THE BOMB THAT FELL ON NIAGARA
As published in ARTVOICE MAGAZINE - Buffalo, New York, USA ARTICLE ONEARTVOICE Series Listing/Date/Volume/Number
Article One *Cover Story The Legacy of the Manhattan Project in Niagara Falls May 24-May 30, 2001 V12N21
Article Two The Human Radiation Experiments-From the Laboratory to the Workplace to Your Own Home June 2-June 13, 2001 V12N23
Article Three Upping the Stakes in Redeveloping Niagara Falls June 21-June27, 2001 V12N25
Article Four Why is Niagara Falls Burning? July 12-July 18, 2001 V12N28
Article Five And I'm Never Going Back to My Old School August 16-August 22, 2001 V12N33
Article Six *Cover Story But Ricky, Why Not? November 8-November 14, 2001 V12N45
Article Seven-Brokaw's Desk Anthrax--If its been buried, its been buried in Niagara County, USA November 29-December 5, 2002 V12N48
The Legacy of the Manhattan Project in Niagara Falls
by Geoff Kelly and Louis Ricciuti
"A Niagara of white light flooded the bunker through an open back door. A few tense seconds later came a resounding, teeth-rattling roar".
J. R. Oppenheimer, 5:30 a.m., July 16, 1945, Alamogordo, New Mexico, describing the worlds first atomic explosion.
"Doctors Conant and Bush and myself were struck by an even stronger feeling that the faith of those who had been responsible for the initiation and the carrying on of this Herculean project had been justified. I personally thought of Blondin crossing Niagara Falls on his tight rope, only to me this tight rope had lasted for almost three years".
General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, recounting the same blast.
That the two men quoted above should make reference to Niagara Falls on the morning of the worlds first atomic explosion may shed some light on the important role this regions industry played in the creation of the atomic bomb. The two men who directed the Manhattan Project, whose names are most inextricably linked with the dawn of the atomic age, both evoked Niagara Falls in metaphors describing the experience. Why? Perhaps because, in many respects, Niagara Falls was the birthplace of the bomb.
When the United States turned in earnest to developing the atomic bomb in 1942, the government did not possess the facilities to fast-track the project. So the Army Corps of Engineers enlisted private industries that did possess those facilities and that were, in some cases, already engaged in the kind of work the Manhattan Project would require. With its abundant supply of energy and water, its close concentration of companies with experience in creating and refining exotic chemicals, metals and ceramics, no region was better equipped to abet the effort than Niagara Falls. Fueled by cheap, plentiful electricity, the region had become the nations center of chemical, metal alloy and ceramics manufacturing.
Many companies in Niagara Falls already had experience working with uranium. Some of the processes and materials that would be required to develop the atomic bomb were invented here. The uranium and graphite of physicist Enrico Fermi's graphite-pile reactor under the bleachers at Stagg Field at the University of Chicago (site of the first manmade sustained nuclear reaction and a crucial first step in the development of the bomb) were almost certainly fabricated in the furnaces of Niagara Falls.
By the end of World War II the Manhattan Project had employed 200,000 people nationwide and cost $2.2 billion. Gigantic research and production installations were eventually developed at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Hanford, Washington and Los Alamos, New Mexico. But in the beginning, and in fact throughout the Manhattan Project and continuing through the Cold War, commercial industries in Niagara Falls, Tonawanda, Buffalo, Lackawanna, Lockport and elsewhere in the country would provide many of the materials that the larger facilities required to produce atomic, and later, thermonuclear weapons. This regions industries were among the first to step into the atomic era.
The Captains of the Industry
Just a few of the many local companies that handled radioactive materials for the Manhattan Projector the Manhattan Engineering District (MED) as it is more properly called--and subsequently for the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Energy:
The Linde Air Products division of Union Carbide in Tonawanda converted lethal uranium oxides mined in the western United States, Canada and Africa into uranium tetrafluoride, also called green salt. The green salt was turned into uranium metal ingots and billets in the furnaces of ElectroMet (another division of Union Carbide), which was on the cutting edge of the industry and producing new metals and materials virtually every day.
ElectroMet also reprocessed uranium filings from Simonds Saw & Steel in Lockport, which cut and rolled the uranium into fuel rods for reactors. ElectroMet also produced thorium. U.S. Vanadium in Niagara Falls, another Union Carbide division, also processed uranium ore.
The cooperative program involving Union Carbides numerous metallurgical divisions and the Manhattan Engineering District was code-named The Babbitt 65 Project. There were lots of code names used during the Manhattan Project for substances, plant sites, and processes. Secretive measures were considered necessary, given that the country was at war and our enemies were also experimenting with atomic energy. But code names also served to hide the dangerous nature of the work from the men who performed it and the communities in which they lived.
Hooker Chemical brewed many of the chemicals these processes required, and also facilitated recycling and disposal of uranium waste products. Titanium Alloys Manufacturing (later called TAM Ceramics and today called Ferro Electronics) recycled uranium and thorium metals, and in following years produced zirconium, which was used in military and industrial reactors, for the Manhattan Project, for the Atomic Energy Commission and for commercial use. Ferro Electronics, which is next door to Niagara University, currently manufactures electronic instruments using radioactive zirconium sand of uranium content sufficient to be refined into bomb-grade material.
Bethlehem Steel in Lackawanna, like nearly every facility in the country that had a blast furnace, experimented with methods of processing uranium and possibly thorium metals.
At What Price?
Before World War II Niagara Falls and surrounding municipalities already were coping with hazardous wastes generated by the burgeoning chemical and metallurgical industries that had seen the city grow from a village of 3,000 to a city of 75,000 in 40 years. Hooker Chemical and several other companies, for example, probably had been dumping in Love Canal since at least the mid 1930s.
Those industries worked double-time for the war effort, including the Manhattan Project, leading to astronomic increases in the amount of hazardous waste produced. Waste materials generated in the creation and processing of uranium--both radioactive and toxic chemical waste--often were disposed of haphazardly, expedience taking precedence over caution. Industrial waste was left in the open, thrown into pits and lagoons, discharged directly into waterways. Uranium and other radioactive sludges were dumped on the ground at the sites known as Ashland 1 and Ashland 2, two mounds, still visible, that tower over both sides of the I-290 just before the South Grand Island Bridge.
Some of the radioactive waste was eventually moved to storage facilities elsewhere in the country, or consolidated at the Niagara Falls Storage Site in Lewiston on the former Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (LOOW), but much remains. The secrecy that continues to surround the project prevents an accurate public accounting of waste materials, as does the often expedient manner of its disposal. Though the MED and its successors kept careful track of the amount of waste produced in each stage of uranium processing, even the companies that created the waste probably could not say for certain where it all went. The pollutants and contaminants emanating from these facilities did not respect property lines, fence lines or human lives.
During the war hundreds of local workers were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation levels that even then the Projects managers understood were unsafe. Studies of the effects of radioactivity were later conducted in the larger government facilities, and appropriate (if not entirely satisfactory) safety precautions instituted, but in commercial industries like those in and surrounding Niagara Falls such studies were never done, and safety measures for workers were cursory or nonexistent. This, despite ample evidence available before the war suggesting that radioactivity could kill.
Most scientists understood that radiation could be deadly before the Manhattan Project began, but the scientists working on the MED recommended acceptable levels of exposure for factory workers--and therefore perhaps surrounding neighborhoods--that some scientists today would consider virtual death sentences. Those dose levels proved to be arbitrary and malleable anyway--if production demands spiked one week then the acceptable dosage levels might rise that week as well.
Postwar letters between executives at ElectroMet and the Atomic Energy Commission (recently posted to various websites) suggest that employees were falsely assured regarding the hazardous nature of the materials they were handling. In these letters the correspondents weigh the value of studying the effects of exposure on workers, and it appears that some monitoring of radiation levels did take place. Many plants had on-site medical facilities that would take urine and blood samples from workers. But if the information gathered at places like Linde and ElectroMet--apparently without informed consent of the workers there--was ever collated and studied, the results of that study were never made public.
As a result, workers employed by plants working with hazardous materials were exposed to extremely dangerous levels of radiation without knowing it was happening--in some cases thousands of times the dose the Manhattan Project scientists had decided was acceptable. Workers often brought those risks home in the form of radiation on their clothes and hands.
There may have been negative economic repercussions as well, blows to the economic viability of the region that may outweigh and outlast--at least from the perspective of the average citizen--the immense profits made by private corporations. In 1962 Union Carbide closed down about half its operations in and around Niagara Falls. Much of the work that Union Carbides divisions had performed for the federal government had been transferred to government-owned facilities by that point, and more would soon follow. In some cases Union Carbide managed those facilities for the government, a much more financially rewarding situation than owning its own plants.
So Union Carbide was left with superfluous industrial real estate, much of which had been badly contaminated--both the buildings and the grounds. It seems reasonable that Union Carbide would have responded to the situation the same way companies like LTV Steel responded to its heavily contaminated, superfluous plants in Lackawanna and South Buffalo. It was cheaper to close down operations and leave than to face the price of remediation and cleanup.
What They Left Behind
In a letter dated March 29, 1944, a Linde superintendent, A. R. Holmes, wrote to the area Army Engineer, Captain Emery L. Van Horn, about disposing of liquid caustic wastes contaminated by radiation.
He wrote that the options were to discharge the material into a storm sewer, which empties into Two Mile Creek, which runs past a public park and eventually into the Niagara River; or to discharge the material into a well on Linde's Tonawanda factory property, which was already contaminated by other materials. The Linde official wrote, Plan 1 is objectionable because of probable future complications in the event of claims of contamination against us. Plan 2 is favored because our law department advises that it is considered impossible to determine the course of subterranean streams and, therefore, the responsibility for contamination could not be fixed.
The MED recommended the second option, and over the next two years Linde pumped nearly 50 million gallons of radioactive effluent into shallow wells on its property. (That's equivalent to nearly 13 seconds of full flow over the American Falls.) The wells would regularly become congested with silt and overflow onto the ground, but, at MED's insistence, Linde continued to pump the effluent into the ground. The Army Corps of Engineers continues to remediate the Linde site in Tonawanda, but that effluent is long gone--into the ground, into the aquifer, into the Niagara River (from which comes much of the areas drinking water) and over the Falls. However, it is not too late to determine where exactly that caustic, radioactive waste went, or what ill effects it may have caused the environment and the health of the population. The radioactive contaminants are heavy metals with long half-lives that may still exist along whatever pathway they were carried. Wherever they are, they are still radioactive.
In any case, Linde's actions seem illustrative of the prevailing attitude toward waste disposal during that era and suggests that similar, or worse, episodes may have occurred elsewhere in the region.
There are more documented incidents to substantiate that notion. At the LOOW 20,489 tons of radioactive waste were stored. Eight thousand tons were dumped on the ground, according to declassified government documents. The rest was left in the open or stored in concrete silos, where it remained for decades.
After the war, five thousand drums of waste from places like ElectroMet and Linde and Simonds Saw sat in barrels along railroad tracks and adjacent to public roads on the LOOW, waiting to be disposed of properly. While the barrels waited they were exposed to the elements, and 1,500 barrels deteriorated to such a degree that the materials had to be transferred to new barrels before they could be moved.
Not all of the radioactive waste material in and around Niagara Falls dates back to the 1940s and 1950s. According to Department of Energy documents, between 1965 and 1972 Union Carbide companies located on 47th and Royal Avenue in Niagara Falls, just off Niagara Falls Boulevard, produced 505 tons of waste carrying 9,212 pounds of uranium oxide and 1,293 pounds of thorium oxide. The waste was placed in 55-gallon drums and buried in a ditch 20 feet deep with four to five feet of soil on top. The ditch is somewhere in that complex of plants on property that may or may not still belong to Union Carbide.
Presumably, like the barrels that sat deteriorating and perhaps leaking along the railroad tracks on the LOOW site, those barrels buried on Union Carbides property will not last forever--if they are still there. Its been 29 years, and nobody seems to know exactly where they were buried, and there is no account of them ever having been removed. Within 1,000 feet of where those barrels are buried is a baseball diamond that is used every summer.
There may be as many as 35 sites in the Buffalo Niagara region on which radioactive materials were manufactured, recycled, stored, handled or dumped. Many may prove to be harmless, but all demand investigation. Only a few--Linde, Simonds Saw & Steel; B&L Steel; Ashland 1 and 2 dump sites; the LOOW; and the Niagara Falls Storage Site--are slated for scrutiny by the Army Corps of Engineers. Only the Linde site is in the process of being remediated.
LOOW and the Niagara Falls Storage Site
Most mysterious and perhaps most contaminated is the former LOOW site, which lies in the townships of Lewiston and Porter just north of the Tuscarora Indian Reservation. Originally it occupied approximately 7,500 acres, which were purchased by the US Army in 1942. Some of the farmers who owned the property sold voluntarily; those who didn't sell were served a 30-day eviction notice. The Army built a TNT manufacturing plant on part of the site, but that plant ceased operations after less than a year. Gradually the property was transferred to other government agencies or sold piecemeal to private citizens, businesses and municipalities.
Currently 800 acres north of Balmer Road are owned by the Department of Defense. South of Balmer are 1500-plus acres dedicated to hazardous chemical and municipal wastes, including two commercial dump sites and the Niagara Falls Storage Site, a hazardous waste containment facility currently monitored by the Army Corps of Engineers. One of the commercial dumps, Chemical Waste Management, is one of the largest hazardous waste facilities still operating in the country. Twenty-five hundred acres now belong to homeowners and over 200 acres were sold to the Lewiston-Porter School District.
Even in 1942 it was clear that the site was poorly suited to the Army's original purpose. Much of the parcel is wet, practically swamp, with standing water everywhere. To build its TNT factory the Army had to drain the land with a network of sewers and ditches, some of which were also used for discharging waste into the Niagara River. The site was even less well suited to its subsequent uses: a dumping ground for radioactive and aggressive biological wastes, toxic chemicals, and nobody knows what else.
