Love Canal

The Love Canal resistance was a resistance movement that took place at the neighborhood of Love Canal. The controversy was about how toxic waste was being dumped there, and the citizens trying to get the government to do something about it.

The Love Canal area, named after William T. Love, was located in the city of Niagara Falls, New York, part of the southeast La Salle district, in the United States. The neighborhood was made up of 36 square blocks. The boundaries were Bergholtz Creek to the north of the neighborhood, and to the south was the Niagara River.

William T. Love aspired to build a giant canal that would generate electricity. Different sources conflicted with each other at this point. One source says that he wanted to build a canal from the north Niagara Falls River to the south Niagara Falls River, separated by a water fall. The other source says, and this is the one more likely to be true due to feedback from other sources, that Love wanted to build a canal that stretched from the Niagara River all the way to Lake Ontario, one of the great lakes. Then he would have made a hydroelectric dam to generate massive amounts of electric power that could power many houses. In 1894 he commenced his construction of the canal, but all to no avail. His great endeavor failed when Nikola Tesla, a famous inventor and electrical engineer, invented the AC (Alternating Current) current system. This allowed people to transmit electricity long distances. Because of this invention, people didn’t need Love’s hydroelectric dam power. Love’s funding ran out and his plan failed. His funding running out wasn’t the only factor that made his plan fail. In fact, it was only one of many. To say that Love failed because his funding ran out is a gross understatement. The other reasons were that he was disappointed because of “economic depression”, and “financial instability.” In the end, only one mile of the canal had been dug when William T. Love abandoned the Love Canal project.

The land, which consisted of a massive 15 acres (653400 sq ft), was used as a recreation spot for some time (fishing, boating, picnics, etc). In the year of 1929, the land was auctioned off to the City of Niagara Falls. The city used it as a landfill to deposit all the chemical waste from its giant, majorly successful petrochemical industry. Petrochemicals are anything derived from fossil fuels (oil, petroleum, diesel, etc). Later, the United States Army acquired the land. They used the canal area as a place to dump waste from their experiments on chemical warfare. Even though they didn’t fill the canal to the brim, the city of Niagara Falls and the US army still deposited lots of their toxic, hazardous, chemical waste there. The actions of the army and the city could and may have accounted for many of the problems created later on at Love Canal. The waste deposited by the US army was the worst, formerly used for chemical warfare (the use of chemical weapons). This could have accounted for many of the problems. This is because chemical weapons are designed to hurt, maim, and kill people. So, by dumping all this waste in the canal, they were basically asking for the civilians to get hurt. Unluckily, back then people didn’t know about the dangers of chemical waste and the harm it could inflict.