posted by nevereatshreddedwheat #
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—This is not Love Canal, Fobel then said and smacked the top of his lectern: there is no equivalent between that situation and ours, I heard him say—
—At Love Canal, the Hooker Chemical Corporation was found guilty of monstrous violations of the law, I heard him say—
– The Lost Scrapbook p. 388
Love Canal, a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, NY, was the site of a toxic dump in the 1940s, although to be fair the Hooker Chemical Company had permission to dump waste into the canal and when the Niagara Falls School District wanted the land in 1953 to build a school, Hooker sold them the land for $1, because, you know, it was poisonous.
The city continued to build on the land, and in the 1970s, birth defects and a whole host of other health problems in the community started to appear. This mirrors what happens in The Lost Scrapbook in the fictional Missouri town of Isaura.