A new documentary about the Love Canal disaster is premiering tonight on PBS.
“Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal,” will air at 9 p.m. as part of the American Experience series. It can be seen locally on WNED, PBS.org, and the PBS app.
The two-hour-long documentary traces the history of the Love Canal neighborhood, the environmental disaster there in the 1970s, and the local residents who fought to get the area cleaned up. Their efforts helped create the federal Superfund program for cleaning up such areas.
In the 1940s, Hooker Chemical Company started dumping over 20,000 tons of toxic chemicals at the Love Canal site, burying it with earth and clay. The Niagara Falls City School District would take control of the site in 1953 for $1, building the 99th Street school as more residential developments were built in the coming years. By 1978, around 800 private single-family homes and 240 low-income apartments were built around the former dump.
Residents complained through the 1970s of odors and strange substances in their yards and at the school playground. A Calspan Corporation study in 1976 of toxic chemical residues in the air and in-home sump pumps, with the state Department of Health starting testing in 1978.
Families living in the neighborhood had an increase in miscarriages, stillbirths, sudden infant death syndrome, nervous breakdowns, hyperactivity, epilepsy, and urinary tract disorders. In the five-year period before 1978, more than half the children born in the neighborhood had a birth defect.
The community around Love Canal was completely evacuated by 1980 and the site was surrounded by a 10-foot fence as cleanup started. The area was removed from the Superfund list in 2004.
More information about the documentary and supplemental materials can be found at www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience.