Canal del amor en 50 – ACV50

Canal del amor en 50 Anniversary Series (ACV50)

Clean Air is supporting the efforts of Niagara grassroots organizing ongoing under the banner of Save Our Backyards – and we are also working in parallel with Love Canal veterans like Luella Kenny and other peer organizations largely based in Niagara Falls to kick off a series of educational events about Love Canal as well as commemoration efforts that will take place over the next several years.

The first of these will be a panel to recognize and celebrate Michael Brown’s first reporting on Love Canal on October 3, 1976.

en octubre 1, 2026 at 6pm we will gather at the Niagara Arts and Cultural Center for a panel with veteran reporter Richard Newberg and current reporters Dale Shoemaker, Mackenzie Schuman and Dan Tevlock for a discussion about the importance of watchdog reporting for corporate accountability, how things have changed since 1976, and the state of journalism today.

We will also screen some documentary materials from Mr. Newberg, including archival interviews.

Please register by clicking here, and please take a moment to bookmark this webpage – we plan to launch a separate website jointly with our partners as this effort evolves, but for the foreseeable future, updates on this anniversary series will be posted here.

Just for context, this commemoration effort began several years ago, and we are working with SOS Niagara to include their policy demands as part of this LCA50 series.

Background

En 1894, William T. Amor, a bit of an odd historic figure tied to several fraudulent large infrastructure projects, began digging a canal off the Niagara River near the eastern outskirts of Niagara Falls. His vision was of a new utopian city – un “Model City” – powered by clean abundant hydropower.

His team dug for years, but ultimately the finances fell apart, and the plan was scrapped. Local industries however, particularly the new chlor-alkali chemical industry, kept chugging along, y en 1942 the Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation took over ownership of the partially dug canal to use as a waste dump.

Acerca de 10 years later, having dumped over 20,000 of tons of hazardous waste, Hooker sold this waste dump to the Niagara Falls School District for $1, with a restriction that the school district not dig for any future construction.

The 99th Street Elementary School and hundreds of homes would be built on this site and in surrounding areas in the following decades.

The basics of the rest of the story are generally well known, but the details, the stories of the people who fought for justice, and the outcomes that continue to ripple today, less so. The University at Buffalo has an excellent timeline available here, archived materials available here, a research guide here, a photo archive here, y a story map available here.

Like many complicated industrial contamination sites and organizing campaigns, there is no one single anniversary date for the Love Canal Disaster and the related organizing efforts, but rather a series of dates spread between 1976-1984, which we plan to celebrate between now and 2034.

En 2018, with the closure of Tonawanda Coke, Clean Air members fought to push for the entire site to be placed into the State Superfund program. We felt, and feel, that the clean up costs of sites like Tonawanda Coke should fall on the corporations that caused the pollution in the first place, not on taxpayers through the NYS Brownfield program.

We lost that fight – 2/3 of the campus is being remediated through Brownfield – and NYS taxpayers will ultimately pay the financial cost of the clean-up, not Honeywell, the identified responsible party for the Superfund portions of the campus.

A few years later, in response, we made a push to add some public engagement and labor provisions to the state Brownfield law.

We largely lost that fight as well.

When we debriefed and talked about next steps, we recognized that part of the reason we were losing our fights on this front was a general lack of public understanding about these programs – that while these programs originated from the organizing right here in WNY, terms like Brownfield and Superfund are not widely known, and the nuances of these programs even less so.

Entonces, in late 2022, we began discussing an education push related to toxics, Brownfield, and Superfund in WNY – to educate residents to be able to identify potentially contaminated sites in our communities, to agitate about who caused this contamination, and to organize to demand corporate accountability as well as remediation and redevelopment of abandoned contaminated properties in our region.

We also realized that the 50th Anniversary of the events of the Love Canal disaster were just a few years on the horizon, and that this would be an unique opportunity for narrative purposes starting in 2026 – to not only use the moment to educate and organize, but also to celebrate the unsung work of the original organizers, and to learn from them.

We made several efforts between 2023-2025 to seek funding and support for this through state and federal programs and through private foundations – and what we found was that even this modest largely educational effort was one that funders were uninterested in. We may all generally understand that we live among toxic contamination, but to take the next step and openly acknowledge and address it is a step too far.

Y entonces, as things currently stand today, September 1, 2026, the only official physical monument to the work of Lois Gibbs, Luella Kenny, Dr. Beverly Paigen, and so many others is a granite plaque, tucked in the woods near the Love Canal site, which bears the names of local elected officials who fought against these organizers.

We feel this is wrong, and they are overdue to receive their roses.

As things currently stand today, grassroots organizers in Niagara Falls and surrounding areas have again recently begun efforts to demand remediation and accountability for legacy contamination.

We feel they need their demands uplifted and supported.

As things currently stand today, while we know that we need widespread remediation of legacy contamination throughout our region, particularly in fenceline and frontline environmental justice communities, these efforts are largely treated by policy makers and regulators not as longstanding injustices that must be addressed and the polluters held to account, but rather as economic development opportunities for developers.

We feel this dynamic must be flipped, and we must enforce Superfund much more robustly in WNY rather than let polluters avoid their financial liability and civic responsibilities.

Between our anniversary commemoration efforts, our ongoing campaigns, and our efforts to support grassroots organizing around these issues, we aim to address the lack of recognition and celebration of the organizing of previous generations and also to help improve material conditions and move Environmental Justice and Just Transition policies forward for residents in Erie and Niagara Counties.