Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  The Falls here were 182 feet high, but in certain spots the mound of talus had accumulated to a height of 100 feet. Every time a prominent feature collapsed, the cataract was further obscured. Photographs taken at the turn of the century show it in all its glory. By the mid-sixties, at least half of it was hidden by the rubble. If the process were allowed to continue, nature would eventually transform the American Falls into a series of tumbling rapids threading their way through a labyrinth of broken rock. Although that calamity belonged to the distant future, the city fathers and the business community could see the Falls already diminishing before their eyes, and they didn’t like what they saw.

  They were convinced that something must be done. Mankind had already “conquered” the Falls, stolen half the water for power, improved the crest-line of the Horseshoe; now, once again, nature would have to do mankind’s bidding. With the help of the Niagara Falls Gazette, the mayor launched a campaign to involve both state and federal governments in a gigantic project to clear away the debris. Specifically, the city council asked for “remedial action to prevent further erosion and rock slides, which are endangering tourists and sending them to Canada to view the already stabilized Horseshoe Falls.”

  With the approval of the International Joint Commission and with partial funding from Ontario Hydro and the New York State Power Authority, U.S. army engineers carried out, in the summer of 1969, “the most exciting challenge in the history of Niagara Falls.” They drained the American Falls dry. Half a mile above the cataract, in the channel between Goat Island and the American shore, the engineers built a massive cofferdam of earth and rock fill. It wasn’t an easy job. The channel at this point was 600 feet wide, and the current raced through at more than thirty miles an hour. When the dam was about three-quarters finished and the channel narrowed to a width of 140 feet, the pressure became so powerful that a six-foot section of the dam was torn out overnight. To circumvent the current, the engineers brought in huge quarter-ton boulders and dumped them in the gap. Then they added truckloads of earth taken from the great excavations that had accompanied the building of the Robert Moses powerplant.

  By June 10, the curtain of water over the precipice had thinned from a flow of 6,000 cubic feet a second to 500. The roar of the cataract was muffled; bare spots appeared in the channel above the Falls. The next day, all the water was diverted around Goat Island to the Horseshoe. By the following morning, the American channel would be dry.

  What lay behind that silver sheet of water, foam, and spray? Thousands waited up all night to find out. Dawn broke to reveal a withered escarpment in all its nakedness – a brown and jagged cliff, riven with cracks and fissures and scarred by two vast wounds made when the rock falls of 1931 and 1954 were ripped from the precipice. Three hundred thousand tons of debris lay heaped at the base.

  Halfway up that great rock-fall lay the broken body of a young man; at its base, where a few rivulets still trickled, was the corpse of a young woman – both apparently suicides. Gulls in great clouds, shrieking like banshees, swirled and dived over the dead channel, feasting on the fish that lay flopping in small pools beneath the cliff. Coins flung into the seething waters for good luck glittered among the pebbles in the damp sand of the riverbed. The engineers collected twelve quarts of these.

  To the crowds gawking at the unaccustomed spectacle, the sandwich of sedimentary rocks was clearly visible: eighty feet of hard Lockport dolostone surmounting sixty-one feet of softer Rochester shale and below that more layers of other shales and sandstone. The softer shales were already drying out in the hot June sunlight; they would have to be kept wet to prevent their flaking off. A temporary network of pipes drew water from the river above the dam to keep the strata wet until the engineers could install a system of powerful sprays in the rock face itself. On the islands that dotted the dried channel, the poplar trees, too, had to be regularly watered.

  The purpose of this expensive and unwieldy operation was to try to find a solution to the problem of the mountain of talus obscuring the view. How much was there? Could it be moved? How deep did it go before it reached the floor of the river? And what, exactly, was causing the harder dolostone caps to break off in dangerous and spectacular rock slides?

