the area with TNT wastes and residues.  That, unfortunately, was only the beginning.  In 1944, the Chemical Warfare Service took over 1100 acres of the site for the “temporary” storage of munitions and chemicals.  Also in 1944, the MED took over part of the LOOW for storing radioactive sludge from the LInde plant and other sites.  After the war, the Atomic Energy Commission was established and superseded the Manhattan Project.  They used their portion of the LOOW as a waste disposal site for contaminated materials from all over the Eastern US.

Lack of planning and a careless, cavalier regard for the environment were evident from the first days of the LOOW.  The original TNT plant was never decontaminated before it became a chemical dump.  A vast network of TNT pipes, 14 feet underground and thousands of feet in length, had once been used to flush 130,000 gallons of TNT refuse into Lake Ontario daily.  The pipes were all left in place, still coated on the inside with TNT residue and lime.  The pipes were considered dangerous, posing a legitimate risk that one of them might detonate if it were accidentally struck by a shovel or a plow, or that the place could blow up if you lit a cigarette, as a friend of Smitty’s had said.

The danger posed by siting a chemical dump on top of contaminated infrastructure was recognized immediately by the War Assets Administration which had been charged with managing and disposing of the LOOW right after the war.  They had been hampered in their work, however, by the Army’s lack of cooperation in providing them with information.   

The WAA hired a consultant in 1948 to research the site and figure out what needed to be done to the property before it could be sold.  Their consultant told them that the site was so polluted that, “100% decontamination is almost impossible,” and that the property “should be condemned for future use and fenced and posted accordingly.”  But according to the Task Force, these words of warning were ignored by the Government, and “then forgotten by the succeeding generations of bureaucrats.”

Within a few weeks of the issuance of the consultant’s report in March 1948, the Atomic Energy Commission was given expanded control of the entire LOOW.  The pressing problem confronting the War Assets Administration had therefore been solved.  But the problems posed by the TNT contamination were simply swept aside and forgotten.  When the Task Force asked the AEC for documentation about TNT contamination, they were given nothing.  The AEC claimed they had no records.

All of the problems associated with TNT wastes were compounded with the introduction of chemical and radioactive wastes to the site.  The Task Force criticized the Government for adopting a policy of “expediency and economy” in its federal storage and disposal program.  They specifically condemned “the dumping of radioactive wastes in open, and often unmapped pits, in rusting barrels stacked along the road side, and in inadequate structures originally designed for much different purposes.  Inevitably, these practices resulted in the contamination of the LOOW site and in the leaching of radioactive contaminants off the site, onto land outside of the control of the Federal Government.”

A radioactive who’s who of wastes made their way to the site through the 1940s and 1950s.  The higher quality African ore that was processed at the Linde Ceramics plant generated a by product of sludge that contained significant levels of radium.  Unlike the lower grade sludge that was hauled to the Haist property as waste, about 18,000 tons of the quality African sludge was stored at the LOOW for eventual retrieval by a Belgian owned metals company based in Katanga that had retained possession of the material in its contract with the Manhattan Project.  The company intended to retrieve the sludge after the war, but never did.  "I called them and asked them if they were ever going to pick it up." Smitty explained.  "They told me to forget it."

In addition to this locally supplied radioactive waste, other wastes were brought in from around the country.  The Task Force noted that the Cold War had led to the build up of atomic waste as well as atomic arsenals.   Contaminated and radioactive materials came into the LOOW from Missouri, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, and Massachusetts.   Storage was haphazard and dangerous.  Radioactive material leaked into the ground.

Of all the materials being brought in, K-65 uranium ore residues had the most radium concentration and were therefore considered the most dangerous.  In fact, by 1995 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had determined that these residues were as hazardous as High Level Radioactive Waste.  They originated at a processor in St. Louis, the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, and at Linde.  The K-65 residues were stored at the LOOW in old TNT igloos, but it soon became evident that the amount of radiation in the igloos drove the interior radon levels far too high.  After storing 96 drums for one day in one of the igloos, radiation levels rose to 71 times higher than the human tolerance level.  The drums were taken out of the igloos, but they were left along the railroad line and the roadsides for a number of years.

A concrete silo that was used for the storage of K-65 residues cracked soon after being put in service, prompting the AEC to stack more drums along roads where the metal soon deteriorated and the radioactive contents leaked into air and land.  The Niagara Frontier is infamous for its wet windy winters and lake effect snow.  Eventually, drums of K-65 were shipped back to Fernald, Ohio.

“I could not get out onto the site, but I could see all over the LOOW from the roads,” Smitty explained to me.  “It was all so wide open, I could see everything that was there.  I could see the rusting drums lined up along the edge of the road.  The same ones with the radioactive ore in them.  So many of them were still there.’

The last problem with the LOOW taken up by The Federal Connection concerned the ammonium thiocyanate that the AEC allowed the Carborundum Metals Company to dump at the LOOW in the mid 1950s. Carborundum had been refining hafnium and zirconium for the AEC’s reactor program.  350,000 gallons of ammonium thiocyanate filled a lagoon on Carborundum property and could not be disposed of without killing off the fish in Tonawanda Creek.  The AEC and the NYS Department of Health gave permission for the material to be dumped at the LOOW on a one time only basis, but the dumping continued for about a year at the rate of 12,000 gallons a day, for a total of roughly 4 million gallons.  It is impossible to establish an accurate number because records were not maintained.  

The records that do exist, however, indicate that AEC and Carborundum officials, as well as Hooker officials who were custodians for the LOOW at that point, were all more concerned with legal liability than they were with damage to the environment.  They allowed a company to dump millions of gallons of contaminated material into a system that flowed directly into the Niagara River, an international waterway.  Canada was never informed.

Ultimately, parts of the LOOW have been recycled for different purposes.  The Army used part of it as a Nike missile base, and the Air Force used part as a test site.  A real estate firm bought a big piece in 1966 for less than $100,000.  Part of it went to a disposal company, Services Corporation of America, which uses it as a waste treatment and disposal plant.  Radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project is still stored at the LOOW.

