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The soap that gets you extra clean is Dial, Dial, Dial. The soap with hexachlorophene is Dial, Dial, Dial. Normal perspiration is odorless until skin bacteria attack it. They cause the odor. Now, ordinary good soaps can't remove skin bacteria effectively, but Dial soap gets rid of up to 95% of these troublemakers.
It's the hexachlorophene and dial that does it. It clings to your skin, keeping you fresh all day. Hexachlorophene is a chemical compound that was used as a disinfectant throughout the 1950s and 60s.
It was most often found in soaps and toothpastes and even baby products until the US Food and Drug Administration halted its production in 1972 when it was discovered that the chemical compound was responsible for the brain damage and deaths of more than 15 Americans. But prior to the discovery of its harmful effects, production of hexachlorophene was booming, so much so that the Northeastern Pharmaceutical and Chemical Company in Missouri who produced the compound
had run out of disposal space for the waste produced by its manufacturing plants. In 1971, the company made a deal with a local farmer named James Denney to store barrels of its waste in a trench on his property seven miles south of Verona, Missouri for $150, which equates to a little less than a thousand dollars in today's money. Before the company was dissolved in 1974,
Northeastern had stored up to 150 drums of waste material on the Denny Farm. Five years later, in 1979, the Environmental Protection Agency received an anonymous tip about the disposal site. The tipster voiced concern about the processes used by the crew that Northeastern contracted with to dispose of its waste. The EPA followed up on the informant's allegations by driving to the Denny Farm, evaluating the site, and interviewing people involved in the disposal process.
From the interviews, investigators learned that the 150 barrels of waste had simply been dumped from the back of a truck into a trench on James Denny's property and was covered with one to three feet of topsoil. One interviewee claimed that he had witnessed at least one of the barrels leaking into the soil. A bad situation turned worse when EPA officials tested the soil and discovered the presence of dioxin.
Dioxin is an unwanted byproduct of many herbicides and disinfectants, including hexachlorophene. Dioxin is considered to be one of the most toxic substances known to man. It is the main ingredient found in Agent Orange, the herbicide used to defoliate millions of acres of forest and farmland during the Vietnam War, which has since been linked to cancers, diabetes, birth defects, and numerous other disabilities in those who were exposed.
and it can remain toxic in soil for decades. At the time of the Denny Farm incident, soil levels with a dioxin concentration greater than one part per billion were considered dangerous. The concentration found on the Denny Farm
319 parts per million. Mr. Denning, did the chemical company let you know what was in the barrels before they buried him on your farm? No, they didn't tell me what was in it. They just said it's waste. It wasn't unharmful. Did they give you any idea of...
Mr. Denny was not alone.
Over 40 abandoned dump sites in Missouri had tested positive for dioxin, totaling over 500,000 tons of contaminated soil. To clean up the sites, the EPA built a state-of-the-art dioxin incinerator, which they parked at the Denny Farm. Contaminated soil from other sites in Missouri were transported to the Denny Farm, where it was fed into the furnace and destroyed. The incinerator worked by torching the contaminated soil at 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit.
Vapors from the burning chemicals were then transported into a second chamber where they were destroyed using 2200 degree heat. The furnace could process about one ton of soil per hour at a cost of $1,000 per ton. 99.9% of any toxic chemical that came in contact with the furnace was destroyed with zero toxic emissions. The EPA's cleanup efforts were innovative but expensive.
The total cost of cleaning up the Denny Farm and a few other Missouri dioxin sites were about $40 million, $20 million of which went towards the buyout of the entire town of Times Beach. The incinerator alone cost $5 million to build and another $4 million to operate. The Denny Farm case is significant not only because of the way the cleanup was performed, but also because of how it was funded.
As a response to the rising threat of toxic waste sites, the United States Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, or CERCLA for short, which allowed the EPA to recover the cost of cleanup from responsible parties through a court of law, even if those companies were now defunct, as was the case with Northwestern in the Denny Farm case.
Prior to the new law, the EPA would usually attempt to recover its costs through out-of-court settlements, with little success. The EPA sued the Northeastern Pharmaceutical and Chemical Company, along with its former president and vice president, seeking to recoup about $400,000 from the cleanup of Denny Farm. The EPA won the lawsuit in a landmark decision, marking the first time a recovery case had been brought to trial under the new legislation.