From 1944 to 1947, the MED used the LOOW to store uranium ore processing residues from Linde and ElectroMet, as well as a number of other facilities. By 1948 the MED had ended and 600 acres was transferred to the Atomic Energy Commission, which continued to use the site to store uranium ore processing residues. In the late 1940s and 1950s, additional residues and other radioactive waste were transported to the site from eastern and mid-western states.
By 1975 the Niagara Falls Storage Site had been reduced to 191 acres, the size it remains today. The property includes a three-story building with three adjacent silos, an office building, a small storage shed, and a storage building. In the course of several partial remediations of the LOOW, various waste materials have been consolidated on the Niagara Falls Storage Site. In 1988, radioactive material was drained from the silos into a containment facility. The most highly radioactive materials in the structure are residues which resulted from the processing of high-grade African uranium pitchblende ores. The average concentrations of radium-226 and thorium-230 in the residues are 520,000 Pico curies per gram and 54,000 Pico curies per gram, respectively.
That is a massive amount of radiation contained in a relatively small area. This waste, 4,000 cubic yards worth, represents the greatest concentration of radium-226 in the world. It is 2,500 yards from the Lewiston-Porter school system, which serves 2,500 students.
The Army Corps of Engineers says that the swampiness that characterizes the rest of the former LOOW does not exist at the Niagara Fall Storage Site. The Corps monitors the integrity of the clay cap, checking it for cracks and standing water, and takes radioactivity readings at the boundaries of the site, which they say fall well below permissible standards (1.09 Pico curies per gram, as opposed to the maximum allowable 20 Pico curies per gram). The Corps is beginning an investigation into the long-term feasibility of the containment facility.
Also stored somewhere on-site are the remains of animals used in radiation experiments at the University of Rochester. Many of the animals were injected with plutonium, which even in the smallest quantities can be lethal. The animal carcasses were apparently tossed in wooden crates and buried in the ground.
The same laboratory at the University of Rochester also performed radiation experiments on unsuspecting humans. Though there is no solid evidence to prove the assertion, it has been suggested that if animal remains from the Rochester laboratory were buried on the former LOOW site then human remains may have been buried there as well. There are references to a Rochester burial site and to medical wastes in Department of Energy records pertaining to the LOOW.
Some suggest even more frightening possibilities. The Corps of Engineers reports finding empty canisters labeled phosgene, a type of nerve gas produced during World War II using compounds produced by Hooker Chemical. It is not certain whether substances such as phosgene were stored or produced at the former LOOW, or if the empty containers are simply garbage unrelated to past on-site activities. However, a 1981 New York State Assembly report on the LOOW found traces of a chemical that may indicate the presence of VX nerve gas. Some wonder if the existence of a biological containment facility indicates that biological weapons might have been dumped or developed on-site as well.
Remediation Efforts: 50 Years Later, Back to the Corps
No comprehensive health studies have ever been conducted anywhere in the region to determine the possible effects of radioactive waste on the well-being of residents. The closest was an animal survey performed by a Dr. Marvin Resnikoff. Dr. Resnikoff reported that 15 of 20 deer captured near dump sites manifested deformities. Some of the deer contained high levels of radium and cesium in their livers.
Information like that, coupled with anecdotal evidence that suggests high rates of heart disease, genetic disorders, respiratory ailments, lupus, childhood leukemia and other cancers, has frightened Niagara County residents.
Intermittent remediations of the LOOW site typically have been accompanied by new revelations of what might be buried there. Twenty years ago the Department of Energy identified the possibility of dangerous TNT residue on the former LOOW, which has just recently been cleaned up. But virtually no mention was made of the possibility of additional radioactive wastes at the time. Radioactive materials have generally been described as existing at safe levels and as being well contained. But readings taken in 1982 indicated unacceptably high levels of radon gas escaping from the silos on the site. Yet the silos were not emptied until 1988.
In 1998 the Department of Energy turned responsibility for many of these former MED sites to the Army Corps of Engineers--the outfit which had overseen much of the dumping in and around Niagara Falls, which had driven the Manhattan Project to a successful conclusion at a great environmental and health risk to the community.
Its little wonder that concerned residents throughout Buffalo Niagara are suspicious of what the Army Corps of Engineers tells them about chemical and radioactive wastes buried in the region. They've been misled before.
As if to confirm the doubts of local activists, the Corps submitted a remediation plan for the Linde site in Tonawanda which federal and state officials derided as the worst they'd ever seen. It called for post-remediation levels of radioactivity far exceeding any plan ever proposed in the US. The New York State Department of Health suggested that the Corps might have to apply for a waste-handling license for the Linde site--after the cleanup.
This is the first in a series of articles examining the effects of toxic chemical and radioactive wastes in Erie and Niagara Counties. The authors invite anyone who would like to learn more or offer information to contact:
Lou Ricciuti at NiagaraNet@aol.com or Geoff Kelly at ghkelly@hotmail.com
Next: The Human Radiation Experiments
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ARTICLE TWO
The Human Radiation Experiments
From the laboratory to the workplace to your own backyard
By Geoff Kelly and Louis Ricciuti
On March 25, 1945about three years after Buffalo Niagara's industries began producing uranium for the worlds first atomic bomb--at 6:30 a.m., Ebb Cade, his two brothers and a co-worker pulled away from the guard shack at the head of the road that led to the federal governments new, top secret Oak Ridge, Tennessee nuclear facility. All four men worked for a North Carolina construction company that had been contracted to build a plant where uranium was created and enriched.
Ten minutes later the driver tried to pull around a government truck stalled in his lane, and ran head-on into a dump truck speeding the other way.
The four men in the car were taken to the Oak Ridge Army Hospital, built two years earlier, where Ebb Cade was told his kneecap, right forearm and left femur were broken. Cade was a somewhat elderly black man, according to doctors records, who suffered from cataracts in both eyes, tooth decay and gum disease.
No one knows which, if any, of those characteristics made the doctors at Oak Ridge choose Cade; maybe it was simply a matter of timing. The night before the accident doctors in the Medical Section of the Manhattan Engineer District (MED, more commonly called the Manhattan Project) had met in Los Alamos, New Mexico and decided to expand the scope of their investigations into radiation and its effect on human health. Previously their information had been limited to that gathered from lab animals and from workers in the numerous labs and factories contributing to the development of the atomic bomb.
On April 10 that changed, when doctors injected 4.7 micrograms of plutonium into Cades left arm. He was code named HP-12 (HP stood for human product). The doctors wanted to see how the lethal substance would circulate in the human body, how it would deposit itself in the liver and the bones. Five days after the injection Cades bones--broken three weeks earlier--were set, but not before bone samples were taken from his body. Doctors also pulled 15 of his teeth. The teeth and the bone sample were hot with radioactivity.
Cade was the first, but many more patients would be subjected to injections of a variety of radioactive isotopes at institutions around the country. In The Plutonium Files, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eileen Welsome describes the human radiation experiments conducted by the MED and later the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The subjects were sometimes told the injections were a special new therapy, according to Welsome; sometimes they were offered no explanation at all. The injections were sometimes called the U medication and represented as a kind of cure.
The scientists who designed the human radiation experiments knew already, perhaps better than anyone else, the dangers of radiation exposure. They knew that the first scientists to play with radioactivesubstances had suffered terrible health effects. They knew that X-ray machine operators (and subjects) often manifested gruesome radiation burns and illnesses. They had already begun to chronicle the effects of exposure to factory workers handling radium, uranium and plutonium.
The dangers of internal exposure were no mystery either. The whole country remembered the story of the radium girls, a group of New Jersey factory workers in the 1920s who painted watch hands and dials with glow-in-the-dark paint that contained a tiny amount of radium. The radium girls would often lick their brushes as they worked to keep the point fine. Over time they ingested lethal quantities of radium. Their gums would bleed, their jaws would rot, their bones would become brittle and break, their organs would hemorrhage. They developed cancers and anemia. They died.
But apparently knowing the likely outcomes of radiation exposure--heart disease, cancer, kidney damage, a host of other ailments--was not enough for MED scientists. They wanted to know how it did what it did. Why? For the sake of science, certainly. Some documents suggest they were concerned about lawsuits that might be filed down the road by nuclear workers and so wanted as much information as they could gather to prepare for that eventuality.
Rochester's Manhattan Annex
In September 1945 a program of plutonium injections began at a secret research facility at the University of Rochester called the Manhattan Annex. The Annex, with Army guards posted at it entrances, was across the street from the medical school and connected to it by a tunnel. Colonel Stafford Warren, the head of the Manhattan Projects Medical Section, Experimental Division, had been a professor of radiology at the University of Rochester before being tapped for the Manhattan Project and catapulted to the rank of colonel. So it was perhaps natural that he should choose Rochester as a site for human radiation experiments.
A variety of ailments brought the subjects into the hospital, from hemophilia to heart attack to cancer. The experimenters tended to choose patients who might stay in the hospital for a while, or who returned there frequently, so that the effects of the plutonium injections could be tracked. Some patients lived for decades after being injected, and others died within days. Autopsies were performed on all the patients. Their bones and organs were harvested and studied so scientists could determine the rate at which plutonium deposited itself in the human body.
In some cases it is easy to suppose that the plutonium directly contributed to their deaths: you come to the hospital with a chronic but not life-threatening illness, you are injected with plutonium and six days later you die. In other cases it is difficult to prove what effect the plutonium might have had. A subject who dies ten years later of heart disease? Well, radiation causes heart disease, but so does smoking, and maybe the subject was predisposed to heart disease before the plutonium began wreaking havoc on his body.
In December 1946, over a year after the war had ended and just five months after the last plutonium injection was administered in Rochester (though not the last in the country), 23 Nazi scientists were tried at Nuremberg for murder and torture performed in the name of medical science. The American Medical Association published a three-part code of ethics governing human experimentation--informed consent, previous animal experimentation and appropriate medical supervision-and an editorial suggesting that in the US military it was well established that human beings, even under military conditions, are not ordered to submit to procedures that violate the sanctity of their own persons.
Eleven patients were injected with plutonium at Rochester's Manhattan Annex, all without giving informed consent, the last in July 1946. Numerous others were injected with radioactive isotopes of other substances, again without informed consent. Boys at the Walter E.Fernald State School in Waltham, Mass. were fed oatmeal laced with radioactive iron and calcium--the boys were all members of the Science Club. Soldiers watched atomic weapons tests with sunglasses as their only protection, and then were studied by scientists who wished to ascertain the effects of radioactive fallout from the explosions. And, as we will see, nuclear workers in plants around the country were exposed to dangerous levels of radioactive material and the effects of that exposure studied.
Experiments Outside the Laboratory
The boys at the Fernald State School were fed radioactive calcium, and subjects at the Rochester laboratories were injected with it. Coincidentally, the ElectroMet division of Union Carbide in Niagara Falls produced calcium metal for the government laboratories in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the headquarters of the Manhattan Project. Perhaps it is not coincidence--the experiments conducted by the Manhattan Projects Medical Section were generally designed to understand the dangers posed to workers by the substances with which they worked. So perhaps it was natural that the doctors in Rochester would want to test a substance manufactured 70 miles away in Niagara Falls.
But ElectroMet's principle contribution to the Manhattan Project, and later to the AEC, was uranium refining. MED activity at ElectroMet all took place in one wood and brick building. That building is no longer on the site, demolished in 1957, but if it was like MED buildings at other companies it would have been tucked away in a corner and the windows would have been blacked out. The compounds would have been well guarded by armed soldiers.
The men who worked there would have been a tight clique, proud to be working on a project the secrecy of which was evidence of its importance. During wartime and after, in Cold War days, workers were happy to take on extra shifts at higher pay. They were told not to speak about their work, and for the most part they didn't. A widow whose husband worked at one local MED facility said he never spoke about what went on at the plant, and would sometimes be sent away for a few weeks and wouldn't tell her where.
The pay was considered good, but the price was high. At ElectroMet workers were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation and inhalation of potentially lethal uranium dust. Memos regarding readings taken at ElectroMet characterized exposure to uranium dust as severe, and radiation exposure as moderately severe. ElectroMet workers breathed up to 17 times the amount of uranium dust that MED doctors considered tolerance level.
Considering that MED's tolerance levels were astronomically high by Today's standards, and prone to fluctuation depending on the Projects production needs, those early memos describe a poisonous atmosphere at ElectroMet. Today's standards allow nuclear workers a maximum radiation exposure of five rem a year. A dose of 1,000 rem is considered to cause a 100% increase in the subjects chances of developing cancer. According to Dr. Arjun Makhijani, the president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, some workers at ElectroMet were exposed to 6,000 rem. Statistics suggest that is a virtual death sentence. Exposures that MED doctors deemed acceptable were extremely dangerous; exposures they considered severe or even moderately severe are unthinkable.
Dr. Makhijani says that ElectroMet was probably the worst commercial facility in the nation in regard to worker safety. Conditions did not improve there after the war, nor after 1947 when authority over atomic weapon and energy production was transferred from the Army Corps of Engineers to the newly formed AEC. A 1949 AEC memo describes the hazardous conditions at ElectroMet and then guesses at the cost of improving safety precautions and providing workers a cleaner environment. Weighing the cost against the likelihood that ElectroMet's uranium processing operations would probably shut down in a few years anyway, the memos author suggests the investment would be a waste of money.
The horrible conditions at ElectroMet were not without a silver lining, at least not for scientists studying the effects of radiation on humans. By that point the AEC had already recognized what MED scientists--many of whom made the jump to AEC in 1947had understood as early as 1942. A November 28, 1947 memo from the Industrial Safety and Health Advisory Board of the AEC says that conditions in plants such as ElectroMet had produced a reservoir of individuals who have had considerable exposure to uranium dust, both soluble and insoluble. This large reservoir of potential human damage should, if possible, be followed carefully in the future.
In other words, the workers ought to be tracked like subjects in an experiment. Manhattan Project doctors had started measuring the effects of exposure on ElectroMet workers. There is a letter from Lt. Richard A.Tybour of the Army Corps of Engineers Medical Division to the Corps Tonawanda chief dated November 9, 1944. Copies were sent to executives at ElectroMet and to Col. Stafford Warren, the head of the Manhattan Projects Medical Section, Experimental Division. In the letter Tybour describes the results of urine tests taken from workers at ElectroMet between July and September 1944 in connection with a medical research program that is being conducted by the Rochester group. The analysts were checking the urine for concentrations of F and X ions--code names for thorium and uranium respectively.
The concentrations of F ions were not deemed hazardous, although again it should be noted that the tolerance levels set by MED doctors are considered outrageously dangerous by today's standards. Though the MED had not yet established a safe level, X ion concentrations, according to the memo, were comparable to levels recorded in other plants--which suggests that this sort of information was being gathered at numerous acilities that the Manhattan Project had pressed into service during the war.
A memo from that same month to Col. Stafford Warren indicates that the collection of urine samples from ElectroMet employees would continue on a monthly basis, and the samples would be analyzed by a Dr. Eugene Roberts, who was examining kidney damage caused by exposure to radiation. In other words, these urine samples were not taken simply in he interest of worker safety. The physicians working for the MED took advantage of the workers massive exposure to radiation and uranium dust to explore the effects of that exposure on the human body. ElectroMet workers were used as guinea pigs--during the Manhattan Project and apparently long after the war under the supervision of the AEC.
What about informed consent? Workers at Niagara Falls plants like ElectroMet were given letters assuring them that their work was entirely safe, that the minute quantities of radioactivity emanating from the materials they handled was too slight to harm them. So slight is the radioactivity, the letter assures, that specialized instruments are required to detect it. Presumably the writer of the letter was referring to Geiger counters--which are needed to detect any level of radiation.
The wife of a Niagara Falls atomic worker says her husband, a draftsman, was a vigorous man when he started working on the Manhattan Project. Two years later, at the age of 35, he had his first heart attack. He began to break out in boils, two inches across, which oozed infection when opened. As his illnesses multiplied and grew worse, his desk was moved into an isolated corner of the plant and he was gradually cut out of the everyday business of the company.
He was forced into retirement at age 56. Eventually he died of heart disease. At the funeral his supervisor avoided eye contact with his widow.
Most of the men the couple knew from the plant had died years ago, she says. There were lots of illnesses, lots of cancers. They died like flies over a period of 15 years, she says.
Experiments Outside the Experiments
In the 1920s the radium girls would delight their friends and families after work by turning out the lights and spinning around in their work clothes, which glowed with radium paint. No doubt workers at places like ElectroMet brought a little bit of their work home with them at the end of each shift.
Dust permeates everything in an environment like that--the clothes, the hair, the shoes, even the treads of car tires in the parking lot. Workers were supposed to take precautions, but regulations were loosely enforced. One MED memo describes a study done on the gloves the workers there wore--apparently they were trying to determine the protective qualities of leather as opposed to canvas, while simultaneously getting an idea of how much radioactive dust workers in different jobs were dealing with.
Lots of radioactivity was recorded on the canvas gloves of L. Carberry, who mixed the uranium tetrafluoride, or green salt, that was refined at ElectroMet. The leather gloves of J.Costingo, a remelt operator, were also hot. The leather gloves of H. Williams, who packed billets, or bars, of the metal were pretty clean. But the memo notes that Williams did his job bare-handed most of the time.
So Williams gloves were clean but his hands were not. At lunch Williams might have eaten a sandwich with those bare hands, or wiped his lips. After his shift he may have picked up his daughter or tousled her hair. One could argue that Williams imprudence was his own fault, but one must remember that no one told him honestly how dangerous were the materials he handled.
Every day workers carried home the dangers of the workplace, and the dangers of the workplace came to their neighborhoods as well. Many of the sites in this region that handled radioactive materials were adjacent to the neighborhoods in which workers lived and died. Controls of emissions and waste outside the factories were no better than the controls inside. The by-products were buried haphazardly, everywhere and anywhere, contaminating the air, the soil, and the streams. For 28 years a tremendous waste pile of radium-226 sat in uncovered silos on the Army's Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (LOOW) site in Lewiston, emitting lethal radon gas into the air.
An area businessman recalls asking a scientist about the danger posed by that plume of radon gas. The scientist replied, Which way is the wind blowing? Cause I'm getting out of this town.
The Experiment Continues
That radium-226 was moved from the silos to a clay-capped containment area in 1988. Other radioactive materials that had been dumped throughout the region and elsewhere on the LOOW site have been consolidated to the Niagara Falls Storage Site (NFSS) as well.
Over a dozen members of the National Academy of Sciences have testified that radium-226 should not be stored anywhere near human beings. The NFSS is just 7,000 feet from the Lewiston-Porter Schools, with 2,500 students in attendance. A storm sewer that runs through the NFSS passes through school property on its way to its outlet on the Niagara River.
There is a site on the old LOOW property called the Rochester Burial Site where medical wastes were dumped--presumably medical wastes from the MED Medical Sections activities in Rochester. Hundreds of dogs and monkeys and thousands of lab rats that were injected with radioactive isotopes were buried there in wooden crates. It is not unreasonable to think that human body parts--the pieces of bones and organs recovered from the bodies of subjects--might be buried there as well.
It is reported that the equipment used in the Rochester Manhattan Annex experiments was also buried at the Rochester Burial Site. That equipment would include such things as syringes and vials that contained plutonium. The equipment, like the animal carcasses, was buried in wooden crates that decay quickly and that have no capacity for containing plutonium or its radiation.
Different plutonium isotopes have half lives ranging from 6,500 to over 300,000 years. The smallest amount can be lethal. And the LOOW site where these medical wastes are buried is a swamp, criss-crossed by drainage ditches. There is no telling how or where the contamination from poorly contained wastes might travel.
When the MED ElectroMet building was razed in 1957, contaminated waste and debris were dumped at the LOOW and at the old Union Carbide dump north of Pine Avenue in Niagara Falls, then operated by Newco and later by CECOS International Inc. Judging by available reports, that contaminated material has never been addressed, remediated or Recovered--its still there, and its still radioactive.
The region is pockmarked with toxic waste dumps and radioactive hot spots. At Ferro Electronics, formerly TAM Ceramics and before that Titanium Alloy Manufacturing, barrels of barium remain buried in the back of the property. The site is contaminated with uranium-238, radium-226 and thorium-232, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). Radiation levels around the contaminated areas are 50 times background level. Ferro is located less than a quarter mile from Niagara University. Yet no action is forthcoming, according to DEC reports.
The sites that require investigation and remediation are too numerous too mention--there are far more than the half dozen currently being considered for cleanup by the Army Corps of Engineers. They are not at all inaccessible, either--a curious kid or a teenager looking for a placeto hang out can take a walk through the old ElectroMet site, or slip through a section of turned-back fence and explore the old LOOW property. The LOOW has been popular with teenagers for decade--kids even used to climb on top of the silos filled with radium-226, and swim in tanks that had been used to treat and store chemical and radioactive wastes.
As in the case of H. Williams, the bare-handed ElectroMet worker, one can argue that these kids--or the people who buy houses next to some old dump site--are their own worst enemies. But, again, residents of Erie and Niagara Counties have been lied to again and again about what is buried in their backyards and the danger it poses. When government officials do acknowledge the presence of radioactive waste they tell residents it is low-level waste.
They don't say that low-level waste is, by definition, any radioactive substance other than weapons- or fuel-grade material. That's how substances as dangerous as radium-226 or thorium-232 get classified as low-level waste.
Government officials will tell residents that the exposure risk is minimal, and that the level of exposure is safe. But more and more health physicists dismiss the idea that there is a safe dose of radiation. Every dose at any level is a crap shoot--you might get cancer, you might not. Its not like arsenic, of which your body can absorb a certain amount before you die. Higher doses of radiation are worse, but any dose is dangerous.
There is no safe dose, says Dr. John Gofman, a pioneer in the study of radiation and human health and himself an original member of the scientific team assembled for the Manhattan Project and later the AEC.
What to Do About It?
In March 1951nine years after ElectroMet and other Niagara Falls companies began processing uranium for the military--the government built a uranium refinery in Fernald, Ohio. Although Buffalo Niagara industries began earlier and were more numerous, the history of Fernald is a mirror image of our own. The AEC told citizens that no hazardous work would be performed at the new plant, which then proceeded over the next 30 years to leak hundreds of thousands of pounds of uranium dust into the environment through equipment failure and carelessness.
In Fernald, as in Niagara Falls, radioactive waste was dumped in uncapped pits. Radon gas leaked from uncovered silos filled with radium-226just like the silos in Lewiston on the LOOW site. The ground and water were contaminated with uranium, thorium and other radioactive residue--just like Niagara Falls.
The difference are these: First, Niagara Falls is worse. The ontamination in this area outstrips that in Fernald.
Second, Fernald neighbors initiated a class-action law suit against the federal government and won. Fernald's is a cautionary tale--the cleanup, which is funded by taxpayers, has not gone smoothly and there are questions about the competency and honesty of the contractors. But such a lawsuit may be the next logical step for Niagara activists and concerned citizens.
This is the second in a series of articles examining the effects of toxic chemical and radioactive wastes in Erie and Niagara Counties. The authors invite anyone who would like to learn more or offer information to contact:
Louis H. Ricciuti at NiagaraNet@aol.com or Geoff Kelly at ghkelly@hotmail.com
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ARTICLE THREE
The Bomb That Fell on Niagara
Upping the stakes in redeveloping Niagara Falls
By Geoff Kelly and Lou Ricciuti
On Wednesday, June 13, the Restoration Advisory Board for the former Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (LOOW) held a public hearing at the Lewiston-Porter School District. Ostensibly the purpose of the LOOW Restoration Advisory Board--and of any advisory board--is to offer advice to the organization that convenes the board. At least, that is the understanding of Tim Henderson, an environmental activist and a member of the LOOW Restoration Advisory Board, or RAB as it is sometimes called.
The initial purpose of the RAB meetings, says Henderson, as was explained to me by Congressman LaFalce in his office in the presence of a colonel from the Corps of Engineers, was to open up dialog with the residents and address their concerns. One of their biggest concerns was that they were being left out of the loop and questions were going unanswered.
In this case, the LOOW Restoration Advisory Board is intended to advise the Army Corps of Engineers concerning its efforts to investigate and hopefully remediate toxic chemical and radioactive contamination on the former LOOW site. The former LOOW site is a huge tract of mostly swampy land that straddles the towns of Lewiston and Porter in Niagara County. First purchased by the US Army in 1942 for a TNT factory, it later was used by numerous Defense Department agencies for a variety of purposes. Radioactive and chemical waste generated by local industries involved in producing materials for the first atomic bomb were--and continue to be stored there. The Navy and Air Force experimented with high-energy jet fuels on the site. Other companies experimented with lasers and high-energy particle beams in the surrounding woods. Though there is only circumstantial evidence to suggest this, some community residents suspect that chemical and biological warfare agents were stored and perhaps generated there during the Cold War. Incendiary bombs of the type used to annihilate the German town of Dresden in a maelstrom of fire were stored for a time at LOOW upon return shipment from Europe.
Much of that huge parcel has since been sold by the government to private buyers. Some have built homes and businesses there. There is a fish hatchery, a wetlands restoration project, and two waste management companies, Modern Landfill and Chemical Waste Management. The latter is the only dump in the Northeast that is still actively accepting hazardous chemical wastes.
The federal government still owns some of the former LOOW site, including the Niagara Falls Storage Site, a 191-acre plot on which is stored a tremendous amount of what the Army Corps of Engineers calls low-level radioactive waste. It is the worlds largest repository of radium-226, and it is just 2,000 yards from the Lewiston-Porter Schools, which serve over 2,500 students.
The members of the LOOW Restoration Advisory Board include local residents, activists like Tim Henderson, and representatives of agencies, such as Mike Basile of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Businessman John Syms is also a member. According to public records, Syms purchased a hundred-odd acres on the former LOOW site from the Department of Defense in 1969 on which to expand his Tonawanda-based business, which had contracts with the Defense Department. The site included a number of abandoned industrial buildings, which Syms rented out to other light manufacturers. In 1972 the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) told Syms that his property was horribly contaminated and that all operations on site had to be shut down. For the last 29 years Syms has been trying to force the federal government to clean up the property it sold him.
So Syms, like every member of the LOOW Restoration Advisory Board, has a personal stake in how the Army Corps of Engineers goes about its job. He would have been surprised, then, when the local representatives of the Corps told the board that they were not allowed to offer advice on the project. That, they were told, was not their function.
Step to the Back of the Bus, Please
According to Arlene Kreusch of the Army Corps of Engineers, the Restoration Advisory Board is not allowed to offer advice on certain areas of the Corps activities. They provide a forum for community input, she says, and can make recommendations on certain matters but not on others. Asked to explain which matters where the purvey of the RAB and which were taboo, Kreusch deferred to the Corps legal advisor, who was out of the office.
The Army Corps of Engineers has lately been changing the parameters of the hearings regarding their plans to investigate and remediate contaminated sites in the area. The Corps attended a meeting in Cheektowaga regarding the revelation that tons of radioactive waste from Linde Air Products, a Union Carbide division that processed uranium for the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission, had been dumped in the Schultz Landfill on Indian Road and Broadway in Cheektowaga.
Residents, who had become increasingly vocal in expressing their concerns and their distrust of the government agencies charged with investigating the contamination in their neighborhoods, were told they could ask one question each. When residents tried to cede their right to ask a question to a designated representative--who would then be able to ask a series of questions on their behalf--the Corps said that wouldn't be allowed.
At the June 13 meeting of the LOOW Restoration Advisory Board, the public was told their questions would have to wait until the end of the evening, while the board and the Corps went about their business. Each attendee was given a copy of the agenda and two slips of blue paper on which to write questions. The Corps would then choose among the slips of paper which questions they wished to answer. No writing instruments were provided.
To limit the exchange by placing public questions at the end? says Henderson. It takes great patience to wait two and half hours to ask one question.
Some of the business conducted was mundane, the usual board stuff--approval of minutes from the last meeting, election of officers, etc. But there were some strange things on the agenda as well. And some strange statements.