“Any kind of strange experiments they wanted to try, they would do out there and then abandon them, and then try new experiments,”  Smitty told me.  “But all of that was over and done with by the time we got there. From a distance, it looked like an industrial city like Pittsburgh gone to rot.  No smoke, nothing moving, everything falling apart.  It was all very mechanical, and all a big production.”

The members of the Task Force felt that the LOOW illustrated what they called a “startling and disturbing breakdown of institutional memory.”  Tests and surveys had been conducted in the late 1940s and again in the 1950s that identified some of the toxins that were buried and where they were located.  But years later, when the land was sold, all of this information had been lost and forgotten.  Vital information disappeared when one group of bureaucrats took over from another.  Most unforgivable of all, however, was that throughout the brief history of the LOOW, “Federal officials misled local government representatives and the public concerning the nature of federal activity at the site, and the extent of the radiological hazard at LOOW.”  The Government, according to the Task Force, was not to be  trusted.

As the Task Force was wrapping up its investigation, Assembly Speaker Stanley Fink lobbied President Jimmy Carter  to get the Federal Government to assume a larger role in the Love Canal clean up.  He spoke with the President in November of 1979.  By early 1980, Carter appointed Fink to the State Planning Council on Radioactive Waste Management.   According to Smitty, Assemblyman Hinchey was optimistic that the President was going to respond to The Federal Connection and allocate more resources to the Niagara Frontier and continue the investigation into who was responsible.  

Smitty was not so confident.  “I was pretty sure that nothing was going to happen when we released our report, and I’m afraid that I was right.  The counsel for Stanley Fink, and maybe even Fink himself, went down to see Carter around 1979.  They told Jimmy that it was going to get very uncomfortable for him because New York was going to open this Love Canal story up, and reveal the extent of the Federal Government’s role.  They told Jimmy that I had found more in my trips to the archives, and that it was compelling.  These discussions were not publicized.  I can only go by what Stanley Fink told me.”

According to Smitty, Fink had threatened to subpoena the federal officials and force them to attend a hearing in Albany to talk about the contamination of Niagara.   “It was unheard of for a state to subpoena the Federal Government over wrongdoing, so the feds came to Albany cooperatively, no subpoena necessary.”

“The pentagon officials, while in Albany, acknowledged that our report was correct,” Smitty continued.  “They were civilians from the Department of Defense.  They wanted no record of this meeting.  It was very informal.  And polite.  There were no arguments about anything.  They just basically nodded their heads and agreed with the things we were saying.  Fink and the rest of us sat on one side of the table, and the pentagon civilians sat on the other side.  It was a green topped table.  We would ask them questions, and they would look at each other as if to say, ‘who wants to tell the next lie?’  They agreed to allow us to look at more records, so shortly after the meeting, I went down to the Pentagon one more time.”

Smitty recalled that there was some press coverage, but that “no one drew the right conclusions from the meeting.”

NBC Nightly News with John Chancellor ran a story on May 31, 1980 about The Federal Connection:  “A task force of the New York legislature charged that Hooker Chemical may not have been the only one dumping at Love Canal. It said there’s evidence the U.S. military dumped dangerous wastes there in the 1940s and that some of the wastes could have come from nuclear projects. It said that dumping may have occurred elsewhere, too, north of the canal at nearby Lewiston, and south along the Niagara River…But federal officials do not believe the government dumped dangerous wastes in the area … The Defense Department said Friday that it had found no evidence in its records to support charges that the Army had ever dumped toxic wastes in the Love Canal area…”

A similar story appeared the same day in The New York Times:  "George Marienthal, a deputy assistant secretary of defense for energy, environment and safety, said in a statement Friday: 'The Department of Defense takes exception to the New York State Assembly Task Force report as we found no evidence to suggest that previous, comprehensive Army and interagency task force reports, which found no Defense Department dumping program to have existed in the Love Canal area, were deficient.'”

The Assistant Secretary went on to deny any possibility of Army dumping at the other sites mentioned by the Task Force in its report.  He hinted that the Army might conduct another investigation, but it never did.  The news media paid no more attention to the matter.

The Federal Connection was filed several months later, and there it died.  One can find reference to it in the New York State Library and the Assembly archives as The Assembly Task Force on Toxic Substances Sub-agency history record.    This document records the three major recommendations of the Task Force:  “1) The New York State congressional delegation should sponsor legislation providing additional federal funds for Love Canal remedial programs and for health studies of individuals whose health was affected by contamination; 2) the Department of Defense should reopen its investigation of military involvement in chemical production and disposal of wastes; and 3) the records gathered by the Task Force should be turned over to the New York State Attorney General for possible legal action against the federal government.”

None of these three things ever happened.  Jimmy Carter lost his bid for re-election in the fall of 1980, and President Reagan’s administration was far less cooperative with the New York State Assembly than his predecessor had been.  In fact, many of the documents that Smitty had used in his research were reclassified under Reagan.  Still, the Assembly archives tried to put a positive spin on the work of the Task Force:

“The main success of the Task Force investigation was to call attention to federal government involvement in toxic dumping in the Niagara Falls region. The Task Force called on the federal government for the first time to acknowledge responsibility for dumping and to accept responsibility for further testing and cleanup. During the 1980's, the
Environmental Protection Agency continued to do extensive testing and monitoring of contamination in the region. The federal government however, has not assumed responsibility for contributing to toxic contamination of the region.”

The whole experience left a bad taste, according to Smitty.  He told me that he and Maurice were “offended by our government.”  The more they learned about the contamination of Niagara, the more Government officials began to appear to them like organized crime figures in their willingness to lie, deliberately deceive, and contribute to human suffering.  Smitty noted little difference between the operations of the Government and those of the mob.  Ultimately, they worked hand in glove with each other.

The Task Force had recommended that the Defense Department reopen its investigation into the contamination at Love Canal and continue that investigation until the Army personnel who were seen dumping by eyewitnesses could be identified.  I asked Smitty if he would still like to see that come to pass.  “Why bother,” he answered me.  “What is the good, at this point, in blaming individuals, whether it is General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, or Roosevelt, or Truman, or anyone else?  They are all dead.”

If nothing else, a close reading of The Federal Connection can provide a greater insight into some of the grand and questionable claims found in the speech that President Harry Truman delivered after the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.  It should be obvious, for example, that Truman’s claim that the “utmost care has been taken” for the safety of the war plant workers is false.  Research done by the Task Force demonstrated that workers were routinely exposed to unhealthy levels of radiation, and that the “utmost care” had been taken to boost production, often at the expense of worker protection.

The Federal Connection also pokes holes in Truman’s claims about the effectiveness and “unique success” of the combination of “science and industry” working under the direction of the United States Army.  The Task Force has shown us how that combination really functioned: how industrialists and Army officials scrambled to push responsibility and liability onto each other as they knowingly violated laws of decency and common sense by dumping poisons into sewer systems, streams, and the international waters of the Niagara River.  We have seen how the Army abandoned its partners in science and industry when the bills came due for environmental clean up.  And we have seen how the Army and the industrialists have hidden the history of their work and the contamination that they have produced, leaving future generations without the knowledge they need to protect themselves.

The Federal Connection may also help us to understand better the claims that Truman made about winning “the battle of the laboratories,” and “the greatest scientific gamble in history.”  The Task Force has shown us what that battle and gamble looked like as it played out in Niagara Falls, and how much it may ultimately cost.  It enables us to better understand what was certainly happening in Germany and Japan as both countries raced to produce more powerful weapons too, leaving behind a legacy of radioactivity, contamination, broken landscapes, and lives.

The Federal Connection shows us that if, indeed, the battle and gamble were won, it was because of the frantic pace and the reckless drive to build the bomb no matter what the cost.  We begin to see that the mandate to build the bomb took precedence over everything, often banishing reason and human feeling in accordance with its cold demands.  In fact, we see how the race for the bomb took on a life of its own, and once begun, could not be stopped.

The human race had walked into a trap of its own making.  Our military leaders went into World War II thinking it would be like World War I.  They ordered up vast stocks of phosgene gas and impregnite.  But the race to manufacture the ultimate weapon overtook those old weapons, and led us all into something much different.  The decision to make the bomb was made under duress: Einstein had written to Roosevelt that the Germans were working on a bomb.  Once the decision to beat them to it was made, there was no turning back.

The Federal Connection may lead us to question whether or not we actually won that enormous gamble.  Yes, the bomb hastened the end of the war, but the question has to be asked whether even that major victory was worth the price.  The final cost of the Manhattan Project has yet to be reckoned, but the toll keeps climbing higher.  We have seen that the Niagara Frontier is still home to a large number of radioactive hotspots, tracts of land that will never support life as we know it, but that have to be monitored forever.  

The many Manhattan Project sites around the country all tell the same story.  There is intractable radioactivity at the Hanford reactor in Washington; in New Mexico; and in Rocky Flats.  The Army’s reckless attitude toward disposal methods during and immediately after the war will take generations to undo.  Perhaps the damage is irrevocable.   In recent weeks we are learning that even our fail safe, underground, nuclear depositories buried deep in salt vaults in New Mexico are leaking radioactivity.

Since humankind first started manufacturing fissionable materials, we have proven ourselves unequal to the task of handling them.  The carelessness of the Army and its partners, as outlined in The Federal Connection, contributed to widespread contamination, leaks, exposures, and even the loss or theft of atomic fuel.  Trillions of dollars would be required to remove the atomic waste from all of the sites, but even then, we still don’t know how to dispose of the material.  We do not know how to protect ourselves and future generations from the radioactivity.

But while we may not know how to handle radioactivity, radioactivity knows how to handle us.  It has become our master instead of our servant.  Its presence in the world sets new parameters for the way we think and live.

Harry Truman illustrated this when he spoke about secrecy.  He may not have had first hand experience with many aspects of the Manhattan Project, but secrecy he understood.  Until April 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt died and Vice-President Truman was sworn in as President, he had no knowledge of the Manhattan Project or that it even existed.  In four months, he went from being completely in the dark to being the one to give the order to drop the bomb.

Reading from a speech that had been carefully prepared for him many weeks in advance, he said, “It has never been the habit of the scientists of this country or the policy of this Government to withhold from the world scientific knowledge.  Normally, therefore, everything about the work with atomic energy would be made public.”

It was almost an apology.  Up until this time, America did not have to keep very many secrets.  But now it did.  The Manhattan Project was so secret that the men and women who put it together had no real sense of what they had been doing.  Tens of thousands of people did their part guided solely by obedience and trust, starting with the men and women in Niagara Falls who unloaded the uranium ore that had been shipped from Africa by way of Canada, and finishing with those who sailed to Tinian Island aboard the USS Indianapolis and transferred the bombs onto the planes that dropped them over Japan.  Nothing had ever been organized like this in the world before.

Truman blamed the need for secrecy on the demands of the moment, that is, the war, the race to be first, and the nature of the nuclear weaponry itself.  According to Truman, these were not normal times, and these were not normal weapons.  The war and the technology forced the Government to keep secrets.  People had no choice but to behave the way they did.  It was why the Army Captain had to scare the boys of the Love Canal Gang away from their swimming hole as he hid away canisters of explosive garbage. It was why the Army couldn’t tell the Niagara Falls City Council that the Army and Linde were flushing radioactive particles down the municipal sewers.  It was why the men and women who worked all day in the plants returned home in the evening and embraced their spouses and children without caution, oblivious to the fact that tiny particles of radioactivity were clinging to their clothing.  

We want to blame human agents for situations like this.  People are the ones with political and moral motivations, not things.  But in truth, the situation and the technologies often make demands of their own, forcing choices and forcing events.  This idea is not new.  Taking up the question, “Do artifacts have politics,” Langdon Winner wrote in 1986: “The atom bomb is an inherently political artifact. As long as it exists at all, its lethal properties demand that it be controlled by a centralized, rigidly hierarchical chain of command closed to all influences that might make its workings unpredictable. The internal social system of the bomb must be authoritarian; there is no other way.”

He went on to say that it does not matter what kind of political system is in place.  Once the bomb is introduced, it will demand authoritarian conditions.  “Indeed, democratic states must try to find ways to ensure that the social structures and mentality that characterize the management of nuclear weapons do not ‘spin off’ or ‘spill over’ into the polity as a whole.”