Another important aspect of CERCLA was that it established a new trust fund program called the Superfund to be used for the cleanup of hazardous waste sites in which responsible parties cannot be identified or are unable to afford the cleanup. The Superfund consisted of 1.6 billion dollars which was, until 1995, generated mostly through the taxation of the petroleum and chemical industries. The parties most responsible were hazardous waste.
The majority of the program's current costs have since shifted to taxpayers. As of September 6, 2017, the Superfund program has reclaimed almost 400 contaminated sites, with over 1,300 sites remaining on the waiting list. In recent years, Superfund site cleanups have slowed dramatically. In 2014, only eight sites in total were cleaned up.
Much of the stagnation can be attributed to a combination of complex bureaucracy, delayed decision-making, and insufficient funding. These delays have allowed contaminated sites to languish in communities for decades at a time, posing potential health risk to surrounding citizens. Scott Pruitt, the head of the Trump administration EPA, has vowed to make Superfund cleanups a priority and to speed up the process.
However, his statements turned out to be little more than lip service as the Trump administration's initial budget for 2018, which was published after Pruitt's comments, proposes a 30% cut in the program's funding, which elicited this response from Senator Edward Markey from Massachusetts.
Is it fair to say that even if the EPA task force comes back with constructive recommendations, that if there's a 30% cut in the funding for the remediation of these sites, that there's going to be great harm because the triaging will have to, in fact, occur, and that a vision without funding is an hallucination? You know, saying that you care, here's the vision, but then cutting the funding by 30%,
only results in more kids being exposed around the country. While the Denny Farm case was unfolding in Missouri, an incident that was as equally instrumental in establishing the Superfund was taking place in New York. Corporate irresponsibility, gross negligence, and government deniability leads to a massive man-made environmental disaster on this episode of Swindled.
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In the early 1900s, an ambitious and flamboyant entrepreneur named William T. Love envisioned building a model community near the upper and lower Niagara Rivers in Niagara Falls, New York. He planned to dig a canal between the two rivers to produce hydroelectricity, which would provide power to the entire urban area. The energy would be cheap and clean, not that that was anyone's concern in 1901, and he would call this community Model City.
But Model City never became a reality. The project was abandoned in 1910 due to economic fluctuations and Nikola Tesla's discovery of alternating current, which allowed for cheap transmission of electrical power over long distances. All that remained of William T. Love's dream was the initial phase of the construction of the canal, a mile-long trench 20 yards wide and up to 40 feet deep.
The canal remained an empty, unused hole in the ground for a decade until the city of Niagara Falls repurposed it into a municipal and chemical landfill in 1920, which it used for the following 20 years. The canal, or landfill at this point, was eventually sold to the Hooker Chemical Company, who became the sole owner and user of the site.
Hooker Chemical emptied the canal and lined the bottom with a thick clay to protect the surrounding soil from becoming contaminated with the chemical waste that it planned to bury there in barrels 20 to 25 feet underground. In a span of 10 years, the company dumped over 21,000 tons of chemicals at the Love Canal site.
including byproducts from the manufacture of dyes and perfumes, such as alkalines and chlorinated hydrocarbons, as well as residues from pesticides, synthetic resins, and rubber solvents, many of which were suspected of causing cancer and had already been placed under heavy restrictions by the government.
In the early 1950s, the population of Niagara Falls was growing dramatically. As the land adjacent to the canal burgeoned with residential development, Hooker Chemical decided it would be wise to find a different location for its waste. The dump site was sealed with clay and then covered with a layer of topsoil. Grass and vegetation began to grow on top, reclaimed by the earth like it had never existed at all. The canal was gone, but it would not be forgotten.
The Hooker Chemical Company began negotiating the sale of the canal to the city of Niagara Falls in 1953. The city planned to use the land to build new schools and houses to accommodate its growing population. Recognizing the potential hazards and potential lawsuits of building on the site, Hooker Chemical included a liability limitation clause in the purchase contract. The clause made no mention of warnings about the dangers of the chemicals buried beneath the surface.
only a brief paragraph stating that the company would not be responsible for any future injuries or deaths related to the site. But internally, executives at Hooker Chemical were aware of the potential danger and litigation. Hooker's in-house lawyers addressed memos to the president of the company voicing their concerns about potential future issues related to the canal.
The company's legal team viewed the sale of the property as an opportunity to evade any future responsibility or liability related to the buried chemicals. Hooker Chemicals sold the property to the city of Niagara Falls for the generous price of $1. Soon after purchasing the site, the Niagara Falls School Board broke ground on the construction of the first school at Love Canal.
While excavating the site, construction crews discovered that the school and its playground were being built directly on top of the former chemical dump site. Instead of abandoning the project, construction was relocated a mere 80 feet north of the original planned location. Construction of the school was completed in 1955. About 400 students attended the new school. The playground was littered with remnants of the land's former purpose.
After a rainstorm, children would play in the giant puddles that would form in the craters of the canal's collapsing soil. It was reported that children would return home from school teary-eyed and sneezing, with hard pimples covering their bodies. But none of those things impeded development. By 1960, an additional 800 houses had been built, as well as another school, which were filled with young families who were completely unaware of the land's history.
As the community grew, the clay lining that housed the dump had been punctured to run water pipes to the newly built areas, allowing the toxic chemicals to seep into the surrounding soil. Residents of Love Canal would often find strange substances in their yards and gardens. Sometimes a weird, chemical-like odor would fill the air, but local government agencies insisted that there was no danger.
So, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, life carried on as normal in Love Canal until a record amount of snow and rainfall in 1977 and 1978 revealed the ugly truth. Groundwater levels rose dramatically due to melting snow and heavy rains, causing the toxic substances underground to literally overflow, spreading quickly through the neighborhood. Puddles of noxious substances were forming in the basements of people's homes.
Trees were turning black and dying. On one particularly rainy afternoon, a 25 square foot area of the school grounds crumbled, exposing the corroding barrels of chemical waste hiding below. Two journalists from the Niagara Falls Gazette named David Polak and David Russell began investigating the matter. They published two reports which were virtually ignored at the time. One of the reports described finding toxic chemicals in the sump pumps in people's homes.
Sump pumps are typically used to remove standing water from basement and cellar floors. Michael Brown, another reporter from the Gazette, discovered that the dump site was three times larger than anyone had originally thought.
He performed a door-to-door survey recording the health issues affecting Love Canal residents, and what he found was extremely alarming. Sherry has a cleft palate. She has a double-robed bottom teeth. She has deterioration of the bones in the middle ear, deterioration of the eardrums. She has bone blockage in the left nasal passage. There were disturbingly high numbers of birth defects and miscarriages, reports of leukemia, deafness, severe headaches,
intellectual disabilities, cleft palates, and even extra rows of teeth. In his reports, Michael Brown urged the residents of Love Canal to organize and protest. And so they did, with a local mother named Lois Gibbs leading the charge.
Lois' son Michael had been attending one of the schools in Love Canal for only three months when he developed epilepsy, asthma, a urinary tract infection, and a low white blood cell count, which is a precursor to leukemia. Lois was not even aware that her new home had been built on top of a chemical waste dump. On behalf of the residents of Love Canal, Lois Gibbs made repeated complaints to the city of Niagara Falls and pleaded with city officials to investigate the matter.
The mayor of Niagara Falls at the time, Michael O'Loughlin, infamously contended that there was nothing wrong in Love Canal. The Niagara County Health Department supported Mayor O'Loughlin's statement by proclaiming that the chemical waste was nothing more than a nuisance and did not pose any serious health risks to the people. And Niagara Falls City Manager, Donald O'Hara, deemed the unpleasant sights and smells of the canal as not a matter of health, but a matter of aesthetics.
Hooker Chemical Company did not comment publicly on the situation, other than claiming that the problem was not their responsibility, and that the company had no record of burying any chemicals in the canal. Many residents suspected that the local government was turning a blind eye to the crisis because it did not want to ruin the region's relationship with Hooker Chemical, who employed more than 3,000 people in the area, and was in the middle of discussions to build a $17 million company headquarters in downtown Niagara Falls.
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City officials were so excited at the prospect of landing the project that highly lucrative tax and loan incentives were provided to Hooker Chemical to influence their decision to build in their city. The city even forced a hotel owner to vacate the location in which the building was to be built. Besides, there was no proof that the chemicals had come from the Hooker disposal site.
Tempers flared at a Niagara County legislative meeting when city officials voted no to recovery efforts. Each and every one of you in this room are murderers. You're a bunch of sick, sadistic people. Do you know what government is going to evacuate us? The state government is doing something. County people voted down. How many representatives are supposed to support us? Well, the nation is looking at you and you look like damn fools. Get out.
