Prisoners of place
Muto, Frederick T.
LIVING ALONG THE LOVE CANAL Prisoners of place FREDERICK T. MUTO THE LOVE canal. A chasm divides the words and what they signify, creating a facile and arid irony. Many families are marooned in...
...They think it pathological that the people in the neighborhood immediately surrounding the Canal could have clung so stubbornly, and for so long, to their worthless homes...
...A measure of denial is a salutary, perhaps essential, grease for the wheels of daily life...
...I wondered how intelligent people could ask such silly questions...
...psychic, miles from the Love Canal...
...another friend asked...
...A friend who worked at one of the plants regularly had to don an oxygen mask to protect himself from an escaping gas or vapor...
...Most are convinced that anyone who lives there will in some way be physically affected by the chemicals...
...It's not knowing what may develop in the future...
...WHY SUCH radically differing perceptions between natives and outsiders...
...The company also admitted it has discovered "an area of contaminated soil" on the grounds of a local Water Treatment Plant...
...When I was in high school, occasional chlorine leaks at one of the local plants would temporarily force the cordoning off of several square city blocks...
...Now I'm no longer so confident...
...My mind resists considering the alternatives...
...I shift to something I think is pivotal...
...It's what I can't see that frightens me...
...I assured him my family was fine...
...The Niagara Falls Gazette first published articles in the spring of 1978 describing the grisly health problems caused by chemicals dumped many years before in the Canal...
...I was reassured to find a similar disarming complacency among my friends in Niagara Falls when I visited there or spoke with them on the telephone...
...On a conscious level, I thought I was too removed, in space and in time, to be personally threatened by any of the revelations...
...I fervently hope my family, my friends and most Niagarans are physically far enough away from the Canal to escape the gruesome limits it has imposed on the lives of some residents...
...For twenty-two years I lived less than five miles from the ditch into which Hooker Chemical & Plastics Corp...
...That's the torment and tragedy of the Love Canal...
...In a very real sense they are captives, as we all are in some way, of the place in which they were born...
...Nor did I fear for my family...
...I gave the question its only possible answer No, I certainly do not...
...They can't remain where they are, but can't afford to leave...
...My family is still in Niagara Falls, and I remain confused about the Love Canal...
...I'm not yet willing to believe she would be alive today had there been no chemical plants in Niagara Falls...
...Does the choice seem simple...
...But as time passed, these and kindred questions nurtured the seedling doubts I had...
...But I can't understand the blanket reluctance of these institutions to address the immediate threat to the residents...
...Many families are marooned in their chemical wasteland, victims of a sadly familiar legal, bureaucratic, and political stalemate...
...Of course not, I retorted, offended by her alarmism...
...Parents must choose between jettisoning their family's financial security and imperiling their children's health...
...Although chemical traces have been found in the local water supply, city officials insist the water is safe...
...We might all think we can make the correct one, but the answer could only be simple to those who aren't constrained by limited resources and who needn't worry about their family's economic survival...
...People outside the city see and assess the Canal's danger in different ways from those within it...
...But the doubts are haunting and persistent...
...We steel ourselves readily against external threats...
...We all want to like the places we live in...
...As in most parts of the world, self and familial identity become wedded over the years to a sense of place, to the particulars and intangibles of a given area...
...A scant few seriously talk of moving because of earthquakes...
...People everywhere develop devices to diminish the specter of a danger they are compelled by circumstance to live with and confront daily...
...Niagarans perceive an invisible, but very real, geographic boundary around the contaminated area...
...I try to think of parallels in their own lives and seize upon the earthquakes endemic to my adopted state...
...For most of them, their homes represent a lifetime of labor...
...This not only makes them want to stay but also, quite naturally, causes them to cast their home in the most favorable light possible...
...If the plants were to wither and die, the city might respond in kind...
...All of this fails to explain why the Canal residents, those perched directly on top of the cauldron of caustic chemicals, have stayed as long as they have in the contaminated area...
...I've composed a litany of likely reasons, which I patiently recite to each new inquisitor...
...Although our mobile times and culture belittle the notion, attachment to a community still exercises a powerful spell over most people...
...As national attention focused on the Canal, I read of the legal skirmishes and reports of chromosome damage and other maladies with a confused blend of empathy, distance, and foreboding...
...Nevertheless, my ingrained notion that few residents will be directly affected by the Canal isn't shed easily...
...Most residents simply don't, in their own eyes, live near enough to any of the dumpsites (there are at least three others within the city) to be threatened by them...
...Another friend worked one college summer replacing pipe that was systematically eaten away by the chemicals it carried...
...The long-term effects of chemical wastes are unknown and unforeseeable, and cloud the future of all Niagarans...
...They face a Hobson's choice...
...Perhaps they already do...
...My friends in Southern California can't understand why there hasn't been a great diaspora from Niagara Falls—to nearly any place else...
...Although a visceral feeling tells me they will be fine, the accumulated body of disclosures worries me...
...Several hometown acquaintances contorted their faces i 1 mock agony when I first told them I had moved to California...