But, of course, they have spun off.  That's why Truman’s speech ends up sounding to us more like a threat, or a grim promise, than an apology.  He told America and the world that the culture of secrecy will have to remain in place for awhile, given the great work that had yet to be done.  “... under present circumstances it is not intended to divulge the technical processes of production or all the military applications pending further examination of possible methods of protecting us and the rest of the world from the dangers of sudden destruction.”  In other words, this enriched uranium puts everyone on the planet at risk, so trust us.  We will keep it from getting into the wrong hands... for as long as it poses a threat... which is pretty much forever...

One can draw a direct line from the culture of power and secrecy that grew up around the Manhattan Project, to our present looming fears about lost civil liberties, total surveillance, terrorism, counter-terrorism, and a global police state.  Atomic bomb technology establishes a one sided power relationship between those who wield the power of life and death, and those with no comparable power at all.  It establishes a social order built on raw strength, inequality, stealth, and distrust.   It makes our world as unstable as the uranium 235 isotope.

Our reading of The Federal Connection may have given us some insights into Truman's threat; it may also help us better understand what President Eisenhower was talking about, 15 years later, when he warned about the "military industrial complex" and  "the permanent armaments industry."   The Federal Connection has given us a glimpse of the military industrial complex in its infancy, how it got its way, and how it abused an entire region of New York State without taking any responsibility for it.   We can understand better now just what Eisenhower's words imply, and what kind of threat to our way of life he feared.   

Unfortunately, we can also see that the Task Force's best efforts on behalf of environmental justice had little or no effect on the US Government.  And Dwight Eisenhower, while pointing out there was a major problem, didn't offer us any solutions, or advise us how we might make Government and industry behave less destructively.  All of that we are still going to have to figure out for ourselves.

“The truth is all there,” Smitty said to me at the end of a very long evening.  “But people have to be willing to look at it directly and say something about it.  The Government is not going to deal straight with you, and they certainly are not going to help you, but you can’t just lie down and let them tell you how things are going to be.  You have to keep bashing on.” 

Pete Seeger added his voice, banjo, guitar, and boundless energy to a union workers' gathering in Rock Tavern on a bitter cold afternoon three years ago.  The rally was organized by the Hudson Valley Area Labor Federation in support of public workers in Wisconsin.  We went as part of the teachers union.  I shot video and my wife, Denise, took pictures.

It was March 3, 2011, and protests like this were organized all over the country in response to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s proposal, two weeks earlier, for a “budget repair bill” that would fix a $137 million gap in the state budget by erasing the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers.  The bitterly fought bill was voted on, signed, and rushed into law by March 11.  Scott Walker’s 2010 election campaign and his assault on unions had been heavily bankrolled and promoted by the secretive billionaire Koch brothers.

Pete Seeger exercised civic courage throughout his life, fighting for social justice, human dignity, and the environment, almost always with a grin on his face.  He will be especially missed here in the Hudson Valley.

Just a few months ago, I listened in on a conversation between former congressman Maurice Hinchey and his long time aide and friend, A.J. Woolston-Smith, better known as Smitty.  The work of these two men fueled our Middletown High School investigations into Orange County’s landfills in the 1990s.  It was a pleasure to sit with them as they reminisced for a couple of hours about their long fight for environmental justice.

They began working together in 1979 while Hinchey was a member of the New York State Assembly.  Hinchey conducted hearings, with full subpoena power, into a wide range of environmental crimes, while Smitty did behind the scenes investigations.  In 1992, Hinchey was elected to Congress where he served until 2013.  Smitty stayed with him the whole time.

In the early 1980s, Assemblyman Hinchey began investigating the mob’s role in the garbage business, and in 1986 he filed the report, Organized Crime’s Involvement in the Waste Hauling Industry, complete with a chart showing which Mafia family controlled which carting companies.    In 1991, Hinchey followed up with another report on organized crime in the Hudson Valley, this one titled, Illegal Dumping in New York State: Who’s enforcing the law?

Well before any of that, the young Assemblyman Hinchey took part in a special investigation into a small landfill near Niagara Falls that came to be known throughout the world as Love Canal.  The report his task force produced after a year and a half of research was titled, The Federal Connection.

Love Canal burst on the scene, both literally and figuratively, in 1978.  Neighbors of the abandoned waste dump began noticing exploding rocks, blue goo, and rotting 55 gallon drums rising to the surface in places not too far from their homes.  Michael Brown, a reporter for the local Niagara Gazette wrote a series of stories about the region’s toxic problems that sparked concern and fear among the residents as they learned more about Niagara Falls’ toxic history.

Almost immediately, the New York State Department of Health conducted a study and confirmed that a health hazard existed in the Love Canal neighborhood.  The Health Commissioner condemned and closed the elementary school across the street from the old dump.  A neighborhood citizens group formed, headed by an anxious young Love Canal mother named Lois Gibbs.
 
The residents demanded that the government take some kind of action to protect them from the toxic chemical waste that was being uncovered in the old canal. Facing a wave of public pressure, President Jimmy Carter ordered that the homes closest to the contamination be evacuated and the residents relocated.  The drama grabbed America and the world’s attention.

The Hooker Chemical Company, which operated a number of factories in the Niagara Falls area, was blamed for the disaster.  Hooker acknowledged using the old canal bed as a waste disposal site. In fact, the company had even warned the school district years earlier not to build near the site because of all of the chemical contamination.  But in their defense, Hooker also claimed that they had not acted alone.

Because this drama was unfolding on their own turf, New York State Government officials wanted to be on top of it.  Stanley Fink was the Democratic progressive speaker of the New York State Assembly.  He and others in Albany were doubtful when the U.S. Army declared in 1978 that the U.S. Government had had nothing to do with the poisoning of Love Canal.  Fink knew that many of the chemical plants in the Niagara Falls region, including Hooker Chemical, had been involved in the Manhattan Project, and had worked closely with the U.S. Government.