  The army and its geologists had just five months in which to study the area by drilling into the rock. Once the freeze-up began in late November, the cataract would have to be turned on again. Until that time there would be no American Falls, only the great pock-marked cliff, its rim edged by saw-toothed indentations. Some merchants had worried that the experiment would harm the tourist business. On the contrary, it provided a much-needed boost. That summer, local business almost doubled as people poured in to view one of the great wonders of the world tamed by the hand of man. To accommodate these spectators, the army built flights of wooden steps that led down from Prospect Point to link up with an eighty-foot boardwalk, five feet wide, out on the dry riverbed.

  Over the five-month period, the army engineers removed dozens of drill cores taken from borings made in the face of the precipice and in the dry riverbed behind the Falls. Two cages were suspended over the cliff on cables hung from a fifty-foot crane. Workmen in one cage used crowbars to remove any scale or loose rocks that might fall on the drillers. In the second cage, a group of geologists oversaw a meticulous foot-by-foot examination of the rock. Workmen sprayed and sandblasted the ancient riverbed upstream from the cliff, scouring out sand and silt to expose the entire 1,100-foot crest for a distance of 400 feet upriver.

  The drilling crews arrived after them and faced the delicate task of boring three-inch test holes in the riverbed and in the cliff face. The cores – totalling a mile in length – had to be in mint condition when they were withdrawn. Special miniature cameras were then dropped down these test holes to gain a better idea of the rock structure.

  It soon became apparent from the drilling that this friable cliff was a labyrinth of passageways through which the waters of the river constantly seeped, freezing and thawing over the seasons, expanding the cracks and weakening the shales. The seepage extended under Goat Island and, indeed, was visible to the workers, who could see small jets of water shooting from the cliff face.

  In one place, near Prospect Point, the drillers lost both their drill and their rock core in a vast cavity at the forty-foot level. They poured black dye into the hole and waited. Ten minutes and thirty seconds later, the dye emerged in three places thirty feet farther down the cliff. This was added proof that water was percolating through the hard cap of dolostone and into the softer shales.

  The entire area was honeycombed with these vertical clefts. Small wonder that so much of Prospect Point had fallen into the river! A wide fissure, one hundred feet deep, had already partially detached a chunk of what was left of the point from the main mass. The crack in the cliff grew appreciably wider as the work progressed, indicating that this would be the site of the next major rock-fall. But when it would be, nobody could tell. It might come at any moment. It might not come for decades. The engineers were taking no chances. An elaborate system of warning sensors had been installed at the outset to give the workmen time to escape, and no workman was allowed to operate below any of the overhangs. Fortunately, nothing untoward occurred.

  The geologists made another surprising discovery. The great heap of broken rock that was blocking the view of the Falls was actually acting as a buffer, propping up the crumbling cliff. If it were removed, there was no knowing what would happen.

  By fall, nature had begun to blur the edges of the dry riverbed. A tomato plant was discovered growing out of one of the cracks, bearing ten green tomatoes. Carp continued to flop about in the shallow ponds caused by the inexorable seepage. Small poplar seedlings had sprouted in some of the holes.

  All this was swept away on November 25, 1969, when the work ended. At 10:43 that morning, a huge crane on top of the cofferdam gnawed a cavity in the wall of earth and rock. Water began to trickle through the gap and pour over the grey, misshape
n rocks, to plunge into the gorge below. Within a day the American Falls were back in business.

  When the American Falls International Board studying the results of the survey finally delivered its report in February 1972, it was clear that the new conservation movement that had begun in the sixties had affected its decisions. “It is better to allow the process of natural change to continue uninterrupted rather than to give permanence to a particular condition and appearance,” the commissioners wrote.

  The cycle of erosion and recession should not be interrupted, the report said. The mountain of rubble at the base – 280,000 cubic yards – was “a dynamic part of the natural condition of the Falls.” It would be wrong, the commissioners declared, “to make the Falls static and unnatural, like an artificial waterfall in a garden or a park, however grand the scale.”

  The report admitted that the enormous forces of nature might “eventually convert the waterfall into a steeply sloping cascade.” But the board added that it had another aspect to consider: “that the visibility of the immense forces at work on the Falls … is an important part of the dramatic effect, and that any attempt to conceal and interrupt these forces might remove from the scene some element of aesthetic appreciation.”

