OxyChem

I was there for a couple of days for a little bit of a family gathering.

But the reason she moved us out was because she realized that the chemical companies for which my dad worked, Union Carbide, Carborundum, some of the other big hooker chemical there, were destroying the place.

We had the indications.

I had my aunt, Katie's two kids, age four and six, died of leukemia.

And it's a great book and it's a great history of Niagara Falls.

But yeah, that's how I got involved because I said to myself, what the hell is going on? And I ended up, I actually, in preparing for the interview, I sent her a picture from the Chicago Tribune with me 40 years ago, challenging Armand Hammer.

Armand Hammer was the CEO of Oxygen Petroleum, which owned Hooker Chemical.

And President Nixon at the time revealing my age here, President Nixon at the time had appointed Armand Hammer to head the president's cancer panel to find a cure for cancer.

Dan McKernan said the DEC's August test results, coupled with the area's history of buried toxic waste, should be enough to justify the family's immediate relocation.

Their 99th Street home, built in 1956, sits just north of Love Canal, where Hooker Chemical, now Occidental Chemical Corporation, dumped more than 21,000 tons of toxic waste between 1942 and 1952.

A 1993 DEC report described an eight-month cleanup of an adjacent property where materials included black ash containing elevated mercury levels.

The soil unearthed during the family's pool construction have left them fearing that the contamination found in the 1990s was never fully investigated or cleaned up.

The partially dug canal, a trench about 3,000 feet long and 100 feet wide, sat abandoned for decades.

In 1942, Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation leased it, then bought it.

Between 1942 and 1953, Hooker used the empty canal as a dump for chemical manufacturing waste.

More than 21,000 tons of chemical waste went into the site, much of it contained in drums, including chlorinated hydrocarbons, pesticides, and other hazardous compounds.

It created the first federal mechanism for identifying and cleaning up contaminated waste sites and holding polluters financially responsible for that cleanup.

Love Canal became one of the defining early sites addressed under the new Superfund program.

Hooker Chemical, by then a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, eventually paid $129 million to settle claims from former Love Canal residents and contributed to cleanup costs that ran into the hundreds of millions.

The 99th Street Elementary School was demolished.