Speaker Fink assigned a couple of his aspiring Democratic mavericks to the Task Force that would investigate what happened at Love Canal.  One was, of course, Maurice Hinchey.  The other was Alexander “Pete” Grannis, an assemblyman representing the Upper East Side of Manhattan.  Years later, in 2007, Grannis would be appointed Commissioner of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation by Governor Eliot Spitzer.  Three years later he would be fired by Governor David Paterson because of a statement he had made in reaction to severe DEC budget cuts proposed by the governor.  Grannis had said that the cuts would make it impossible for his agency to enforce the law and protect the environment, especially if New York were to permit hydraulic fracking.  Apparently, he was speaking too much truth and was told to resign.

The Task Force on Toxic Substances to which Hinchey and Grannis were assigned in 1979 began speaking the truth right away.  They had been commissioned in part to respond to the U.S. Government’s investigation of itself: more specifically, “The Army’s investigation into alleged Army dumping at Love Canal.”

Defense Department officials speaking after their own 1978 investigation had declared, “We’ve taken a look at everything we can and we’ve been unable to verify even a hint of evidence that there was Army dumping at that site.”  Hinchey and Grannis, on the other hand, found plenty of evidence to implicate the Army in the contamination of Love Canal, including substantial eye-witness testimony about men who wore Army uniforms and respirators, and who dumped barrels of chemicals out of the backs of Army vehicles.  They also found a pattern of deception in the Army’s handling of the investigation.  As they saw it, “The ultimate effect of the Army’s investigation and report was to quell public suspicion and whether intended or not, to dampen further investigative efforts.”    

Despite the opposition, the Task Force continued their investigation, going through many of the same witnesses and testimony that had been available to the Army, and then taking the research further.  The Task Force conducted interviews, obtained corporate and government documents, inspected factories.  Smitty used some of the contacts he had made in the American State Department and the British Foreign Office and the War Offices of both countries during the Second World War to track down information about the Manhattan Project.

What the Task Force found is neatly summarized in the full title of their report: The Federal Connection: A History of U.S. Military Involvement in the Toxic Contamination of Love Canal and the Niagara Falls Region.

There were many different companies in the Niagara Falls region in the 1940s and 1950s that had produced toxic, and sometimes radioactive, chemicals.  They included Hooker, Linde Air, DuPont, Carborundum, Olin, Hercules, National Lead, and Union Carbide.  All of these plants worked in conjunction with a special Manhattan Engineering District project overseen by the US Army Corps of Engineers.

The Manhattan Project designed and built the bombs that were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the close of World War II.  Raw, super high grade uranium ore mined in the Katanga Province of the Belgian Congo was transported into the Niagara region by way of Canada, and then refined, through a series of elaborate steps that integrated the combined efforts of several different factories and processes, into the fissionable material that was required to make the bombs explode.  The big Niagara Falls chemical companies working with the U.S. Government in the early 1940s profoundly altered the course of history by producing the world’s first atomic weapons.

Many of the industrial buildings up and down Buffalo Avenue and the surrounding neighborhoods were engaged in no other activity than the refinement of fissionable material for the atomic bomb.  In some instances the factory buildings were owned by the company, while in others, the Government owned the building and supervised the operations.  There were different kinds of working relationships between the Government and the various contractors, but few of these relationships allowed for much independence from Government oversight and control.

For example, the Manhattan Project paid for and built a secret, guarded factory building called P-45 on Hooker property. It was operated by both Hooker and Army personnel but run by the military.  Hooker described itself as an “agent” working for the Chemical Warfare Service of the U.S. Army, not as a private contractor.

As they expanded their search, the members of the Task Force realized that Hooker made up only one small part of a much larger, and more serious, story.  In this context, it seemed highly unfair and misleading to portray the Hooker Chemical Company as the sole responsible party for the contamination of Love Canal.  As the Task Force explained In the introduction to The Federal Connection.

Just what did the inquiry reveal?  The Federal Connection is a well-organized and argued 274 page document, with over 100 additional pages of appendices and notes, that presents findings, provides evidence, and makes recommendations.  The Assembly Task Force drew two conclusions about Love Canal:

In addition, they placed their findings about the Army’s involvement at Love Canal in the broader context of the Government’s contamination and neglect of the entire Niagara region:

The members of the Task Force anticipated a loud and immediate public reaction to their report because they were contradicting the official story.  They knew that their findings were not new, but that the public had been relatively unaware of them.  From The Federal Connection:

Thousands of people worked in the chemical factories in the Niagara region during the war and into the 1950s.  Their lives and experiences touched many thousands more.  All of them knew what was going on in the factories, more or less, and yet they didn’t know.   It is hard to know that which is not validated by authority.  Workers had not been told exactly what they were making and why, because many of the plants’ operations were secret.  Workers had not been told that they were constantly being exposed to unsafe levels of radioactivity.

The Task Force was hopeful that their report would demonstrate the Government’s responsibility and liability, and that it would also spur more inquiries into the nature of the pollution in the Niagara Falls region, more remediation of the damaged sites, and more help for the affected chemical workers and their families.  They believed that the revelations in their report would lead to more openness and cooperation in dealing with the sites.

In the approximately 32 years since The Federal Connection was written, and the 35 years since the story of Love Canal became part of our national consciousness, the details about the nature and causes of the pollution are still not very well known.  Most Americans do not associate Love Canal with the Manhattan Project and America’s war effort.  Our collective memory seems to have failed, or we have taken on a willful amnesia.  What little was known has been forgotten.

One reason The Federal Connection is not so widely known is because the U.S. Government immediately denied, then distanced itself from the allegations.  In May 1980, the Associated Press reported the Assembly Task Force findings that the U.S. military had dumped “radioactive wastes, nerve gas and other highly toxic chemicals at Love Canal and other sites near Niagara Falls.”  The Defense Department responded that they had not had time to examine the Assembly report, but a pentagon spokesman added that he "recalled a 1978 department study which found no evidence of chemical dumping by the military in the Love Canal area.”

U.S. Congressman John LaFalce, whose district included the Niagara Falls region, demanded that Congress investigate the “apparent discrepancies between the Pentagon study and the latest Assembly findings.”  But the congressional investigation he called for never took place.

In February 1981, The New York Times reported the Assembly Task Force finding that, “The Army and a defense contractor dumped more than 37 million gallons of radioactive caustic wastes from the World War II atomic bomb project in shallow wells at Tonawanda, N.Y,” and that the Task Force had new data to “dispute an earlier denial of involvement in dumping at Love Canal.”  A Defense Department Spokesman said the report was “under review,” and stood by the earlier statement that the Army had “no direct involvement” in dumping at Love Canal.

U.S. Senator Daniel Moynihan pledged efforts to get the U.S. Government to investigate the allegations, or, he told the New York State Attorney General, you can “sue us and we might respond.”  The federal investigation he pledged never happened, nor did the Attorney General sue the U.S. Government.

The U.S. Justice Department had, in fact, already initiated a $124 million lawsuit several months earlier against Hooker Chemical in connection with chemicals buried at four sites in the city.  The court proceedings would drag out into the 1990s, but the U.S. Government’s position was clear and consistent from the very beginning: Hooker did it.

With the passage in 1980 of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), better known as Superfund, a clearly defined federal response to toxic releases had been established, as well as a reserve fund to pay for clean ups when responsible parties could not be found and compelled to bear the costs.  Love Canal was Superfund site number one, and Hooker Chemical was going to be the first ever responsible party.

In February 1988, Federal Judge John T. Curtin granted a partial summary judgment that ruled in favor of the United States and against Hooker, now the Occidental Petroleum Corporation, and made them liable under CERCLA  for the clean up of Love Canal. The amount of payment depended upon the eventual costs of the clean up, but were estimated to run into the tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars.

Occidental was not going down without a fight.  They counter sued, claiming that the military dumped 4,000 tons of chemical waste into Love Canal, and that Hooker was under contract to the military at the time of the dumping.  They argued that the Government was responsible as well, and liable for part of the clean up costs.

In May 1991, Judge Curtin came down hard on the Government’s refusal to cooperate with Occidental’s request for documents.   According to Smitty, soon after it had assumed office in 1981, the Reagan administration re-classified many of the documents that he and other members of the Task Force had used while researching The Federal Connection. 

In 1984, as part of its defense in the original case, Occidental’s lawyers had requested more information about the Army’s 1978 investigation into allegations of Army dumping, as well as more information about the allegations themselves.  The Army turned over nothing.

Judge Curtin did not like the stone walling, and wrote that "the United States seems to have been guilty of a disturbing naivete when faced with the task of determining whether the Army did, in fact, possess documents pertaining to the allegations.”  There was no longer any access to the incriminating information, and without it, Occidental didn’t have a chance of making the U.S. assume responsibility.

Closing arguments were made in February 1992.  Thomas H. Truitt, one of the lawyers representing Occidental, argued that the Government had failed to follow up and investigate claims made by residents and employees that the Army had buried waste in Love Canal.  He accused the Government of “shameful” and “sordid” behavior and of concealing evidence.  He charged that “efforts by the Federal Government to mislead this court and this community have constituted a significant attack on the judicial process…At no time have I seen such a consistent pattern of sham, stonewalling and dissembling the record as this case shows…the gist of the Government's position is that the cover-up worked.”

The assistant U.S. Attorneys on the case argued back that, “There is no basis for claims made by Occidental that the military sanctioned and directed the company's dumping in the 1940's and early 1950’s.”

By this time, Occidental’s reputation was as toxic as the chemicals that were buried in Love Canal.  Judge Curtin considered his decision for about two years, finally issuing a ruling in 1994 that Occidental, all by itself, was liable for the clean up of Love Canal.  In the same ruling, however, he denied a request by Government lawyers to make Occidental liable for an additional $250 million in punitive damages.  

The request for punitive damages seems especially harsh when you consider that Hooker was working for the Government both during and right after the war.  Common sense would dictate that the Manhattan Project bore some, if not most, of the responsibility for the contamination of Love Canal.  Instead, the Government threw Hooker over the Falls.

The Federal Connection’s disclosures about the Manhattan Project did not seem to have had much influence on the courts as they decided who bore the responsibility for the damages inflicted upon Love Canal and its residents.  Occidental ended up paying $129 million as the only responsible party.  

Unfortunately, The Federal Connection, with all of its warnings about more buried chemicals and residual radioactivity, exerted just as little influence over the state and federal agencies that over see environmental and health issues, as it had exerted over the courts.

The Federal Connection had been the first to report the dangerous and uncharted conditions at the 7,500 acre Lake Ontario Ordnance Works where TNT had been manufactured and stored on the surface and in a vast network of underground waste lines along with several thousand tons of radioactive residual uranium. The report called on the Government to suspend construction of the new Interim Waste Containment Structure they were building on top of it, and to acknowledge the seriousness of the problem for the first time and to accept responsibility for further testing and any cleanup of the widespread and unaccounted for contamination.

Instead, almost immediately after The Federal Connection was submitted, the Department of Energy began containment and capping work on the LOOW, which by then had been renamed the Niagara Falls Storage Site (NFSS).  The new waste containment structure was completed in 1986.  Less than ten years later, the National Research Council studied the site and determined that the new chemical landfill was a potential threat to health and the environment and that the cap was destined to fail.  Environmental groups to this day insist that the site is leaking radioactivity, but the Army Corps of Engineers assures us that the radioactive waste will be safe there for at least 200 years.

The New York Times embraced the idea that the landfill was clean, and that despite the clashes and conflicts of interests that made up Love Canal’s history, ultimately, the right thing had been done.  A Times editorial summarized what we all should have learned from the wrenching experience.

A familiarity with The Federal Connection and the Manhattan Project’s activities in the Niagara Falls region might lead one to arrive at vastly different conclusions about the meaning of Love Canal than those reached by the Times’ editorial staff.  Yes, government, community, and corporate interests were colliding, but not in the usual ways.  The community wanted assurances and relief from a toxic nightmare.  The Government withheld important information that would have explained much better what was at the root of the problem, and just how far reaching it was. 

In an effort to maintain secrecy and avoid liability, the Government pursued a strategy of minimizing the perception of damage, and putting all of the blame on one of its corporate contractors.  Hooker was a huge polluting chemical company that was certainly deserving of blame for the mess, but not all of it.   The Government was not siding with ordinary citizens so much as it was protecting itself.  How necessary has it been, for reasons of national security, to maintain silence?

And despite assurances, Love Canal was still not clean and still not safe, and still not ready to slip quietly into historical memory.  The only one who seemed to get it right was Lois Gibbs, the Love Canal activist, who marked the 2004 de-listing ceremony by saying, ''Nothing is different from what it was five years ago except that the E.P.A. needs to look good.”

Not surprisingly, Lois Gibbs returned again to Love Canal nine years after the de-listing to lend support to a recent lawsuit filed by Love Canal residents who are claiming that Hooker’s buried chemicals are still making people sick.  ”It was so weird to go back and stand next to someone who was crying and saying the exact same thing I said 35 years ago,” she said.

The new residents, who had been drawn to the neighborhood by promises of cleaned-up land and affordable houses, were experiencing health problems and feeling trapped, just like those of Lois’ generation had.  One young couple complained of mysterious rashes, miscarriages, and unexplained cysts since moving into the Love Canal neighborhood. "We knew it was Love Canal, that chemicals were here," the homeowner said, but we had been “swayed by assurances that the waste was contained and the area was safe.”

How could these young families not know?  How could they accept the assurances when all of the parties involved in this matter were suspect?  Why weren’t they more familiar with some of the information that had been documented in The Federal Connection?  If they had, they would have known that a plastic liner and a cap made of clay were not going to eliminate all of the environmental threats in their beleaguered neighborhood.

Why was it that despite everything, some of the fundamentals had not been learned in 35 years?  Clearly, the actions of the U.S. Government, across branches, departments, and agencies, were directed toward minimizing discussion about the Manhattan Project as it relates to the pollution of the Niagara Falls region.  It is also clear that large American news organizations, like the New York Times, basically stuck to the official Government version.

If you do a Google search for “Manhattan Project Love Canal” you will find information, but not as much as you might hope.  Several articles were written this past year on the 35 year legacy of Love Canal, but the Manhattan Project is rarely if ever mentioned in these toxic legacy retrospectives, nor is Love Canal’s connection to the creation of the atom bomb.  Undoubtedly, readers would learn a lot by seeing how the Love Canal disaster fits into a larger picture, but there is barely a hint.  One of our culture’s most iconic environmental stories is only partially understood.

Our news media have sanitized and diminished the event.  Their reporting functions something like the clay and plastic cap that covers Love Canal; it defines and contains the matter from seeping out in scattered directions, and it reassures us that we are safe from harm.  Both pacify us and cover-up what is occurring beneath the surface.

It would be a different world if our major news outlets consistently told us stories that aimed deeper for the truth.  Sadly, most of the stories would arrive at the same awful conclusions.  We would be reminded constantly that we have poisoned our earth.  We would read everyday that our governments have neither the will, the integrity, nor the capacity to address our problems, nor are they likely to do so.  Maybe we would stop reading.

Fortunately, there are people who are collecting data, maintaining records, and writing stories that go deep into the history of the Niagara’s Manhattan Project plants.  For example, there is a wealth of information on the For A Clean Tonawanda Site (F.A.C.T.S.), maintained by a coalition of concerned citizens who stand for the removal of all radioactive waste from local Manhattan Project sites.  They have a PDF library that contains a scanned copy of The Federal Connection including the volume 2 appendices.

There are also committed writers like Geoff Kelly and Lou Ricciuti who have been researching the history of the Manhattan Project, picking up current developments, and reporting all of it for the last several years in Artvoice, a Buffalo area culture magazine.   

They wrote a story in 2008, for example, about historical amnesia and the large quantities of radioactive material that lie buried under streets that were scheduled for pothole repair.  Discovering radioactivity shouldn’t be a surprise in Niagara Falls, given what happened there.  Back in the early 1980s the Oak Ridge National Laboratories had identified “more than 100 radioactive hotspots in Niagara Falls, including in its roadways.”  But the discovery of radioactive fill in the roadway was a surprise.  Typically, according to Kelly and Ricciuti, people had no idea where the radiation might have come from.

Many of the 100 hotspots had never been remediated or investigated and had quickly dropped out of “everyday consciousness.”  And most folks had no historical memory of the LOOW and the radioactive wastes that had been sloppily contained there since the war, nor did they understand how careless oversight over the years enabled some of that material to find its way into the fill used under the streets.

One of the people who was puzzled by the discovery of radioactive fill was a Niagara City Councilman.  When he was given a copy of the Oak Ridge surveys, he could see for himself the extent of the radioactivity around his city.  He acknowledged his community’s hazy historical memory of its chemical and nuclear past.  “We know what we were at one time, but I think everybody believes that it was contained to Love Canal.”

All that stands between us and this fatal forgetting are the grassroots activists, journalists, academics, and archivists who locate and preserve the evidence, then contribute to the public awareness.  It is hard, but necessary, work, for as all activists know, no one else is going to do it for us.  That’s what Lois Gibbs and her neighbors learned 35 years ago, and it is the thing that Ralph Nader urges us to remember most about Love Canal’s legacy: “that collective citizen action is a powerful agent of change.”

He’s right. It is.  But if we allow ourselves to forget where the toxic stuff is buried, it will keep re-appearing to haunt our children.  Succeeding generations will take their turn, as Lois Gibbs and her neighbors did, and as terrified young couples are doing right now, discovering cysts, rashes, miscarriages, and tumors, all the while wondering why, and not knowing where to go for the answers.  Collective citizen action must be accompanied by collective accumulated knowledge, or there will be no real change, just recurring heartbreak.

The first step toward real change is recognizing the real problem.  The world’s first atomic bombs were manufactured in the neighborhood of Love Canal.  After they were dropped, the U.S. Government did not want the world to see what the two bombs had done to the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The Government didn’t want the world to see what the bombs had done to Niagara Falls, either.  But unless we are able to look squarely at what was done, we won’t ever be able to fix it.

In my recent conversations with Smitty I ask him how it feels to know that The Federal Connection has pretty much gone unheeded, nearly erased from public consciousness.  

He tells me about the trips he took to the government archives in Virginia from 1979 to ’81; the documents he located that identified what had been dumped and hidden and flushed, how it got there, and where it sat, and still sits.  “The Government lawyers and investigators,” he tells me. “They never even bothered to look at this stuff.”

Coming soon - part 2: The Federal Connection

Dieter died way too soon at age 57 this past week.  I regret that I had very little contact with him over the last few years, a time when he suffered greatly.  A series of accidents had left Dieter with a bad back and shoulder that made it difficult for him to move, let alone work, without searing pain.  Dieter, who sometimes likened himself to Sluggo, was brawny and used to manual labor and the operation of heavy equipment.  It must have been maddening for him to have to spend so much of his time incapacitated.

I met Dieter in May of 1996.  At that time my students and I were trying to put together the pieces of Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed.   Dieter was blowing the whistle about a dump at the Orange County Park in Montgomery, and county legislator Tom Pahucki and Orange Environment’s Michael Edelstein thought it would be a good idea for Dieter and me to talk and compare notes.

Dieter called me and introduced himself on a Sunday morning.  He told me that he worked on the Orange County Landfill as a bulldozer operator from 1988 to 1992, and that he had witnessed huge quantities of toxic material being dumped there illegally.  He said he complained to his bosses and to authorities about the violations at the landfill, and that as a reward, they stopped giving him the pay raises to which he was entitled.  They then transferred him out to the County DPW garage where he ended up reporting more environmental violations, and then to the Orange County Park where he claimed the County was operating an illegal landfill near the sixth fairway.

So began our relationship, over many such phone conversations about toxic waste, organized crime, and government corruption.  Our long talks quickly turned into friendship.  Dieter loved coming over to the house to chat and have a few beers.  He loved our daughter, Sadie, and brought her stuffed animals, and he gave her some of the arrow heads he loved to find and collect.  He took Sadie fishing, and he once prepared us a delicious meal of freshly road-killed pheasant.

But most of our time we kept on about exposing the dumping.  Dieter had seen it all, and was deeply affected by it.  He loved the outdoors, and could not understand how people could knowingly pollute the land and water for profit.  He was desperate to do everything he could to make things right, even if that meant appearing on tape and becoming part of our documentary.  Dieter did not like the spotlight, and he did not like the idea of being recorded, but he did it anyway because he thought it would help our cause.

Inevitably, he suffered for it.  Dieter was already being hounded by his bosses for blowing the whistle on activities at the landfill and at the DPW garage.  When 60 Minutes had come to Middletown High School a couple of years earlier to interview students who had worked on our documentaries, they also visited Dieter who told them about the illegal dumping at the landfill.  The County knew all about Dieter’s cooperation.  And they knew that Dieter had called the DEC to complain, and that he had called the NY State Department of Health to ask about cancer concerns among park workers.  The State employees who took his calls had told Dieter’s bosses the same day, and the bosses made sure that Dieter got the message that he should just keep his mouth shut.

He received threats to his life.  A truck driver tried to run him off the road.  His supervisors called him a professional troublemaker; his coworkers kept their distance from him.  This only made him more determined.  He got back in their faces and told them that he would tell the world about the “tomb,” a hidden chemical dump at the county park that had been covered over with a concrete slab.  He was bluffing.  Only the old timers at the park knew where the tomb was, and they were not about to tell Dieter.  They were too frightened, even though the contaminated water was making some of them sick.

In school, my students and I were trying to practice a strategy known as “civic courage.”  It means behaving exactly as if you were a practicing citizen in a real democracy.  It means going to meetings and speaking truth to power and taking responsibility for the welfare of the community.  Like Dieter’s bluff about the tomb, civic courage is a bluff as well.  The key words in the definition are as if, because we know that our democracy is becoming more myth than reality, and that power moves on stealthy, filthy feet outside of public view.  The practitioner of civic courage goes through all of the motions for this very reason, in an effort to expose the undemocratic contradictions built into the system.

To all of us who worked with Dieter at the time, he was the embodiment of civic courage.  Like Dutch Smith, Stan Greenberg, Armondo Bilancione, and others, he was willing to risk his job, and maybe even his life, to bear witness to the truth.  For every whistle blower like Dieter, there were dozens who said nothing, who kept their heads down and their mouths closed, no matter how ugly or destructive the acts they witnessed on the job.

Our society is ambivalent about whistle blowers.  On the one hand, we claim to admire them.  But on the other, we despise what they do.  Consider Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who is now a fugitive from the United States.  A recent survey shows that 49% of Americans consider Snowden a hero, while 51% consider him “more of a traitor,” even though it is now clear that he opened our eyes to the enormity of our government’s illegal and immoral surveillance system.  That is the way it goes with whistle blowers.  You can open people’s eyes to the poisoning of their land and water, and some of them will hate you for it.  Henrik Ibsen understood that in 1882 when he wrote An Enemy of the People.

Dieter knew that the only thing he had to gain when he went on tape for our documentary was an opportunity to set the record straight: a chance to alert the public that crimes had been committed, and that these crimes represented a direct threat to our health.  It was the same reason he cooperated with 60 Minutes when they came to town to produce the segment that they never aired.  

He knew he was putting himself at risk when he spoke openly about Lou Heimbach touring the landfill every week in his limo even when he was no longer county executive, or of mobsters handing out turkeys and bottles of whisky to state troopers and landfill operators at Christmas, or of 55 gallon drums of spoiled lead highway paint dumped into the wetlands near the DPW garage, or the toxic industrial sludge that was dumped into the black dirt near Pine Island, or the large, working, secret landfill that was maintained at the County Park to take in illegal toxins and medical waste when the police were watching the County Landfill on the other side of town.

I believe that Dieter’s whistle blowing contributed to his difficulties these last few years.  He most likely would have had an easier time of it had he not crossed so many powerful people in Orange County.  Ironically, those same people continue to hold important positions and win prestigious awards.  Dieter received no awards for his selfless acts of civic courage.  I like to think, however, that when Dieter drew his last breath, his conscience was clear, and he knew that he had performed his civic and moral duty.  Dieter is gone, but the poisons he warned us about are still percolating in the landfill, the black dirt, the wetland near the DPW, and the park.  Hopefully, these toxic time bombs will be attended to someday, and when the enormity of these environmental crimes finally comes to light, Dieter will be given the honor he so rightfully deserves.