itive and negative. It could make people more confident of product safety, she says. But it could also get people upset about some products if they see preliminary testing information. No one knows how expensive the program will be for industry because no one knows how many chemicals will be tested in both Tier 1 and Tier 2. Testing only 3,000 chemicals in Tier 1 could cost $750 million, she estimates.^
Lessons learned from Love Canal After 20 litigious years, Hooker Chemical—now part of Occidental Chemical— at the end of April began the process of finally settling its fourth and last Love Canal contamination case with the U.S. and New York State. From 1941 to 1953, Hooker disposed of its chemical waste in a ditch that was part of a canal Thomas Love had built in 1894 near Niagara Falls to generate direct electric current for the industrial area. In 1953, Hooker sold the dump site to the City of Niagara Falls Board of Education for $1.00. A school was eventually built on the site and homes ringed the filled-in canal. Then came heavy snow melts from the winter of 1976, compounded by the rainy spring and summer of 1977. By 1978, groundwater levels had risen so much that chemicals dumped into the canal were eventually flushed into sewers, onto streets, and into the basements of homes bordering the canal. 'The crisis of Love Canal," says Bruce Gelber, principal deputy chief of the Justice Department's environmental enforcement section and lead U.S. counsel in the Love Canal case, "had a lot to do with bad winters and rainy summers." It didn't help that local, state, and federal officials—dealing with this first-of-a-kind crisis—lacked the expertise and money to respond efficiently and effectively. At a recent seminar sponsored by the Environmental Law Institute (Washington, D.C.), Gelber outlined lessons learned from Love Canal—from his perspective. First lesson: "It was a mistake for Hooker to sell the property to the board," he said. Even Hooker's own engineers warned against the sale, and they were correct, he noted. Gelber's second lesson could be called the Superfund imperative. "Love Canal points out the need to have an ad-
equately funded hazardous waste cleanup system in the U.S.," he said. His corollary to lesson two is simple: "Superfund really works!" It is flawed, it has its problems, but it provides the infrastructure that was missing in 1978. And Gelber's final lesson is that Love Canal "highlights the need for good coordination and communication at all levels of government." The lead counsel for New York in the Love Canal litigation, Eugene Martin-Leff, took issue with Gelber's last point. He contended that poor communication was not the root cause of the confusion and chaos that marked the handling of the crisis. Instead, he argued, it was "the inability of the primitive science [of risk assessment] to draw the line" between those residents at risk and those who were not at risk. OxyChem's legal counsel for Love Canal, Anthony L. Young of the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Piper & Marbury, offered a slightly different set of lessons learned. New laws, such as Superfund, will always foster heavy litigation, he claimed. The associated
punitive damage claims "vitiate insurance and must be hotly contested." Young garnered laughs when he offered this lesson: "Politics makes terrible public health policy. Keep prosecutors out of health science. Don't let lawyers do science." The Love Canal site had to be addressed, Young said. But a lesson from its remediation is: "Address the obvious contaminationfirst."The cleanup of nearby creek sediments, which occurred after the Love Canal site proper was cleaned up, "cost more than the Love Canal site remediation," he said. "In hindsight," Young said, "the global approach to cleanup would have put contaminated creek sediments into Love Canal during its remediation." Also, Young noted, the cleanup feasibility studies called for by Superfund, known as the RIF/FS process, "delay remediation and increase costs." As a prime example, Young cited Hooker's 102nd Street landfill—the last site OxyChem is now in the process of settling with the U.S. and New York State. Lois Ember
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