For example, the Corps announced that it had located the Rochester Burial Site, where medical wastes from experiments at the University of Rochester were buried. Those wastes possibly include the carcasses of thousands of animals injected with plutonium and other radioactive isotopes as well as the equipment--syringes, test tubes, etc.--that were used in the experiments, all buried in decomposable wooden crates 50 years ago. But those at the meeting familiar with the history of the site felt certain that the Corps had misidentified the location of the Rochester Burial Site. And the location the Corps had pegged seemed far too small, 21 feet by 21 feet--to handle the amount of waste supposedly buried there.
When asked by a board member (board members were allowed to ask questions at the end of each segment of the meeting) what normal background radiation levels were supposed to be, Dr. Judith Leithner of the Corps stated that normal would be in the range of 13,000-15,000 counts per minute (CPM), far above what others feel is the naturally occurring, pre-atomic bomb levels of 1,000 CPM or below. Either Leithner misspoke or the Corpsman who established that normal background level with a Geiger counter was standing on top of a reactor pile when he took his readings.
Then a fellow named William Librizzi was introduced and allowed to make a presentation. In the Corps agenda handed out to all the people who came to the meeting, Librizzi was identified as a representative of the EPA. In fact, Librizzi represents a commercial vendor, the New Jersey Institute of Technology--a service provider and not an academic institution, as one might believe from its name. Librizzi was there to pitch his company's services as a consultant on the LOOW project.
No one on the board had been told they would be hearing a sales pitch from a vendor, and no other vendors were there to make competing pitches. The board was going to be asked to vote on whether to hire Librizzi's company that night. In other words, the Corps had set up a situation where it would be difficult for the LOOW Restoration Advisory Board--which, according to the Corps, is not supposed to offer its advice anyway--not to approve the hiring.
One member of the community had had enough--he stood up and started to ask questions about Librizzi's pitch and whether it was appropriate. He was told to sit down and be quiet. He refused, and commented that the meeting had already gone over the time allotted and that he did not wish to sit through a business pitch when important community issues were at hand. A heated exchange ensued. Eventually he left the meeting in disgust.
The next day The Buffalo News reported on the meeting but edited out all mention of the blow-up and the changes made in the structure of LOOW RAB meetings.
What the Board Members Said
Apparently, Librizzi's proposal to act as consultant is one question on which the LOOW Restoration Advisory Board does have a say. According to Arlene Kreusch of the Corps, the board voted to form a small committee to check the references Librizzi had provided. Kreusch says that Librizzi's proposal was the first of many options the Corps is obligated to run by the RAB for approval. If the the RAB did not like Librizzi's company, whose services would be paid for by the federal government, the Corps would find a private contractor to consult on the project. The private contractor would be paid out of the Corps budget.
This week the committee tabled Librizzi's proposal. Some board members are suggesting that the committee draft a recommendation that Dr. Arjun Makhijani be contracted as a consultant in the investigation and remediation of the LOOW.
Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) in Takoma Park, Maryland. He is a globally recognized advocate of nuclear responsibility and has looked with a critical eye upon current cleanup standards and protocols. The boards recommendation to hire Makhijani will not elicit many smiles from the Army Corps of Engineers.
What's Out There
It is no secret that Erie and Niagara Counties are peppered with dump sites containing toxic wastes. Everybody knows the regions industrial heritage has had a profoundly negative impact on the environment. But now that most of the furnaces have stopped firing and the chimneys have stopped belching plumes of fire and smoke, it is easy to shrug off the environmental damage as a thing of the past. We move through the our industrial legacy without acknowledging its continuing effect on the air, water and soil.
But look at the facts. The Niagara Falls Storage Site holds an immense amount of radioactive waste that sat for years in uncovered silos, emitting clouds of lethal radon gas into the air. A variety of radioactive and caustic chemicals sat in open tanks and corroding barrels along roads and railways on the LOOW site. Not far away Hooker Chemical and the US Army dumped thousands tons of toxic materials into Love Canal. Union Carbide buried 500 tons of radioactive material in 55-gallon drums on one of its properties in downtown Niagara Falls--somewhere, no one knows exactly where.
ElectroMet, a division of Union Carbide, was for many years the largest uranium refinery in the country. It was an environmental nightmare, for both its workers and the surrounding community. Its legacy is long-lived--measured in half-lives.
Niagara Falls, New York has received less national attention than the other locations around the country, says Dr. Makhijani. Yet, Niagara Falls, by far, was the most wronged in the country by these activities and contaminants.
Thousands of tons of toxic chemicals are buried on other former and present Union Carbide properties. The current effects of toxic wastes have made the news in South Buffalo at Hickory Woods and Seneca- Babcock and all along the Buffalo River and Lake Erie's waterfront. A group of Cheektowaga activists recently filed a $49 million class-action lawsuit against polluters.
There are well over 250 Superfund sites identified in Niagara and Erie Counties. That is to say nothing of dump sites which haven't made the list and which never will. There was always money to be made for someone who didn't mind hauling a few barrels of God-knows-what and dumping it into a nearby creek. And if you knew the Army was dumping haphazardly at the LOOW or at Love Canal, why shouldn't you do it too?
Niagara Falls City Councilmember John Accardo remembers his father and friends dumping barrels in Gill Creek for Hooker Chemical. A lot of people took that work, and justified it by pointing out the number of livelihoods that depended on the companies producing toxic waste. But Accardo sees the impacts--past, present and future--of environmental degradation on the physical and economic health of the community.
Accardo points out that some day in the near future the City of Niagara Falls will have to replace its aging water systems and other infrastructure. The prospect of upsetting long-buried, unaccounted-for waste materials has him worried.
There are things buried in that soil that should never be disturbed, says Accardo.
What's Niagara Falls to Do?
Recently the City of Niagara Falls announced that it had received a $790,000 grant to repave three seldom used streets. They are not even streets, really--they're more like unpaved alleys, rife with potholes and mud. Not many people drive on them.
One of them, Delaware Avenue, runs between Witmer Road and Hyde Park Boulevard. On one side is a junkyard full of cars piled atop one another, and on the other side is Ferro Electronics, formerly TAM Ceramics, and before that Titanium Alloy Manufacturing. The back lot of TAM, which is separated from Delaware Avenue by a chain link fence, has been the site of much dumping. According to a DEC report, there are radium, thorium and uranium residues buried there, and radiation levels are 50 times background level. Readings taken along the road itself have yielded five to six times background levels of radiation.
There are also test wells alongside Delaware Avenue--pipes sticking out of the ground with probes on wire cable that drop deep down into holding tanks that contain some potent mixture of toxic chemicals.
This is the sort of road the City of Niagara Falls wants to repave? If radiation levels are six times background on the surface, what might they be just below the ground? What happens when the machines roll in and the dust starts flying? Will the workers be told of the potential hazard? Will neighbors? How about students at nearby Niagara University, whose athletic fields are less than mile downwind?
A representative of the city's environmental department insists that every public project is proceeded by an environmental review that takes into account site history, and that each review is designed to meet standards handed down by the DEC and the EPA. But much of Niagara Falls environmental history is missing--events occurred and were gone, never recorded. Right now the city only performs environmental assessment of sites that are on deck for development, moving from one to the next with blinders on. There are no plans for a comprehensive evaluation and remediation of toxic chemical and radioactive contamination in and round the city.
To what purpose is a road like Delaware Avenue being repaved? A representative of the Niagara Falls engineering department says that this is the grant they could get; that cash-strapped Niagara Falls needs to accept any money it can get and undertake whatever project that money will buy. He says $790,000 will pave these three streets, but it wouldn't make a dent in the repair work needed on the city's major thoroughfares.
Plus, he says, economic redevelopment depends on available infrastructure. If they make serviceable roads to available property, maybe some private company will be willing to invest in that property and create some economic activity.
Unfortunately, as John Accardo points out, a necessary part of such private investment in Niagara Falls real estate is environmental assessment and possibly remediation. No local businessman with an inkling of what might be buried below the surface of some old industrial lot would be willing to assume that sort of liability. He might accidentally buy that 500 tons of radioactive material buried on some old Union Carbide property. So the movers and shakers in Niagara Falls are not lining up to invest their dollars in reclaimed brownfields, and Niagara Falls doesn't have the money to clean up brownfields without the certainty of a private commercial investor.
And the city's movers and shakers are in a position to know what is buried in and around Niagara Falls. Several of Niagara County's wealthiest families are in the waste management business. The family of Niagara Falls Mayor Irene Elia owns and operates Sevenson Inc., one of the country's largest remediators of radioactive waste and one of the Defense Departments longest-standing building contractors in the area. Yet for all their commitment to redeveloping Niagara Falls and reviving its economy--ruined by, among other things, the exodus of so many industries which poisoned the air, soil and water--these movers and shakers seem unwilling to address the problem of toxic chemical and radioactive contamination, which make the region unsuitable and unattractive for redevelopment.
So what can be done? The Superfund is nearly tapped out, and John Accardo doubts that the state would ever come through with the funding that an comprehensive environmental review of the region would require. Only the federal government is in a position to fund such a massive investigation and remediation.
The problem is, the federal government is reluctant to reveal its complicity in the poisoning of the region by delving into the areas industrial history. Witness that US Army's determined stance that it never dumped in Love Canal, despite ample evidence to the contrary--and despite the fact that the federal government did kick in a few million dollars to help pay for the cleanup.
Perhaps the only recourse available to the community at large is the kind of class-action lawsuit filed by citizens of Fernald, Ohio. Fernald's history of involvement in the production of weapons- and fuel-grade uranium closely mirrors that of the Buffalo Niagara region. Lied to and stymied in their efforts to discover the extent to which their community had been poisoned, Fernald residents filed suit and won a $78 million cleanup settlement.
The Fernald cleanup has run into its share of hitches, but local activists are beginning to gravitate toward such a lawsuit as a means of achieving some solution to the mess left behind by the federal government and its many private contractors.
John Accardo says he thinks the idea is worth consideration, if that's what it takes to get the federal government to admit it has a stake in cleaning up the region. But Accardo warns that such a lawsuit has little chance of succeeding unless the areas movers and shakers get behind it. He seems skeptical that they would; that, after all, would require admitting their own complicity.
This is the third in a series of articles examining the effects of toxic chemical and radioactive wastes in Erie and Niagara Counties. The authors invite anyone who would like to learn more or offer information to contact Lou Ricciuti at NiagaraNet@aol.com or Geoff Kelly at ghkelly@hotmail.com
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ARTICLE FOUR
The Bomb That Fell on Niagara
Why is Niagara Falls burning?
by Geoff Kelly and Louis Ricciuti
A ground fire broke out in a vacant grassy lot in Niagara Falls last Friday afternoon. The field is bounded by Tennessee, Highland, Beech and College Avenue--sits a rundown neighborhood, small tract houses and low-income tenements situated among the shells of old chemical factories and metal-making furnaces, long since shut down and abandoned.
There are a few plants still operating--Ferro Electronics, formerly TAM Ceramics, one of a few companies in the region still handling radioactive materials, is located in that neighborhood--but most are closed.
The two-alarm fire took three hours and 19 firemen to put out. Fortunately there are four fire halls within a mile and a half of the field where the fire broke out.
Strangely, though, the Niagara Falls municipal firemen were assisted by members of the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Base Fire Department, who had to drive five miles to get there.
Maybe not so strange. You see, the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Base Fire Department is specially trained and equipped to handle hazardous material fires such as those involving radioactive or toxic chemical materials; regular fire departments are not. A couple years ago a ground fire broke out in the same area and roads were shut down for more than a square mile. Traffic was backed up and rerouted and generally frustrated while members of the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Base Fire Department fought the fire wearing white protective suits--the kind of suits you see in movies, the kind people wear if they are handling toxic chemical or radioactive materials.
Pyrophoria!
Why would men in white suits travel five miles to get to a fire in a neighborhood surrounded by fire halls? Because, even though officials from the federal, state and local governments tend to downplay or deny the extent to which neighborhoods like this one have been poisoned by chemical and radioactive wastes, some people need to know how bad and how dangerous it really is. Emergency response professionals--like the firemen from the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Base Fire Department--need to know what they might face and the risks it poses.
The Niagara Falls Air Reserve Base Fire Department has hosted seminars on dealing with hazardous materials (with the assistance of companies like Occidental and Kodak, no less--companies that know from toxic waste). They came to that fire because they know that neighborhood is a dump ground, that the industries there have produced dangerous radioactive and chemical wastes dating at least as far back as the Manhattan Project.
They know that tons of toxic chemical and radioactive wastes have been dumped haphazardly for years in neighborhoods like these. They know that chemical and radioactive wastes can spontaneously combust--its called a pyrophoric fire, and the smoke and dust from such a fire is one of the worst exposures to a toxic substance that one can face. Uranium sludge, PCBs and dioxin are bad enough in leaking barrels under a couple feet of dirt. If they start to burn, everyone nearby or downwind of that smoke is endangered. Everyone sitting in a car in traffic that's standing still because firemen from the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Base have shut down the roads to fight a mysterious ground fire is endangered.
Emergency response personnel have to know what's buried under the ground--or at least know that something might be buried under the ground. Some of the contamination in that neighborhood is well documented. For example, a New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) report says that radium, thorium and uranium were dumped in in the back lot of Ferro Electronics back when it was TAM Ceramics--or perhaps even earlier, when it was Titanium Alloy Manufacturing and, like many local companies, contributed to the tremendous effort to build the first atomic bomb. Ferro is less than a thousand yards upwind of Niagara University's athletic fields.
The DEC report says that radiation levels in Ferro's backyard are 50 times higher than background levels.
What does that mean?
We are supposed to understand that background means normal or safe, but don't be so sure. Background levels can be set pretty arbitrarily, and if a whole neighborhood is contaminated to a certain degree to begin with, that degree of contamination might be considered background, or normal, for that neighborhood. So 50 times background radiation might mean 50 times too much radiation from the start. At a public meeting a few weeks ago, Dr. Judith Leithner of the Army Corps of Engineers--whose job it is to identify and clean up waste associated with atomic bomb production--cited a number for normal background levels of radiation near the Lewiston-Porter Schools that was so high that many in attendance thought she must have misspoken. (Ask the residents of South Buffalos Hickory Woods neighborhood about background levels of contamination as determined by government agencies. They'll give you an earful.)
The pollution (at least some of it) in Ferro's backyard is documented. Far more waste, thousands of tons, generated by dozens of chemical and metallurgical companies in and around Niagara Falls, was dumped without documentation. Nobody knows where it is exactly--just that its there, maybe seeping into the water table, or ready to combust, or waiting to be turned up by a developers backhoe. That's common, unspoken knowledge in Niagara Falls; everyone knows the areas polluted, they just don't want to know how badly.
So when a ground fire breaks out in an old industrial neighborhood, there is cause for concern--for the safety of the firefighters and for the safety of the community.
No one has officially said yet what caused last Fridays fire; according to reports, the cause is still under investigation. People were told that the men from the Air Reserve Base were brought in because they had special equipment needed to reach the fire way out in the field.
Niagara Falls Air Reserve Base spokesman Neil E. Nolf did not return phone calls, and so could not explain what that special equipment might be.
Niagara's Redheaded Stepchildren
Niagara Falls is shot through with blighted neighborhoods like the one where Fridays fire took place. When the plants were still open the residents of these neighborhoods lived under poison clouds and drank poisoned water. They worked in the factories and breathed the poisoned air on the factory floors.
Now they live--and die--among the mess companies like National Lead, Union Carbide and Hooker Chemical left behind.
If you drive through the LaSalle neighborhood of Niagara Falls you can see that the houses downwind of the chemical and metallurgical plants have aged much more quickly than houses upwind. The paint is peeling, the clapboards are dry and cracking--exposure to the poisons pouring into the air has withered them. It does the same thing to people.
Nobody invests in these neighborhoods because people with money to invest are savvy enough to realize that these areas are unrecoverable. The City of Niagara Falls recently decided to apply a $790,000 grant to paving three seldom used roads near where Fridays fire took place. None of the roads has ever been paved before, and none leads anywhere you'd want to go. One of the roads, Delaware Avenue, runs behind Ferro Electronics, adjacent to the back lot that is home to tons of radium, thorium and uranium wastes.
The other two roads dead end in fields much like the one that caught fire last Friday. There are great decaying hulks of old factories, piles of truck tires, unidentified metal barrels, garbage, twisted steel, asbestos tiles--all nature of refuse spread out in these fields.
Sevenson Environmental, which is a leading government contractor for hazardous chemical and radioactive waste remediation, stores old vehicles, trailers and equipment along one of the roads on what is most likely city property. (Interestingly, Sevenson Construction was the company that the Army Corps of Engineers contracted to help them shut off the Falls in 1969.) Sevenson is owned by the family of Niagara Falls Mayor Irene Elia.
Much of the property along the other road is owned by NFTA commissioner Henry Sloma, who runs a small audio-visual business out of an office there.
Oddly, the $790,000 grant comes under the auspices of an enterprise zone that is in downtown Niagara Falls. The three roads to be paved are miles away from the zone; one of them is not even inside the city limits.
The argument is that improved road access will encourage creative reuse of the brownfields. But last Fridays fire illustrates precisely why that is wishful thinking: No private investor is going to assume the liability that comes with property heavily contaminated by nobody-knows-what. The only way that land will ever be used for anything other than a dumping ground is if some government agency comes in, investigates the site and cleans it up to a guaranteed pristine condition. Otherwise, who wants to buy land that might be poisoning the neighborhood? That might poison you and your workers? That might spontaneously burst into flame?
Nobody would. And that's why the only investment in this particular neighborhood to date is $790,000 earmarked for a different downtrodden part of town five miles away to pave three bumpy, dirt-and-gravel roads: one that abuts a dangerously radioactive dump site; one that leads to a field where the mayors family has abandoned vehicles and equipment that might have been used to clean up radioactive waste in some other city; and one that services property owned by a politically well connected businessman. Who is that money really serving?
Employees from the city's engineering and environmental offices said that the city relies on the DEC and the Environmental Protection Agency to tell them what sort of tests to do and precautions to take when they embark on a project. But apparently no one has done any sort of environmental tests in these areas to determine what the backhoes will dig up. Nobody is talking about the dangers posed by contaminated dust to workers and residents and passersby. Nobody is talking about a cleanup, even though there is documentary evidence that hazardous radioactive material was dumped there--and where there is documented waste it is prudent to assume there's a lot of undocumented waste alongside it.
Mayor Irene Elia isn't talking about anything. She had her city engineer return one phone call; he professed profound surprise to learn that Niagara Falls had a problem with chemical and radioactive waste, even though his professional background is in waste management. He did not have any background in municipal engineering, but he had worked for Occidental and for BFI, which administered the city's largest landfill (itself a suspected repository of uncontained nuclear waste).
The woman who answers the phone in Elias office took some pains to explain that the engineers response was the mayors response and that she thought it unlikely that there might be questions that the mayor ought to answer.
In any case, Elia did not return subsequent calls, and so did not have opportunity to explain why public funds were being spent to improve access to land being used as a dump by her family's company.
Points of Historical Interest
In January 2000 the Department of Energy issued a list of sites that had been engaged in the Manhattan Engineering District, commonly called the Manhattan Project, the effort to build the first atomic bomb. Many local companies, especially in and around Niagara Falls, were on that list: ElectroMet, Carborundum, Titanium Alloys Manufacturing (TAM), Linde, Simonds Saw & Steel, Hooker Chemical, and many more.
The Department of Energy essentially acknowledged that the list was incomplete by requesting information and documentation concerning sites that hadn't made the list. That includes many sites in and around Niagara Falls. The Department of Energy is interested in filling out the picture on many levels. Not long ago Congress passed a law mandating the compensation of atomic workers and the families of atomic workers who were made sick by exposure to radioactive materials, and Department of Energy wants to know who worked where and what they did. Likewise, Department of Energy wants to know what sites are contaminated and how badly. Whether or not they earnestly want to clean them up is the subject of much debate, but it is probably best to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they do.
Unfortunately it is the Army Corps of Engineers--which made much of the mess to begin with--that is responsible for the cleanup, and they've done nothing to engender any faith in their good intentions. Take, for example, the Corps plan to remediate the Linde site in Tonawanda. One state health official suggested that the site would be so radioactive even after the proposed cleanup that the Corps would have to apply for a radioactive waste handling permit. And yet, despite criticism and even outrage directed at the Linde cleanup proposal, the Corps used Linde as an example of the good work they were doing nationwide to schoolchildren in Mississippi. On a web site (www.mvk.usace.army.mil/offices/pa/sammy/sammy1.htm) created with a state education grant, a furry stuffed animal named Sammy the Sea Lion serves as a tour guide, explaining how hard the Corps was working to make Tonawanda a clean place to live and work.
The Department of Energy is also interested in gathering new information because the Manhattan Project is so historically important. There is, in fact, a Department of Energy initiative that recommends the preservation and interpretation of significant sites.
For example, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was the first to achieve a sustained nuclear reaction. The irradiated graphite and other materials from his CP-1 reactor are buried in the Palos Forest Preserve outside Chicago and marked with a huge stone obelisk explaining the significance of Fermi's achievement.
The graphite that is buried there was manufactured in Niagara Falls by National Carbon, a division of Union Carbide, which was located at the corner of College and Highland Avenues--adjacent to the lot that caught fire last Friday. Originally Fermi's graphite was to be produced by US Graphite in Saginaw, Michigan. But the Saginaw graphite contained more impurities than Fermi would tolerate, so US Graphite lost its contract to National Carbon, whose only plant at the time was in Niagara Falls.
That's just one story; there are dozens more that make Niagara Falls an important setting in the history of the atomic era.
The cover story of the latest edition of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is called Sick Nuclear Workers: The Deception Ends. (The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is one of the most respected journals of its kind--its founders include many scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, as well as Albert Einstein.) The article describes the conditions in which atomic workers labored, the massive doses of radiation and radioactive dust to which they were routinely subjected, and the horrible consequences of that exposure.
The story specifically mentions several sites in and around Niagara Falls: ElectroMet, Hooker, the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works, and Titanium Alloys Manufacturing (later TAM Ceramics and now Ferro Electronics) among them.
The story in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists mirrors a series of articles written last year by Peter Eisler for USA Today, called Poisoned Workers, Poisoned Places. Both were anticipated by Congress mandate to compensate atomic workers and the families of atomic workers whose health suffered as a result of exposure to hazardous materials. As a result of that mandate, a great deal of previously secret information has come to light.
In the past week officials from the Department of Energy and the Department of Labor held a series of public meetings to explain how they would determine who was eligible for compensation and why. One official said sheepishly that secrecy had been important back in those days, that there was a war on. Most of the crowd--which included workers, widows and children of workers, activists, concerned citizens and a handful of military people dressed in civvies--was sympathetic to that point. They and their families had sacrificed a great deal for the war effort; one could argue that the whole region was sacrificed. Now, they said, the truth and consequences of what happened are coming to light. Its time, they said, to stop behaving as if it were still a secret. Its time to do something.
This is the fourth in a series of articles examining the effects of toxic chemical and radioactive wastes in Erie and Niagara Counties.
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ARTICLE FIVE
And I'm never going back to my old school
by Geoff Kelly and Louis Ricciuti
Out on Balmer Road near Lutz in the towns of Lewiston and Porter there are a couple of gated access roads leading into what used to be the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works, a 7,500-acre parcel of land the U.S. Army bought in 1942 for a TNT factory.
After just ten months the TNT factory closed, and there begins the sites long, bizarre and shadowy history. It has been used at one point or another by a number of federal agencies to various purposes. The Army Corps of Engineers dumped radioactive and chemical wastes associated with arms production there. The waste materials from animal and possibly human radiation experiments conducted in Rochester--syringes, body parts, etc. contaminated with plutonium--were shipped to the LOOW and buried in wooden crates. There is evidence that biological and chemical warfare materials were stored and perhaps tested and manufactured on the LOOW site. The FBI trains its agents in urban, house-to-house warfare in a simulated city on the site.
Most of the former LOOW site has been sold off parcel by parcel over the years. The Niagara Falls Storage Site, a 191-acre parcel, is still owned by the Department of Energy. It is home to the worlds largest depot of radium-226, among other toxic chemical and radioactive wastes.
The US military, in cooperation with a company called Olin Matheson, produced and tested experimental jet and rocket fuels on LOOW property behind one of those gated fences on Balmer Road. That property, which had been known as Air Force Plant 68, now belongs to businessman John Syms, who bought the property in 1969 to expand his Tonawanda business. Two years later Syms was told by the New York State Department of Health that the land was hopelessly and dangerously contaminated and he must cease all operations there. For 30 years Syms has been trying to force the federal government to acknowledge and clean up the waste its agencies left behind.
Across a five-foot gully from Syms current property is Chemical Waste Managements facility, one of the only landfills in the Northeast still accepting toxic chemical wastes. CWM is only the most recent operator of that landfill, and the company recently asked the town of Porter for permission to expand the facility. The public hearing on the proposed expansion three weeks ago was a madhouse--residents were, by and large, outraged by the possibility.
That second gated fence leads into CWM's property, but years ago it led to a compound of brick and cement buildings that had been a part of Air Force Plant 68s boron fuel experimentation facilities. Ostensibly Air Force Plant 68 was testing high-powered, boron-based jet and rocket fuels, even though experts had known for years that boron-based fuels weren't practical--they gummed up jet engines and the production process was too volatile. Indeed, explosions at Air Force Plant 68 claimed several lives, and the by-products of jet-fuel experimentation and whatever other projects may have been conducted there under its cover left the land, water and air poisoned.
Meanwhile, by the early 1960s, the Lewiston-Porter School District was overflowing with students and needed space. There were two red brick schoolhouses, one in Lewiston and one in Youngstown, but the towns had outgrown them, and construction on the current school buildings could not keep pace with the population. So, in an act either of absolute ignorance or unforgivable callousness, the Lewiston-Porter schools set up classes in an abandoned building on Air Force Plant 68.
A woman who attended third grade in 1968 recalled the place: the classrooms looked like offices (because that's what they had been) and the walls and floors were covered in an institutional white and green-gray tile. The windows were metal-framed. The school districts administrative offices were housed in another abandoned Olin Matheson building, and there was a kitchen set up in a separate building that made hot lunches for the children.
On nice days the children would play outside after lunch. Outside--on property where barrels of waste were dumped in ditches and buried haphazardly under a few feet of soil. Less than a hundred yards away barrels of uranium sludge--the by-product of Niagara Falls industries contribution to the building of the first atomic bomb--stood beside railroad tracks, exposed to the elements, corroding and leaking. The radium-226 that is now isolated in underground storage facilities (read cellars) was stored above ground in the open air and in a topless silo, emitting plumes of radon gas that prevailing winds would blow directly across the site of the old Air Force Plant 68.
The woman, who asked to remain anonymous because she currently works for the Lewiston-Porter School District, says she was in a class of 20 or 30 students. A lot of wealthy families wouldn't send their kids to Lew-Port schools, she says--they'd go away to private schools like Stella Niagara instead. She wonders if those families, with their connections to the businesses and industries that poisoned the area, kept their kids away because they knew about the pollution.
Often, when confronted with a story like this, people fall back on the those were different times story--the if we knew then what we know now rationalization. But scientists had known, from practical experience, that radiation was lethal since at least the 1920s. They had started collecting clinical evidence in 1942.
As for non-scientists, they didn't need laboratory studies. Workers in factories got sick, and they knew why; guys who drove trucks laden with barrels of sludge from places like ElectroMet and Titanium Alloy Manufacturing and National Lead got sick, and they knew why. There are hundreds of apocryphal stories--about strange fires, a barn full of cows dying overnight, about the things you stumble across in the woods on the former LOOW site, about the things you see and smell in the drainage ditches that criss-cross the property--all of which suggest a certain degree of sophistication regarding the dangers posed by the toxic chemical and radioactive wastes that were dumped in massive quantities in Lewiston and Porter.
Despite what they know and what they hear, Lewiston-Porter residents and school administrators seem unwilling to confront how badly their environment has been corrupted (though the majority did not at the CWM expansion meeting). You don't ask questions, says another Lewiston-Porter School District employee, who also asked to remain anonymous. You just live your life and never question these things.
The woman who attended third grade on the former Air Force Plant 68 has lived her whole life understanding that the factories in Niagara Falls were unhealthy places, and that they produced unhealthy things. Her father worked at Hooker Chemical. At the end of each day he'd change out of his work clothes at the plant, scrub himself clean in the showers, and change into the fresh street clothes he kept in a locker. Despite that effort, he still brought his work home with him.
He'd cough and you could smell the chemicals, she says.
Now her 14-year-old son goes three-wheeling in the woods on the old LOOW. One day he and his friends went tooling around near Air Force Plant 68, the site of her old school.
He said to me when they came back, Mom, I just went somewhere that I think you don't want me to go.
When classes were finally consolidated at the new Lewiston-Porter schools, the classroom on Air Force Plant 68 was once again abandoned. However, Lewiston-Porter students and teachers were, if anything, even closer to the environmental dangers posed by the LOOW at the new schools. Twenty-five hundred yards away is the Niagara Falls Storage Site and its massive concentration of radioactive waste. Two sewer lines and an underground stream run from the storage site and across school property--in fact, the schools sewer lines join the lines originally built by the Army to carry runoff and waste into the Niagara River. A drainage ditch stretches across the back of the school property, also dug by the Army during World War II.
The LOOW is a swampy piece of land, poorly suited as a storage site for toxic chemical and radioactive wastes. All these sources of running and standing water present an exposure risk to students. The old cellars in which the radioactive waste is stored are considered by the Army Corps of Engineers to be adequate for 50 years maximum; the Corps is currently considering what to do with the waste. Meanwhile, the LOOW lies in a 200-year flood plain and on top of a fault line.
The Army Corps of Engineers has said they take frequent readings for some forms of radioactivity along the perimeter of the 191-acre site. They says there is no leakage, that the site is secure. But they don't test for everything, and they don't test everywhere. The Corps admits that the soil around the school is abnormally high in heavy metals such as mercury, manganese, copper, selenium and lead. But then the Corps suggests that the lead contamination is probably the result of hunters shotgun shells.
Curiously, there is a trailer behind the Lewiston-Porter schools that contains some sort of monitoring equipment--some sort of probe hanging from cables. Employees at the schools have never seen anyone come in or out of the trailers, and no one seems to know what the equipment is monitoring.
They do know that lots of students and teachers at Lewiston-Porter schools get sick and have died. No formal study has ever been done, and one is certainly needed, but once again practical knowledge indicates a problem. There are numerous cases of unusual cancers at the school. One woman says that everybody gets sick in April and October. Its difficult to breathe, she says, and everyone in the school coughs. Family members of school staff have been stricken with cancer, respiratory ailments and organ failure. One of the women has suffered mercury toxicity, and was recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
I just want my children safe, she says. "I don't care what happens to me. I've lived my life."
Three generations of Lewiston-Porter residents have been placed at risk in that school system. For those people, its too late--they've been exposed or they haven't--and only a comprehensive health study of Lewiston-Porter graduates will spell out the consequences. If a formal study corroborates the impression of those who work at Lewiston-Porter schools, those consequences are devastating.
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ARTICLE SIX
BUT, RICKY, WHY NOT?
An hour-long episode of *I Love Lucy* called Lucy Hunts Uranium aired in the shows last season, 1958. The story goes something like this: Ricky has an engagement out in Las Vegas and brings Lucy along with him. Ethel and Fred tag along too, just for fun. Of course, Ricky's busy rehearsing the gig, leaving Lucy at loose ends--which is exactly the circumstance that always leads Lucy into some crazy, ill-thought-out adventure.
In this episode, Lucy's curiosity is piqued by a newspaper advertisement encouraging every Jack and Jill to hit the desert and hunt for uranium. The country, after all, needs uranium to keep pace with the Russians. Ethel, as always, is game, but curmudgeonly Fred says there's no way he's tromping around in the desert looking for rocks.
Fred, Lucy replies, it might interest you to know that the government pays a bonus of ten thousand dollars to anybody that discovers uranium!
Those are, of course, the magic words. Fred will do anything to make money. The trio recruits the avuncular Fred MacMurray (playing himself) to join them, they set off for the desert and hilarity ensues.
Its funny because its true--in the 1950s the federal government did offer a bounty to any citizen who located a source of uranium ore. A publicity campaign urged Americans to make uranium prospecting a family activity, depicting a family of four in a wood-paneled station wagon headed into the desert equipped with shovels and a Geiger counter.
Pop culture in the Cold War era, and especially in the 1950s and 1960s, was rife with atomic themes. Remember when Gilligan reels in a crate of vegetable seeds and fails to notice the label that reads WARNING: EXPERIMENTAL RADIOACTIVE SEEDS? The plants grow overnight and yield gargantuan vegetables. Gilligan eats spinach and develops superhuman strength; Mary Ann eats carrots and develops telescopic vision; Mrs. Howell eats beets and experiences bursts of energy.
There were pop songs, too: Atomic Boogie by Maylon Clark (1945); Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb by Lowell Blanchard and the Valley Trio (1946); When They Drop the Atom Bomb by Jackie Doll and his Pickled Peppers (1951); Uranium Fever by Elton Britt, the Yodellin' Cowboy (mid 1950s); Crawl Out Through the Fallout by Sheldon Allman (1960); and the provocatively post-apocalyptic 13 Men (and Only One Gal in Town) by Doris Day.
There was no end to the movies whose plots hinged on radioactivity and atomic bombs, from light sci-fi fare like Mickey Rooney in *The Atomic Kid* (1954) to grim imaginations of life after an atomic holocaust, like Ray Millands *Panic in Year Zero* (1962) (An orgy of looting and lust! said the original movie poster).
While television, movies and pop music alternately made comedy or melodrama out of the new and pervasive threat, the government issued warnings and instructions to citizens about what to do in the event of atomic war. Children were put through duck-and-cover exercises at school. CONELRAD, a nationwide broadcasting network that occupied the same two stations at either end of the AM dial wherever you went, broadcast radio plays that offered stern lessons on preparedness. In the event of atomic attack, CONELRAD was to be Americas only reliable source of information and instructions. Celebrities recorded special radio messages and film shorts that purported to educate viewers about how to deal with radioactive fallout, food and water shortages and post-apocalyptic depression in the tight confines of a bomb shelter (regular doses of barbiturates were recommended for children and adults alike). McCarthyism may have played a role in recruiting star power for these public service announcements--it was a bad time for an actor to appear anything less than enthusiastically patriotic.
It is rumored that the most trusted man in America, actor Arthur Godfrey, who was apparently a close friend of President Eisenhower, recorded the ultimate public service announcement, to be broadcast on national television when the Russian bombs were falling.
The bombs never came, of course, and Godfrey's PSA has never been aired publicly. But the airwaves, movie theaters, newspapers, billboards and Classrooms--all the places in which American public life unfolded--were filled with information about atomic warfare, atomic energy and radioactivity. What was the effect of this bombardment of the American psyche? Did movies, TV and even the governments dire public service announcements mislead people about the dangers of the atomic age by trivializing, understating and obscuring them?
Certainly the movies, songs and television shows that made light of the dangers of the atomic age helped to relieve Americans of the oppressive threat of nuclear annihilation. We all need that. In the first week or two after the September 11 terrorist attacks, no one in the public eye dared to treat the attacks or the looming threat of war lightly. But gradually the comedians and talk-show hosts gingerly approached the new situation with moderate doses of humor, and they have found audiences grateful for the relief.
But atomic pop culture of the 1950s and 1960s obscured much of what was really going on inside the United States. While Ray Milland protected his family and the white, middle-class American way from the chaos following atomic bombardment, American soldiers were being used as guinea pigs in the Nevada desert, their observation posts moved closer and closer to ground zero. Fallout from atomic bomb tests was contaminating the environment to such a degree that in 1955 the Atomic Energy Commission initiated Project Sunshine, in which scientists conspired to steal human corpses and body parts, especially those of babies and young children, to determine how much of the radioactive fallout was being absorbed by humans. Thousands of bodies were clandestinely appropriated from hospitals and dissected by Project Sunshine over several decades. The projects director, Nobel laureate Dr. Willard Libby of the University of Chicago, believed the contamination of the environment might be so comprehensive that it was imperative to measure levels of strontium-90 in the oceans, in the air, even in rainwater.
Human subjects were injected with radioactive isotopes without their knowledge or consent, to study not whether but *how* radioactivity damaged the body. These studies were conducted by scientists working with the Manhattan Project and later with the Atomic Energy Commission. In a project called MKULTRA, the CIA experimented on unwitting humans with a variety of substances, including LSD, PCP, and perhaps lithium and boron, searching for some magic mind-control drug.
A Congressional subcommittee hearing in 1994 revealed that up to 500,000 Americans were endangered by secret defense-related tests between 1940 and 1974. These included covert experiments with radioactive materials, mustard and other poison gases, LSD and biological agents. The General Accounting Office testified that between 1949 and 1969, the Army released radioactive compounds in 239 cities to study the effects.
Workers in local facilities that processed the toxic chemical and radioactive materials that went into weapons production were routinely exposed to dangerous toxins and misled about the threats to their health. In many cases the effects of that exposure were tracked by scientists working under the auspices of the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Energy Commission and, if speculation proves true, the CIA. Neighborhoods were poisoned by the waste products that industry produced, which were dumped callously and sometimes secretly with little regard for environmental consequences. People became sick and died--suspecting, perhaps, but never certain what had caused their illnesses.
No one who lived in the LaSalle neighborhood in Niagara Falls, downwind of ElectroMet, which was for a time the number one source of uranium metal in the world, developed superhuman strength or X-ray vision. Just as no one would be saved from an atomic blast by a duck-and-cover exercise.
The Dene in Canada, Native Americans in the western United States and African tribes in the Congo were decimated by uranium mining. They hauled raw uranium ore in burlap sacks slung over their backs, and the exposure to the radioactive ore sickened and killed them. Sure, the *I Love Lucy* episode is funny, but would it really be worth the $10,000even in 1950s dollars--if you and your family were unlucky enough to find a vein of uranium?
MEANWHILE, BACK IN NIAGARA COUNTY
In the late 1960s Tonawanda businessman John Syms landed a plum contract with the Department of Defense. Syms small factory produced a handheld device called the Unitool, which was several tools in one compact unit. The DOD thought it was perfect for soldiers to carry.
As part of the contract, the DOD required Syms to keep a sizeable inventory of the tools and raw materials in stock in case it should suddenly need more of them. Syms soon found his facilities in Tonawanda inadequate and began looking for more property. The DOD helped him, steering him toward a parcel of land on Balmer Road in Lewiston that had been part of a 7,500-acre federal facility called the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works.
The LOOW lies partly in the Town of Lewiston and partly in the Town of Porter, a stretch of swampy, wooded lowland watered by a network of above-ground and underground streams. Before World War II it was all productive farmland. Some records indicate the Army first started using the land in 1938, then in 1942 bought out or evicted over 150 farmers to create the LOOW, under the auspices of building TNT plant. The swampiness of the land made it less than ideal for such a facility, but the Army dug a system of drainage ditches throughout the site and sewers that ran all the way to the Niagara River to control the water problem and to discharge the waste by-products of TNT production. Roads and railroad tracks soon criss-crossed the property.
The TNT plant ceased production after only nine or ten months. By that time Niagara Falls industries were heavily involved in producing and refining materials for the Army Corps of Engineers Manhattan Engineering District, often called the Manhattan Project, the effort to build the first atomic bomb. When the TNT plant closed, the LOOW was used as a storage depot for materials and waste associated with the Manhattan Project, chemical warfare and other activities.
As the Cold War intensified, the site continued to be used as a dumping ground. Toxic radioactive and chemical materials came by rail and truck from around the country and filled the ditches and pools of the LOOW. Government documents describe hundreds of barrels of radioactive sludge sitting for years along railroad tracks in corroding barrels, leaking onto the ground.
After World War II, the LOOW was parceled out to various federal agencies and branches of the military, but to what purposes is not always clear. Nobody seems able or willing to provide a comprehensive list of the activities there. A history of the site commissioned by the New York State Assembly in 1980 discusses possibilities and suspicions based not on clear, forthright records provided by federal officials but rather on remembered stories, fragments of documentary evidence and deduction from what has been left behind--that is, the abandoned buildings, the refuse and the contaminants found in the soil and water.
Some of those contaminants suggest that biological and chemical weapons material was not only stored on the LOOW but possibly researched and developed there. Traces of PCP, in at least one form a mind-altering drug, that would otherwise be difficult to explain have been found in the soil. There are traces of a biological material used as a medium in which to grow an experimental, fungus-carrying biological weapon called *Aspergillus niger*. There are also records that phosgene, a deadly nerve gas, was buried on site.
No activities that would explain these and other chemical residues are revealed in the federal governments official accounts of the LOOW's uses.
In the 1950s and 1960s the government began to divest itself of most of the property, selling it off to various public and private interests. Many of the parcels have changed hands several times. Today, Modern Landfill and Chemical Waste Management operate huge landfills on former LOOW property; CWM is, in fact, the only landfill in the Northeast still accepting toxic chemical waste. There is a fish hatchery, a shooting range, some private housing.
The Lewiston-Porter schools sit on former LOOW property, and the sewer lines that carried hazardous waste and liquid runoff from the LOOW to the Niagara River run across school property.