You are gonna pay, because those who do wrong pay, sweetie. May you hate each other. One of you are gonna pay. I hope you sleep well. You should be put in cages. Hey, vote for me. Like animals.
Take another recess. Take another recess. More coffee. I hope we have the name of the vote. The only thing you do good, mister, is sit on your fat dupas. I hope all your family's living well. I hope they don't have any diseases. How could you? I don't understand that. After what you heard this past weekend, you've got the nerve to sit there and vote no? They're animals. Oh, I hate all of you. I hate you.
How can you put people through this? We're ordinary people! They have no heart. They care about themselves. They don't live there. Do you think this is fun for us? Do you think for two years we've enjoyed any bit of this? Well, you're wrong. You sit there and look so goddamn smug!
Dissatisfied with the response of the local government, the residents of Love Canal had contacted their state representatives, which prompted the New York State Departments of Health and Environmental Conservation to perform an air, soil, and water study. The study confirmed the residents' worst fears. Hazardous substances such as benzene and dioxin, processed sludge, and garbage were identified in the basements of multiple homes located near the canal.
In April 1978, the state government ordered Niagara County to build a fence around the contaminated area, and the school located closest to the dump site was closed, mostly in part to a petition created and circulated by Lois Gibbs. By August 2nd, 1978, the situation at Love Canal had been declared a state emergency, marking the first time in American history that emergency funds would be used for a situation other than a natural disaster.
A week later, President Jimmy Carter, who was preparing to campaign for re-election when Love Canal became national news, proclaimed the site to be a "federal health emergency" and approved emergency financial aid. The New York State government would evacuate and purchase the homes of 240 families living closest to the canal. These residents were offered an average of $35,000 each for their homes, well below market value.
The remaining residents, many of whom were involved in lawsuits against Hooker Chemical that would take years to complete, were told that they were not in any immediate danger and that there was no reason for them to leave. Despite the reassurance, the remaining residents of Love Canal would continue to fight for relocation. Homeowners who had been left behind voiced their displeasure at every opportunity.
All I want, I don't want to be relocated. All I want is to be 28-5 and give it to me tonight and I'll go down that road and I'll never look back at the love for an age. In 1979, a second evacuation ordered pregnant women and children under the age of two to relocate.
Later in the year, the state temporarily relocated another 300 families because many of them had reported health issues after being exposed to hazardous chemicals that had been unearthed during the cleanup effort. The cleanup effort included a plan to remediate and detoxify the area by sealing the dump site with clay and plastic and covering the dump site with additional soil and grass, not much different than the original effort of containment.
However, a trench system was also installed around the perimeter of the site. It would drain any chemical leaks before they reached nearby creeks or sewers. And to address and understand the health issues involved, the EPA performed blood testing on several members of the community. The homeowners remaining in Love Canal were becoming restless and fearful. At this point, almost two years had passed since the federal government had declared Love Canal a disaster area, and yet over 900 families were still living there.
Dissatisfied with the speed and communication of the revitalization and relocation efforts, a mob of angry citizens stormed the office of Niagara Falls Mayor Michael O'Loughlin, demanding answers. Do you know what it's like to lose a child? Do you? Because I can tell you exactly what it's like to lose a child. Well, it's terrible. And when it's due to chemicals, it's even worse. Much worse. So it's about time you people woke up and stopped fooling around around here and do something. Do something decent.
and care about the people that live in this city. I won't stay in this city. I don't want to. And I was born and raised here and I always stood up for this city. 42 years I've been in this city. And now I don't give a darn about it.
And I won't stay here anymore. They don't care about what's going on. They'd love to just chop off those few blocks and deny that they even own them. Well, they've done that all through the Love Canal crisis. How many more children do you have to die? I'd like to know. How many more liver tests does my son have to have? That's right. These kids are going to get sicker. Is he going to grow up? How many more... Is my daughter going to have children? Will my next baby be normal? Do you know what they say to him? Will it? I have a house already bought. All we're waiting for is these stupid people to get off their bad asses and get going.
I want to move into my new house. I want to start living again. I want to forget about the baby I lost. I'll never forget the baby I lost, but I just want to put it in my past. I can't because I'm reminded every day by these idiots. And then you ask us to be understanding or to be satisfied with an answer. I'm sorry. We cannot be, and we will not be. You want us out of your hair? Get us out of there. And believe me, we don't want to see you any more than you want to see us. That's the bottom line. And if they were smart enough in there, they'd know it.