  Once again, man had tried to change the course of nature. This time nature was to be allowed to take its own course.

  Chapter Thirteen

  1

  Love Canal makes the news

  2

  The mother instinct

  3

  The long crusade of Lois Gibbs

  4

  Taking hostages

  1

  Love Canal makes the news

  Five years after the American Falls International Board agreed not to tamper with nature, Niagara Falls, New York, was plunged into the worst crisis in its history. The earlier prophecies of trouble at the old Hooker Chemical dump in the Love Canal returned to haunt the city. For well over a century, the Falls had enjoyed an international reputation as a glamorous and spectacular resort. By 1978 that reputation was tarnished.

  By shutting off the American Falls almost as easily, it seemed, as turning off a kitchen tap, man had “conquered” Niagara. Decade by decade, more and more water rushing toward the cataract had been taken to produce power. But much of that power had been used to fuel the factories where ordinary carbon was transformed into a satanic mixture that now bubbled up in the basements of families that had bought houses near 97th and 99th streets in the LaSalle residential district of the American city. (There was no 98th Street. That was the site of the Love Canal.)

  In 1976, after one of the heaviest snowfalls in history, the situation had become critical. Several years of abundant snow and rain had already turned the old canal into a sponge. Its contents, often disturbed by digging, were overflowing into the surrounding clay and sandy loam, oozing through the old creekbeds and swales that formed swampy channels extending into the neighbourhood. That year, Patricia Bulka discovered a black, oily sludge oozing out of the drains into her basement. Her mind turned back to ten years earlier, when she and her family had moved into the LaSalle district in the southeast corner of the city. Her son Joey had fallen into a muddy ditch, and when his brother, John, pulled him out, both boys came home covered in what she described as an “oily gook.” She scrubbed them down and threw their clothes away, but the noxious odour from the muck filled their house for more than two weeks.

  At that time, Mrs. Bulka had alerted the Niagara County Health Department. Men arrived, took soil samples, and assured the Bulkas that nothing was wrong. Afterwards, Mrs. Bulka had to endure the indignation of the neighbours, some of whom refused to speak to her for calling the authorities and, by implication, threatening the real-estate values in LaSalle.

  Thereafter, Patricia Bulka held her tongue. If she connected young Joey’s chronic ear ailment or John’s respiratory problems with the incident, she said nothing, even though both problems had begun after the boys went into the ditch. But in the spring and summer of 1976, she found that her neighbours also had basements redolent with the same oily black sludge that was welling up in hers. The Bulkas bought a sump-pump to clear their basement; so did several of their neighbours.

  Nobody now attacked Mrs. Bulka for her concerns. Calls began to flow in to the Niagara Falls Gazette, which sent its educational reporter, David Pollak, out to the LaSalle district to look into the complaints. On October 3, Pollak reported that “Civilization has crept to the doorstep of a former Hooker Chemicals and Plastics Corp. waste deposit site, and the combination contains the elements of an industrial horror story.” The phrasing was melodramatic, but, as it turned out, Pollak had not exaggerated the situation.

  Over the past year the Bulka family had worn out three sump-pumps trying to cope with the seepage through cellar walls that were only one hundred feet from the dump site. Pollak had some of this material analysed by an independent firm. Its analysis made it clear that the chemical content came from Hooker wastes. Love Canal, the Gazette reported, contained at least fifteen organic chemicals including three chlorinated hydrocarbons, which, the analysts declared, constituted an “environmental concern” and were “certainly … a health hazard.” Anyone who breathed the fumes or touched the substances could be affected. The only immediate action taken by the county health department as a result of these revelations was to state that sump-pumping was illegal and to threaten to take action against anyone pumping out a basement into the sewer system.

  Meanwhile, the winter of 1976-77 dragged on, leaving the residents worrying about a problem the authorities refused to acknowledge. The odours abated during the cold weather but returned in the spring. George Amery of the county health department assured everybody that while the fumes might be disagreeable, they posed no immediate health threat to the people living along the old canal. By May 1977 the seepage had been found in at least twenty-one homes. The state ordered corrective action, and in June, the city commissioned a private corporation to study the problem and come up with a solution. Nothing more was heard from officialdom about Love Canal until August, when a dogged reporter, Michael Brown, dug into the human side of the story and sparked the protest movement that, in the end, made Love Canal a byword for pollution in North America.

  Brown, a published author, had been bom and raised in Niagara Falls. Returning after a five-year absence in 1975, he found a new spirit in the community. Local politicians were proudly announcing handsome new industrial and office buildings. The city seemed to be getting back on its feet after a long decline. In February 1977, Brown went to work for the Gazette as a suburban reporter. That summer, he covered a public hearing concerning the existence of a waste disposal firm in the city. A young woman took over the microphone to oppose the company’s presence and suddenly, to Brown’s mystification, burst into tears as she mentioned another dumpsite ravaging her neighbourhood. That was the first Brown had ever heard of Love Canal. He went to the Gazette library and dug out the Pollak articles and some other clippings. Except for Pollak’s investigation, the reports were reassuring. The consensus seemed to be that the situation was well in hand, and there was little hard fact to support the young woman’s emotional outburst.

  He soon changed his mind when he visited the Love Canal area. As he wrote later, “I saw homes where dogs had lost their fur. I saw children with various birth defects. I saw entire families in inexplicably poor health. When I walked on the Love Canal, I gasped for air as my lungs heaved in fits of wheezing. My eyes burned. There was a sour taste in my mouth.”

  On August 10, Brown wrote his first front-page story, the opening shot in a crusade that would win him a Pulitzer Prize. The state ordered the city to investigate, but when the city found that corrective action would cost $400,000, it rejected it as too expensive. That was a short-sighted decision; within a year the bill for temporary remedies would soar to $2 million. (The total cost of cleanup was later put at $500 million.)

  Assured that the story would be pursued, Brown re
turned to his suburban beat. But the newspaper, under heavy pressure from city officials and industrial leaders, played the story down. “There seemed to be an unwritten law that a reporter did not attack or otherwise fluster the Hooker executives,” Brown later wrote. Nothing more appeared in the press until February 1978, after Brown was given the city hall beat. On February 2, in his Cityscape column, he charged, “Government officials are in the throes of a full-fledged environmental crisis.” The city was supposed to take action the previous summer, he wrote, but nothing had been done.

  By this time the filled-in land over the canal between 97th and 99th streets was a quagmire of greasy mud and potholes. When a city truck tried to cross the field to dump clay into a hole, it sank to its axles. In May, after David Pollak was made city editor, the Gazette stepped up its coverage. This wasn’t easy because the authorities kept a tight lid on information. The Environmental Protection Agency had at last been persuaded to conduct tests in the basements of the houses on the canal to see if chemicals were present in the air. It took Brown three months to get at the results, which had not been published. A stray memo to a local senator revealed that benzene had been detected on the streets adjoining the canal. This widely used solvent is a carcinogen known to cause headaches, fatigue, weight loss, dizziness, and, eventually, nosebleeds in addition to damage to the bone marrow. The toxic vapours, the EPA survey reported, “suggest a serious threat to health and welfare.”

  Brown kept up the exposés. He revealed that both federal and state officials were considering declaring Love Canal a disaster area and evacuating some residents. He quoted a state biologist as saying that if he owned a home near the canal and could afford to move, he would. That same month – May 1978 – the state announced at last that it would conduct a health survey based on blood samples taken at the southerly end of the canal area. The results were alarming. The women living in the area had suffered a high rate of miscarriage and given birth to an extraordinary number of children with birth defects. In one age group, 35.3 percent had records of spontaneous abortion – far in excess of the national average. And the people who had lived for the longest period near Love Canal had suffered the highest rates.