Love Canal construction began in 1894. William Love, a railroad entrepreneur, scouted out a tract of land in Niagara Falls, New York, with the idea that he would build an idyllic community of grid streets and preplanned houses and buildings. Love Canal was meant to be a shipping lane, as well as provide hydroelectric power for the town that Love envisioned. Unfortunately, construction was halted due to economic crisis, as well as the lobbying of preservationists to save the waterway of Niagara Falls proper. One construction stopped, the City of Niagara began dumping household and business garbage in the canal.

In the 1940's, Hooker Chemical Company was granted access to dump waste in the canal by the Niagara Power and Development Company. They turned the 16 acres around the canal into a chemical waste dump. They buried 55 gallon drums full of all manner of chemicals, which totaled an estimated 22, 000 tons. The city bought back the site in the 1950's and built a school atop the former chemical dump. As the years went by, residents began to complain about horrible smells, puddles of weird colored water in their yards and basements, and black fluid coming from the canal. People were developing rashes, breathing problems, reproductive issues and birth defects, and cancers. (Hooker Chemical Company was bought by the OXY company.)

This book is well researched about the history of the site, the legal issues, the clean up, etc. I learned a lot of information about this previously unknown to me location and disaster. The author included a lot of personal information about key residents and officials that were involved in the clean up. I googled to see what the town looked like, as I bought the Audible version of this book, and ran across an article that says people that living around this supposedly cleaned up and contained area are experiencing the same exact issues the residents in this book did. Clearly, they did not clean up as well as they thought they did, though I cannot begin to imagine how much of the chemicals have seeped into the surrounding water table and ground. Slapping some new siding on contaminated houses isn't really a clean up. I cannot believe I have never heard of this until now. This was a really good book. I listened to it the entire day while I was doing things around the house. If I had a physical copy, I would say that I couldn't put it down. This has inspired me to look into other SUPERFUND sites to see if there are any other books about them out there.