Love Canal was a small town in Niagara Falls, New York, located between two bodies of water: Bergholtz Creek to the north and the Niagara River to the south. Seems innocent enough, right? Wrong. This city was built on top of 21,000 tons of toxic waste (Verhovek). In the early 1890s, William T. Love wanted to build a canal connecting the Niagara River to Lake Ontario to generate hydroelectric power for his future city. However, due to the sharp decline in investors and the laws passed by Congress, he was unable to bring his idea to life. When his funds were completely exhausted in 1910, he had dug a mile of canal, about 50 feet wide and 10 to 40 feet deep, and had built a few streets and houses (Blum). In the 1920s, the giant hole was used as a landfill for the nearby town of Niagara Falls, which paved the way for one of the most horrific environmental tragedies in American history (Beck). A handful of people who decided not to leave are all that remains of the city today; 90% of the buildings were demolished or boarded up (Verhovek). In 1942, after a few years of the city of Love Canal using the unfinished canal as a landfill, the Hooker Electrochemical Company, later known as Hooker Chemicals, obtained permission from the Niagara Power and Development Company to begin using the landfill as a means of dispose of the large quantities of chemical waste they produced (U.S. Department of Labor). Hooker Chemicals determined that this site was particularly suitable for chemical disposal because the clay in the soil would be impervious and there was not too large a population in the area at the time (Zuesse). By 1947, Hooker Chemicals became the sole owner of the land, and by 1952 had filled it to capacity with 21,000 tons of 55-US-gallon metal barrels. Chemicals such as caustics, alkalines