We're not leaving here until we get any answers. Decent, intelligent answers. The panic intensified a few months later when the results of the blood test conducted by the EPA revealed that a large percentage of the Love Canal community had suffered chromosomal damage. In a typical community, about 1% of the population would test positive for chromosomal damage.
In Love Canal, that number was an astounding 33%. This is Dr. Beverly Pagin. She's a cancer research scientist at Roswell Memorial Institute in Buffalo, New York, who
who worked closely with the residents of Love Canal. - Epidemiology can never prove cause and effect, but the fact that we now know that the chemicals are in the home, that they got into the people and they caused chromosome damage in the people indicates that the miscarriages and the birth defects and the cancer is a result of living in this neighborhood, is a result of Love Canal chemicals. - The results of the blood test outraged the community.
On May 19, 1980, in an attempt to get the attention of the federal government as well as the media, Love Canal residents locked two EPA officials in the offices belonging to the Love Canal Homeowners Association and held them hostage with demands of immediate evacuation. The residents proclaimed that if it were safe for them to live in Love Canal, it was safe for the EPA employees to live there as well.
While 150 Love Canal citizens protested on the building's lawn, Lois Gibbs was inside on the telephone negotiating with the White House. We have gotten more attention in half a day than we have in the two years period that we've been fighting to stop the suffering of Love Canal residents. And it's really, really sad when you have to go to this extreme of either being on a boat down the Potomac River or have somebody held against their will, or at least look that way.
to get any kind of attention from the White House. And that's not a government that I'm very proud of. They should hang a tent in shame. Every so often, Gibbs would emerge from the building to inform the protesters outside about the status of the ongoing negotiations. We are still in contact with the White House, with the federal government. They have given us nothing so far, but that does not mean that the door is closed.
Give us another half hour and I will be out. Please keep calm. I don't want any violence. I don't want anybody hurt. Just give me another half hour and we should come up with something, hopefully. Thirty minutes passed and Gibbs returned with the final announcement.
We have just been, we have just talked to the White House. The White House, the President Carter has met with Congressman LaFalse to discuss the Love Canal and what they're going to do and what we need. The Congressman had dinner with them and they had a very lengthy discussion.
We have contacted the White House and asked for representatives to come down to Love Canal to meet with the community leaders of LaSalle Development, of the Church Task Force, of the Concerned Area Residents, and the Homeowners Association. I have told the White House, and this is upon your approval, that we will allow the two EPA representatives to leave.
But if we do not have a disaster declaration Wednesday by noon, then what they have seen here today is just a Sesame Street picnic. Incapacitate! After almost six hours, the standoff ended without incident. The EPA officials were released and the protesters' demands had finally been heard.
A few days later, on May 21st, the federal government agreed to purchase every house in Love Canal and temporarily relocate every family still remaining there until funding became available for permanent resettlement, which eventually happened five months later. By 1982, almost all of the families had vacated Love Canal, although about 90 of the 900 families chose to stay. Most of the houses in the residential areas had been bulldozed,
Those that remained behind lived in houses that stood alone amongst rows of demolished neighborhood blocks. The residents of Love Canal may have won their battle for resettlement, but the war was just beginning. Hooker Chemical refused to take responsibility for the role it played in the disaster. This is Donald Bader, the president of Hooker Chemical, being interviewed by Eileen Prose. All right, the property is no longer yours.
No, the property was out of our control for approximately 25 years. You deeded it over to the school board, is that correct? We deeded it to the school board, yes. Did you not know when you deeded it to the school board that there were hazardous, toxic dioxin and many chemicals in the ground that were problems? Man, we knew there were dangerous chemicals in what we had put in Love Canal when we deeded it. And in fact, the deed, which was accepted by the school board,
recognizes the fact that there are hazardous wastes in that canal
And it also absolves Hooker Chemical from any problems associated with those chemicals that comes up in later days. I have a copy of that deed in my briefcase if you'd like to see it. But that's fact. I'd like to ask you, because we're out of time, and I just hope that you've had your say, but I'd like to just ask you one thing. This is a problem that's an emotional issue for the whole country because of not only your dump site but others. Why, because Hooker Chemical seems to be so very involved, why
Why doesn't a company like Hooker stand up and say, okay, somebody's got to take the bull by the horns, and somebody has to stop this? Why can't a company that is so very involved or what? I mean, everyone believes in free enterprise, but there is a moral responsibility here.
Why can't someone stand up and say, all right, maybe some mistakes might have been made. Why can't we now clean it all up and stop this? Ma'am, Hooker has been involved right from the very beginning, and we were prepared to go in and clean that dump up. That was taken out of our hands by the state when the state declared that health emergency and ordered the evacuation of pregnant women and children under two.
From there on in, the entire situation has been out from under our control. But Hooker was working cooperatively with the city and the school board at that time to clean up that site. Hooker is a responsible company. One of the things we're trying to do is to responsibly get out the facts. You know, I sat before a committee of the Senate. This was chaired by a young lawyer who had the guts to say to me, "So what if Love Canal's a hoax?"
So what? He says, you need this legislation, and we're going to give it to you. Now, you know, I believe you've got to be sure that whatever we do in this country, we do with an adequate fact base. I do, too. But, however, I bet there's a lot more to be said, though, Donald, on both sides. It seems that many of the studies are inconclusive. I suppose we could go on for an hour, and I really wish we could. Well, I'd like to, too. But I thank you for coming here.
The initial lawsuits filed against Hooker Chemical Company, or Occidental Chemical Corporation as it was now called, were settled on December 20th, 1983. 1,328 Love Canal residents were awarded a total of $20 million, as well as a $1 million medical trust fund.
Occidental would find itself in court often over the next decade. In 1994, a federal judge ruled that the Hooker Chemical Company was negligent in selling the Love Canal land to the Niagara Falls School Board and was ordered to reimburse the state of New York $98 million in cleanup costs.
In 1995, thanks to the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 that established the Superfund, the EPA successfully sued Occidental to recover the federal government's portion of the cleanup cost, which totaled $129 million. The entire Love Canal cleanup process would last over 21 years and cost more than $400 million, before being removed from the Superfund priority list in 2004.
In 1988, the New York State Department of Health completed a study that concluded that parts of Love Canal were habitable. Former residents, including Lois Gibbs, met at the state capitol in Albany to protest the resettlement. But ultimately, their efforts were unsuccessful. They did not clean up Love Canal. At best, they put a trench around it. There's still 20,000 tons of chemicals in the center of that site. We fought very hard.
In 1990, for the first time in 10 years, a new family moved into Love Canal. Since then, more than 260 homes have been renovated and sold in the area, many of which are inhabited by young families who are not familiar with the land's history.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Tonight, people living in a Niagara Falls neighborhood just blocks from the Love Canal say these substances you see here could be putting their health at risk. People are dying. People are sick. People are dying. And this all can be avoided.
Tompkins' latest concern involves these substances that are leaking into some homes through sewer drains. Tompkins had some analyzed by the University of Virginia, and the results recently came back. Arsenic, barium, chromium, and love canal chemicals made by Hooker. We're being told not to worry. Well...
There's a problem. Health officials insist there is nothing to worry about here, but that's not enough to ease the concerns of-- There are currently 18 pending lawsuits from the newest residents of Love Canal. A follow-up to the blood tests performed in the late 70s and early 80s revealed that the residents of Love Canal had no higher rates of chromosomal abnormalities than the rest of Niagara County. The link between exposure to Love Canal and long-term development of serious health issues has not been established.
The children who grew up in Love Canal in the 1970s and 80s reunited at the site 35 years later, many of them suffering from chronic illnesses that they attribute to their time spent living near the dump site.
And so I decided to go to the reunion and seek out all the kids that I went to 93rd Street School with and see if they were having health issues as well. And nine out of ten of them were having health issues. Lois Gibbs also returned to Love Canal and picked up right where she left off. I mean, we said it so many times, don't bring people back here. Just don't bring them back here.
And they did. And they bamboozled them into believing it was safe and gave them the data and God knows what else these folks got. And they innocently went in and bought what I bought 35 years ago, the American dream. Lois has dedicated the last 35 years of her life to environmental and toxic waste activism.
She founded the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, which is a grassroots environmental crisis center. Her organization provides information, resources, technical assistance and training to community groups around the nation. She's written several books, she's won multiple awards, and there was a made-for-TV movie about her. She was even nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. Lois Gibbs provided a shining example of grassroots activism during her time at Love Canal.
Her efforts helped establish the Superfund, which has been used to fund the cleanups of over 400 toxic waste sites, including Love Canal. But with the new developments at Love Canal, and history seemingly repeating itself, the fight that she started is nowhere near finished. Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen. For more information about the show, check out swindledpodcast.com.
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