The federal government has held on to some of the property, most notably the Niagara Falls Storage Site, which is where the government has consolidated as much of the LOOW's radioactive waste as it has been able to locate and recover. The NFSS is home to the worlds largest repository of radium-226, a by-product of bomb production. For decades the radium-226 sat in open-topped silos (the facilities on the LOOW were built to look like farmhouses and outbuildings, so as to look nondescript to prying eyes), spewing clouds of radon gas into the surrounding countryside. Other materials, such as thorium, cesium and uranium, were kept in barrels or makeshift containers, spread on the ground or stored in massive reservoirs. Now, for the most part, it is stored underground in converted basements, less than a mile away from the Lewiston-Porter schools.
In the 1950s the property John Syms would eventually buy was home to a facility built by the military and the Olin Mathieson Company--a GoCo, or government-owned, contractor-operated plant. Ostensibly Olin Mathieson was experimenting with high-energy, boron-based jet and rocket fuels. Boron-based fuels proved to be a dead end--they gummed up engines, were highly toxic and dangerously unstable. They were so dangerous, in fact, that a team of engineers in Malta, New York had mutinied, walking away from a boron fuel testing facility there. Exposed to air, boron-based fuels would spontaneously ignite--neighbors and those who worked at the plant describe an eerie green flame rising from the flarestacks, visible from far away through the woods. Explosions claimed at least two lives at Olin Mathieson's Balmer Road facility in Lewiston. Other workers were terribly burnt.
Olin Mathieson had abandoned the facility ten years before Syms was led to it by the DOD. Syms bought his property in 1970 from the Fort Conti Corporation, a group of investors with deep connections in federal and local government and the intelligence community. Fort Conti acquired the land from the General Services Administration in 1966. Syms planned to move his operation to Balmer Road and convert and lease the buildings abandoned by Olin Mathieson to other light manufacturing companies.
Syms had several tenants in place in 1972 when the New York State Department of Health told him to cease and desist all operations on the site, and to evict his tenants. According to the DOH, the property was dangerously contaminated and unfit even for industrial use.
Syms was floored. He began looking into the history of the LOOW to find out what he had got himself into. He found evidence that his property and the former LOOW as a whole had been host to numerous disconcerting, clandestine activities. He found evidence--in the form of documents and waste Residue--suggesting that biological and chemical weapons material had been stored, disposed of and likely produced and experimented with on the LOOW. He mapped the location of a dumping ground where medical waste from radiation experiments conducted at the University of Rochester had been buried--contaminated syringes, lab equipment, animal and perhaps human body parts.
Syms learned that the Olin Mathieson facility had continued to handle boron for several years after the military had written off boron-based fuels as impractical. He learned that there were also scientists on site working with by-products of the fuel production process, one of which is a nerve gas called pentaborane. The half-buried steel canisters and the decaying buildings on his property began to seem progressively more sinister to Syms.
In 1973 Syms filed a lawsuit against the federal government demanding that the government remediate his property. For 28 years Syms fought, negotiated and learned more about what had transpired on his piece of the former LOOW. For 28 years he came into his office in a small, square concrete hutch on Balmer Road while the buildings around him crumbled. He gathered information and documents to which the government claimed to have no access.
Once he told officials at the Department of Energy that he would share with them everything he knew and all his documents--documents the government claimed to covet--if they would acknowledge in writing what his documents proved about the contamination of the site and agree, again in writing, to clean up everything the documents said was there. The DOE refused the offer.
In his three decades fighting various agencies of the federal government, and in his stint as a member of the Residents Advisory Board for the LOOW, which is intended to advise the Army Corps of Engineers in its efforts to identify and clean up facilities associated with atomic weapons production, Syms came to a cynical conclusion: The government does not seek public input in order to learn more about a problem. The government asks for public input to find out how much people know, and to create opportunities to refute what people think they know. That's why Syms lawsuit scared the federal government and why they strung out the legal battle for years. Syms claimed to know exactly what happened on the LOOW, or at least on his property, and he claimed that his information was irrefutable.
According to Syms, the government is afraid to acknowledge liability for any part of the former LOOW because the problems there are so severe and unmanageable. He suspected that was why the government sold off the land to private interests--to displace and confuse liability, to wash its hands of the problems it had created. His documents, he said, were a threat to that strategy, and that is why US Attorney General Janet Reno served him with a gag order in 1999, preventing him from discussing any details of his case.
Syms believed that he would wear down the government, that eventually his documents would see the light of day and the government would be forced to acknowledge their liability for the poisoning of his property. That, he and many others believed, might force the federal government to acknowledge liability for all of the former LOOW, and to disclose a full history of the sites uses.
On October 10 and 11, 28 years after initiating his lawsuit, John Syms delivered yet another lengthy deposition in federal court. He died the following day in his Balmer Road office. His lawsuit is unresolved, and his documents are in the hands of his attorneys. The future of the Balmer Road property is up in the air, and whether his family will continue his fight remains to be seen.
THINGS ARE TOUGH ALL OVER NIAGARA COUNTY
If the former LOOW property is emblematic of the secret history of Niagara Falls industry, then the city's rundown neighborhoods, poor health and moribund economy are the visible repercussions of that history. The failures of the military-industrial complex are written all over Niagara County. Abandoned factories crumble behind double and triple rows of barbed wire; strange ground fires break out on old industrial lots, requiring special response teams in protective suits trained to handle hazardous materials. People continue to get sick and die. Efforts to revive the economy never get off the ground.
Niagara Falls industry has been polluting the air, water and soil for a century. But starting in 1942, when local companies like ElectroMet, Titanium Alloys Manufacturing, Union Carbide and Carbon, Hooker Chemical, Simonds Saw & Steel, National Lead, Linde and many others became contractors in the Manhattan Project, and subsequently for the other branches of the military and agencies of the federal government, the pollution became much worse.
The most famous example is Love Canal, which gave birth to the Superfund to identify and clean up contaminated sites across the country, but Love Canal is just one ditch in a county filled with ditches, streams, farm fields and empty lots. (Its worth mentioning that, despite eyewitness testimony describing Army trucks and personnel emptying barrels into Love Canal in the 1940s and 1950s, the federal government insisted that the Army never dumped there. Nonetheless, the federal government quietly kicked in $8 million to help pay for the cleanup--which, in this society, may constitute a tacit admission of guilt. And Hooker Chemical, which did the bulk of the dumping, was a government contractor and much of the waste would have been generated producing materials for the military.)
Government records and correspondence between industry executives and the Army Corps of Engineers reveals staggering carelessness in the way toxic chemical and radioactive wastes were handled. Linde pumped millions of gallons of waste into shallow wells on company property, because the Army Corps suggested that dispersion of waste into underground streams would make it nearly impossible to establish the source of pollution and thus liability. Hundreds of tons of uranium sludge are known to be buried somewhere on former Union Carbide property in downtown Niagara Falls. Nobody knows where, and nobody has tried to clean it up. Nobody has even looked for it. Barrels of radium, thorium and uranium waste are buried in the back lot of TAM Ceramics (now called Ferro Electronics), and radioactivity readings there are 50 times higher than background level, according to the EPA.
There are at least 50 dump sites in Niagara County which have been tagged as needing assistance from the bankrupt Superfund. Who knows how many more undocumented, illegal and forgotten dump sites there are? Fifty years ago it was not unusual for a guy who owned a truck to be paid by a company to pick up a few barrels of God-knows-what and dump it wherever, however he could. One local politician, who is retiring from office this year, says his father and his fathers friends did that to make a few extra dollars. Barrels were emptied into creeks and ditches. Farmers were paid to turn their backs while waste was buried in untilled fields on their property.
We may never know where and in what quantity waste was secretly and illegally dumped in and around Niagara Falls. But there's no doubt it happened. A few encounters on recent walks through the woods, beside railroad tracks and on old industrial sites in Niagara County: A five-foot gas cylinder sticking part way out of the ground in a drainage ditch along Pletcher Road, less than a quarter mile from the Niagara Falls Storage Site. Rusting, unmarked barrels resting in pools of standing water at various locations on and around the former LOOW. Yellow, caked phenol resin overflowing from a storm sewer near railroad tracks. On the side of an unpaved road, colored, glass-like furnace slag the size of small boulders overgrown by weeds..
The farmers and truckers must have known they were fouling the land and water, but they probably did not know how dangerous the contents of the barrels were. Military project supervisors, industry executives and local officials consistently misled workers, military personnel and the general public about the danger posed by toxic chemical and radioactive wastes produced by Niagara County factories. Workers were assured that the materials they were working with were safe, and the materials were identified only by code names. The problem is, industry executives and the government knew that the workers were in danger. Yet, as correspondence between the Army Corp of Engineers and ElectroMet executives indicates, what Army doctors called a safe dose of radioactivity fluctuated depending on the months production quotas.
Today's experts say there is no such thing as a safe dose of radioactivity. That notwithstanding, the Army Corps of Engineers and federal health and environmental officers continue to talk about acceptable risks, background and levels of exposure.
Except for in Love Canal, there has never been a formal human health study conducted in Niagara Falls, which is itself strange. Niagara University students have conducted pet health studies, but they were instructed not to ask nor to record any answers those polled might give about human health. A former UB professor did a health study of deer on the former LOOW site (he found that a tremendous percentage showed sign of birth defects and illness). And another Niagara University study, recently completed, polled area resident about their attitudes concerning pollution in Niagara County. (Do you feel the area is polluted? Do you think its a problem? How do you feel about radiation?)
But no one has ever done a health study. What we do know is this: Western New York, and especially Buffalo and Niagara Falls, have unusually high cancer rates, according to the American Cancer Society. Multiple sclerosis rates are also high in the region. Anecdotal accounts of illnesses and birth defects among people who worked at or lived near plants handling toxic chemical and radioactive materials abound.
Finally, there is the local economy, which is integral to the regional economy. Chemical and metallurgical plants working on government contracts were a boon to Niagara Falls for decades. Probably as much as half the population worked in the factories during that era. But the good times did not last long. In the 1960s Union Carbide, the areas biggest employer, began shutting down its Niagara Falls factories, preferring instead to manage plants built and owned by the federal government. Managing the governments facilities was more profitable because the liabilities--worker safety and waste disposal among them--belonged to the government. So Union Carbide divested itself of the factories and properties that it had polluted for years, leaving Niagara Falls to live among the poison and empty, contaminated buildings. Other companies followed suit. There are still active chemical and metallurgical operations in Niagara Falls--a few of which are still handling radioactive materials--but the heyday is long past.
No one wants to take on liability for the poisoned properties that pock the City of Niagara Falls and its surroundings. That may be why talk of redevelopment in Niagara Falls always fizzles away to nothing. Businesspeople who are familiar with the regions history know better than to buy property out on the former LOOW, or off Buffalo Avenue along the industrial corridor. They know that the little lanes behind Ferro Electronics and adjacent to Niagara University are good for dumping car parts and other trash and that's about it. No one with any understanding of how the chemical and metallurgical industries conducted business in Niagara Falls wants to take ownership of old industrial land, let alone put money into it, let alone start digging around with a backhoe.
The only booming industry in Niagara County seems to be waste disposal. CWM has recently been pushing to expand its Lewiston-Porter dump, which is built on military legacy landfills left behind by the former LOOW and includes an aggressive biological containment area. Who is going to embrace brownfield reclamation in a region with phrases like that floating around?
One of many reasons that the Niagara Falls International Airport is touted for its potential to become a major international cargo transport hub is that its surrounded by cheap, available land that can be developed into warehouse space and light manufacturing. That's true, but part of the reason the land out by the NFIA is cheap and available is its proximity to the former LOOW, the CECOS landfills, former Nike missile bases and the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Base--all of which are dangerously contaminated. No developer is going to take on that sort of environmental nightmare--not once they learn what the government did to John Syms when he asked it to clean up the mess it left on his Balmer Road property.
Every potential strength that Niagara Falls has to exploit is tempered by its environmental problems. Niagara Falls is going nowhere until those who understand how badly the environment has been compromised come forward and tell the public what they know.
THE CULTURE OF SECRECY
So who does know how bad things are in Niagara County?
Local government officials must know how bad things are. They know well enough to have made sure the hazardous material response team from the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Base responded to a ground fire on an abandoned industrial site this summer. They know well enough to test the water supply for radioactivity every year.
They know well enough that when a sheriffs deputy was hospitalized after inhaling fumes from four barrels, one of them leaking, that were found on the Tuscarora Reservation two weeks ago, a host of agencies descended on the site. There was a team from E.I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co., the Lewiston Town Hazardous Materials Team, personnel from two fire companies, representatives from the Niagara County Health Department, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the EPA, the county sheriff, the district attorney and the state police.
The family of Niagara Falls Mayor Irene Elia owns Sevenson Environmental, which contracts with the federal government to remediate toxic chemical and radioactive waste around the country. Sevenson is the owner of a Superfund site in Niagara Falls. It would be surprising if she did not have a thorough appreciation of the environmental problems in Niagara Falls. It *is* surprising that Elia, the mayor of the city that gave birth to the Superfund--a city in desperate need of environmental remediation--has not said a word about the need to refinance the bankrupt Superfund.
The local heads of the industries that created the waste must know how badly contaminated the region is, as must those who own and operate the waste-handling facilities where some of the poisons were dumped.
The Department of Energy and the Army Corps of Engineers have access to more information about its activities in Niagara Falls than anyone else. There is plenty of declassified documentary evidence to establish a pattern of irresponsible dumping of chemical and radioactive waste; whatever remains classified would only flesh out the picture.
There are certainly holes in the federal governments understanding of its own history in Niagara Falls. Some of those holes my be the work of former CIA Director Richard Helms, who in 1973 destroyed all documents detailing Project MKULTRA and similar programs. Helms feared disclosure that the CIA had experimented on unwitting children and adults and called upon the expertise of hundreds of former Nazi scientists whom its predecessor, the OSS, had helped to escape prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials of German war criminals. Most famous among those scientists was Werner von Braun, who helped NASA reach the moon and became a national hero. Von Braun and his superior, Walter Dornberger, developed and built the V2 rockets, using 60,000 laborers from concentration camps, of whom 20,000 were literally worked to death.
Dornberger was also whisked out of Germany, though he had been sentenced to death by hanging for his crimes by the Nuremberg tribunal. He went to work for Bell Aircraft in Niagara Falls, where he eventually rose to a vice presidency. His capsule biography in a 1955 piece of company literature refers vaguely to his wartime service, leaving out his Nazi party and SS membership, his specific activities and his condemnation as a war criminal.
Dornberger was probably not the only Nazi scientist working in industry in Western New York. If, as suspected, the former LOOW was the site of biological and chemical weapons research, then German scientists were probably employed at those facilities as well.
We may never know, and of course the presence of former Nazis in Niagara Falls research facilities has no bearing on the environmental legacy left by the military's engagement of Niagara Falls industry. But it does speak to the culture of secrecy that continues to stand between the public and a full account of what transpired in factories and laboratories here. Could former Niagara County Legislator and US Congressman William E. Miller, who had been an assistant prosecutor at Nuremberg, not have been aware of Dornberger and his monstrous activities during the war? Why did he keep quiet?
The government has said in the past that it could not be expected to control how the private industries it employed safeguarded its workers and disposed of its waste, but correspondence between government and military officials and companies like Linde and ElectroMet show that the government kept very careful track of how its contractors performed. Documents declassified over the past 20 years indicate that the government knew how waste materials were being handled and disposed of, and the dangers they posed. The military-industrial history of Niagara County is not unavailable; it is kept secret.
Even today the Army Corps of Engineers, which is charged with identifying and remediating sites associated with atomic weapons production, responds to new information rather than providing it. When Cheektowaga activists produced evidence that radioactive waste from the Linde plant in Tonawanda had been dumped in the Schultz landfill, the Corps expressed surprise and asked for time to look into the matter. The documentation produced by the Cheektowaga activists came from government sources; it was right there on the surface, easily found. When the Corps did respond, they claimed that there was less waste than the documents indicated; a few weeks later they said there was still less waste. A few weeks after that they claimed that there was no radioactive waste at all. They said it was all a big mistake.
Two months ago, in interviews two Lewiston-Porter residents remembered a temporary school on Balmer Road, which handled overflow from the Lewiston-Porter schools in the 1960s. The classrooms were in one abandoned building, and the cafeteria was in another. The two women did not know what the buildings had been used for before they were abandoned, but the school was a stones throw from John Syms property.
A few weeks after the interview was published, the Army Corps of Engineers acknowledged the presence of the school and even produced photographs of the buildings. Why did the Corps wait for someone else to tell that story? Why does information come in dribs and drabs?
Why isn't anyone telling Niagara University that the site where they want to build a new dormitory is adjacent to a dump site that holds 80,000 tons of chemical waste--four times as much as was dumped in Love Canal?
Why didn't anyone tell the Catholic diocese that Niagara Catholics new elementary school was a dump site for radioactive slag and fly ash? When the property was tested about ten years ago, nine bore hole samples were taken on a lot the size of a city block. Were they hoping not to find the toxins that documentary evidence confirms are there?
Why must private citizens bring these environmental problems to light? Aren't there government agencies and elected officials whose job is to look after the well-being of their constituents?
In 1969, the Army Corps of Engineers shut off Niagara Falls for several months. Elia Construction, which later became Sevenson, was the private contractor the Corps engaged for the project. The official explanation for shutting off the Falls was that erosion had caused the rocks at the edge of the Falls to become unstable and the talus rock debris at the base of the Falls needed a facelift. The Corps wanted to take a close look at the rocks, do some tests and take some samples to appreciate the situation and see what they could do to stabilize or remove the rocks.
That official explanation doesn't sit right. At the height of the Vietnam War, the Army Corps of Engineers didn't have anything more pressing to do than a cosmetic treatment of Niagara Falls? The forces of erosion couldn't wait a few years?
The Corps worked day and night, saying they didn't want to hurt the tourist trade. That worry proved needless--more people came to see the Falls dry than had ever come to see them when the water was flowing. Maybe all those tourists were watching the Corps tackling an unnecessary job in its characteristically heavy-handed way. Or maybe they were watching the testing the Falls and the bed of the Niagara River for radioactive contamination deposited by 25 years of discharging waste into the waterways. If that's true, we will no doubt have to wait for some intrepid private citizen to prove it.
WHAT NIAGARA FALLS NEEDS
That may seem like wild speculation, but what else can one do but speculate when it is so difficult to pry information from those who have it? We know that Niagara County is badly contaminated, but we don't know how badly. We know that government and industry have demonstrated an unwillingness to come forward with what they know. Doesn' it seem wise, then, to assume the worst and hope were proven wrong?
Niagara County needs to be cleaned up, but you cant clean up what youre covering up. The first step toward rehabilitating the region is to put an end to the secrecy. The secret is out anyway--at least enough of it that the public recognizes evasions and half-truths. Talking about biological and chemical weapons is hardly taboo anymore. We already know there is radioactive waste to contend with. So why not come completely clean?
There are models out there for Niagara County to follow. The military-industrial history of Fernald, Ohio reads exactly like that of Niagara Falls, but on a smaller scale. Fernald residents won a class-action lawsuit against the federal government, forcing the government to pay a cash settlement and clean up the mess its agencies and contractors made. Niagara County residents could do the same.
But wouldn't it be nice to tackle the problem in cooperation with a forthright government? To create a new, better model for addressing environmental crises?
The federal government ought to provide a full history of its facilities and its involvement with Niagara Falls industries, along with the documents used to produce that history. To the degree that its possible, private industries should be compelled to share whatever records they have as well. The federal government should make an effort to fill the gaps in that account by eliciting accounts from private citizens who remember or took part in that history.
Once the history is complete, then the proper agencies can send out teams to test for contaminants and devise a strategy to clean them up.
There also need to be health studies such as have never been done anywhere, reaching back as far as 60 years and following people who moved in and out of the affected community in that time. And monitoring of the populations health needs to continue long into the future, because being upfront about the problem isn't going to end it overnight.
Niagara County has an environmental problem that has become a human health problem, an economic problem. Our local and federal governments have an opportunity to distinguish themselves and our region--for better or for worse--by how they address the problem. Lets push for the best.
This is the sixth in a series of articles about radioactive and chemical waste in the Buffalo Niagara region.
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ARTICLE SEVEN
TOM BROKAW'S DESK Anthrax--If its been buried, its been buried in Niagara County
Last Sunday, the Buffalo News reported that NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw's anthrax-plagued desk had come to its final resting place in Niagara County. Brokaw's desk and other office furnishings were treated and buried at Chemical Waste Managements waste disposal facility in Lewiston.
It was a short piece in the Sunday Niagara edition. The kicker was a dose of grim humor from local environmental activist Tim Henderson, who pointed out that just about every nasty substance ever generated by man can be found in dump sites in Niagara County. It makes sense the stuff would end up here, Henderson told the Buffalo News. That doesn't mean we have to like it.
Morning radio had a field day. 103.3 The Edges Shredd and Ragan reported the story as an oddity and were soon swamped by phone calls from residents, CWM workers, waste-hauling truck drivers and others who were horrified by the news. It became a really big deal, said Ryan Patrick, the morning shows producer.
Shredd and Ragan continued coverage of the story the following day and plans to broadcast live from the gates of CWM on Friday, Nov. 30 to protest the landfills acceptance of anthrax-contaminated waste.
In fact, Brokaw's desk and the other office furnishings that came to CWM with it are unlikely to pose a hazard. They were decontaminated before they were shipped to CWM and buried. The materials are not going to bleed anthrax into the surrounding countryside.
Still, the strong reaction of 103.3 The Edge listeners is not simply the product of hysteria or misinformation. CWM's disposal of the desk is evocative of all the dangerous waste that has been buried in the backyards of Niagara County residents over the past 75 years. It is a case of affront after affront, of insult added to injury.
Tom Brokaw's Desk
NBC News received two letters containing anthrax spores, one postmarked Sep. 18 and the other Sep. 20. The letters were discovered when one of Brokaw's assistants developed cutaneous anthrax, two weeks after handling one or both letters. When the infection was discovered, hundreds of NBC employees were tested for anthrax and given a two-week supply of the antibiotic Cipro.
The NBC News office was painstakingly tested for anthrax spores, which are so small they are mentioned in microns. In the process, several emergency workers were also exposed to anthrax spores.
Those items in Brokaw's office that came into contact with anthrax spores were decontaminated and shipped to a landfill in Texas, according to CWM spokesman Scott Matter. Those items that did not test positive for anthrax, including Brokaw's desk, were decontaminated anyway--just in case.
Anthrax spores are especially dangerous because they are so resilient. They can lay dormant for decades and then come back to life when exposed to air or water.
Sealed in plastic, Brokaw's desk and various other office furnishings were shipped cross-state by truck to CWM (past the front doors of Lewiston-Porter Schools), where the material was pulverized, and sealed in plastic bags inside plastic tubs. These tubs were then filled with concrete and buried.
Apparently, nobody at NBC or at CWM was prepared for this to become a public relations issue. Inquiries at NBC have gone unanswered. Local CWM personnel were unable to address questions.
George Spira, CWM's community liaison and a Porter town boardmember, said he hadn't heard anything about the story and referred ARTVOICE to Dominic Maruca, the facility's manager. Maruca was out of town, so questions were directed to an engineer at the site who did not return phone calls.
Finally, Scott Matter was dispatched to answer questions by phone. Matter works 500 miles away in Manhattan.
Why CWM?
Mike Basile, head of the EPA's field office in Niagara Falls, said he's not surprised that the desk went to CWM. Its an enormous facility, said Basile. And its one of a very few places in the Northeast that can accept hazardous waste.
CWM is, in fact, the largest facility handling hazardous waste in the Northeast. According to Basile, when a contaminated site in the region is cleaned up, odds are the waste material is shipped to CWM. So it has the virtue of being open and having plenty of room. Scott Matter says the technology there is first-rate, as well. The facility was updated just a few years ago.
Matter was eager to point out that, while Brokaw's desk made a good headline, it wasn't much of a story. The office material was not hazardous and could have been buried legally in any dump in the state. But the anthrax scare has everyone on edge, so its better to err on the side of overkill.
Common sense dictates that additional and every precaution be taken, said Matter. So Brokaw's desk, though it was clean, was to be treated as if it were contaminated. So it went to CWM. Which leads us back to the original question: Why CWM?
When asked if CWM had any special facilities for handling hazardous biological waste, George Spira said, Were not allowed to accept any hazardous biological wastes. Spira emphasized that in his 30 years working on-site, there has never been a biological containment facility at CWM, and CWM has never accepted hazardous biological waste.
However, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers documents dated June 2000 say that there is a biological impoundment area on-site. Other sources have used the phrase aggressive biological containment facility. Spira said he knows nothing about that. On the other hand, Scott Matter, CWM's spokesman in Manhattan, acknowledged the existence of a biological containment area and said he'd look into its dates of operation to determine if CWM had ever operated the biological containment facility or simply inherited it from one of its predecessors--SCA, Chem- Trol or the federal government. At deadline, he had not yet found that information. The 713-acre Model City facility, as CWM refers to the landfill, has been receiving waste for 30 years as a commercial enterprise, and for another 30 years as a government-owned property. CWM took over the site from SCA. SCA acquired the site from Chem-Trol, which bought the property from private holders who in turn bought the property from the federal government. The U.S. Army was the first to use the site as a dump back when it was part of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works, a 7500-acre parcel the Army bought in 1942 that displaced hundreds of local farmers, some against their will. The LOOW has seen many uses--a TNT factory, experimental jet and rocket fuel labs, training facilities, incendiary and chemical weapons depot. Most prominently, it has been used as a dump site for chemical, radioactive and biological wastes generated by the military and private industry working on military contracts. Local industries and academic institutions worked on a wide variety of government projects, including germ warfare.
Since the early 1970s, government agencies--including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense--have been studying the former LOOW in order to determine what sort of cleanup the site might require. Because CWM sits on former LOOW property, the Corps wants to examine parts of the CWM as well. The CWM facility sits on several legacy burial sites.
These sites may contain toxic radioactive, chemical and biological wastes. One of these is the Rochester Burial Site, which contains waste from plutonium experiments conducted on humans and animals at the University of Rochester.
CWM did not initiate and may not even know about some of the dump sites, but they may have buried them under tons of hazardous industrial waste, or covered them with chemical lagoons, making them nearly impossible to investigate. Previous attempts to clean up the former LOOW site have hit an impasse at the CWM site, where cleanup crews were uncertain where to look for waste and either unable or unwilling to dig indiscriminately among the piles of deadly toxins in search of even more deadly toxins.
CWM recently requested permission to expand its landfill. The proposed expansion would mean CWM would cover over more legacy landfills--places containing dangerous wastes that have not yet been assessed or remediated. The Town of Porter (for which CWM spokesman George Spira is a town boardmember) agreed to the expansion, despite public opposition. The Town of Lewiston has not given CWM its okay.
Welcome to Niagara Falls!
Home of Tom Brokaw's anthrax-riddled desk.
Of course its not true--Brokaw's desk, or what remains of it, is not riddled with anthrax. But, then, the weather around here isn't as bad as its perceived to be, and that's a rap well never shake.
If the rest of the country learns to think of Niagara County as a toxic cesspool--and that image is already there, thanks to Love Canal--the rest of the country wont be wrong. CWM is at least a supervised, controlled disposal site. As far as uncontrolled sites, Love Canal was just the tip of the iceberg. Within a couple miles of CWM's Model City landfill, there are dozens of undocumented or under- documented toxic waste dumps.
The ground and water have been compromised by decades of haphazard and cavalier disposal of radioactive, chemical and biological wastes. Economic development has been stalled by a tacit understanding that the regions environmental liabilities jeopardize any investment. Most importantly, people have become sick and died. If Niagara County wants to overcome the image problem created by Tom Brokaw's desk and Love Canal, its people will have to force private industry and government bodies at all levels to be forthright about the legacy of pollution and the substantial problems it continues to cause--the human, environmental and economic health of the region.
The authors invite anyone who would like to learn more or offer information to contact:
Lou Ricciuti at NiagaraNet@aol.com or Geoff Kelly at ghkelly@hotmail.com