...Where we live helps give form to our human finitude, but we must make choices within the limits of that form...
...My California friends aren't impressed...
...The chemicals didn't begin percolating to the surface until after I had moved to another state...
...Whether they are right or not, this is hardly the stuff of restful sleep and a sanguine future...
...The continuing revelations, which seem to explode in clusters, must cause even the most thickskinned of residents some concern...
...As one Canal mother said of the shadows in her son's uncertain future: "I can see Michael have a convulsion...
...Commonweal: 686...
...Not one appeared to consider whether it might have a moral responsibility extending beyond its potential legal liability...
...For all those whose capacity to choose is constricted, for whatever reasons, psychological distance is a necessary balm...
...Much of the harm can't be seen or won't appear for years, perhaps for a generation...
...Rather than acting to defuse the threat, each institution instinctively scurried for refuge under the first available legal rock...
...I can see him turn yellow from a liver disorder...
...The Canal chains shackled the residents gradually, but steadily, like an unfurling fog...
...Two types of distance make extraordinary dangers livable: actual physical distance and, where that is impossible, psychological distance...
...But my family and many friends have stayed in Niagara Falls...
...The bureaucratic and legal battles chug along with the Canal People, prisoners of place, sinking in the mire of political inertia...
...Chemical industries form the backbone of the local economy, and are the primary source of jobs...
...Trumpeting the Canal crisis is, for many residents, tantamount to financial suicide...
...In a $124 million lawsuit brought by the federal government, Hooker admitted the chemical wastes may eventually leach towards the Niagara River...
...I remind myself mat cancer predates the modern chemical industry...
...I'll work with hundreds of bright, educated people in a skyscraper built on landfill, a particularly vulnerable place to be during a quake...
...it's from the internal ones we flee...
...I clumsily continue explaining the attitude of Niagarans to my friends in California with a primitive economic analysis...
...Fear was absent from their voices...
...Maybe I've begun to fear that dioxin or one of its isomers will someday threaten my family and friends...
...My friends aren't persuaded...
...More than once I Commonweal: 684 listened, hardly trusting my ears, as a friend criticized the local newspaper and the Love Canal Homeowners' Association for the mess they had created by publicizing the residents' plight...
...Niagarans are anchored by personal economics and bonded by familial ties to their city...
...Yet I plan to move to San Francisco soon, knowing that many seismologists predict a major earthquake will devastate that area within the next ten years...
...Voicing the sentiment of a native, I glibly told him that every one of my relatives lived at least four miles from the Canal, a considerable distance in a city the size of Niagara Falls...
...THERE ARE other, less concrete reasons families haven't withdrawn en masse from Niagara Falls...
...I write this three thousand physical, although far fewer FREDERICK T. MUTO is a lawyer living in San Diego, California...
...A long, still unsatisfied, struggle to escape their chemical'cage began...
...Will you be tested for chromosome damage if you and your wife-decide to have children...
...As a lawyer, I understand the defenses to legal responsibility raised by Hooker, the Niagara County Attorney, New York State, and the federal government...
...they asked...
...Memories from my childhood years in Niagara Falls illustrate the need to acclimate...
...At the time, the question amused me...
...Residents organized and discovered a pattern of miscarriages, birth defects, and respiratory ailments in their neighborhoods...
...A year and a half ago, as Love Canal courted notoriety, a friend earnestly asked me whether my family was all right...
...Only novel or unfamiliar threats trigger great change...
...Until recently, I reflexively seconded their instincts...
...Do 5 December 1980: 685 you want to die in an earthquake...
...Nearly all of the people could live elsewhere, but choose not to...
...Niagarans have lived in the midst of chemical plants all their lives...
...His crew's task was akin to the continual painting of the Golden Gate Bridge: once the last pipe was replaced, they began again at pipe one...
...At the time I thought of them, if at all, as part of the given order of urban industrial life...
...A belief, probably unexamined, fed the certitude: the danger is restricted to the few blocks immediately surrounding the Canal...
...What varies is their relative freedom—economic, personal or otherwise—to separate themselves from the source of that danger...
...People refuse to be torn from the homes of their parents...
...Three years ago my mother died of cancer at a very young age...
...Many have children who are particularly susceptible to the health hazards generated by the Canal...
...In Niagara Falls, people have acclimated in a similar way to the dangers chemical plants present...
...The foreboding I felt about the^Canal was, I now think, rooted in the distance I had traveled from Niagara Falls...
...I think the residents have the same problem...
...In retrospect, such leaks frighten and amaze me...
...The instinct of economic selfpreservation prevents people from destroying their dwn livelihood...
...In California people don't brood endlessly in anticipation of the next tremor...
...Instead I consistently sensed a certitude that the tragedy was happening to someone else, in a faraway place...
...Constant exposure to their dangers over the years has given the residents a partial immunity—from an enervating fear of chemicals, if not from their effects...
...poured tons of toxic chemicals...
...Future revelations may swell their numbers...
Vol. 107 • December 1980 • No. 22
