Love Canal activist will speak in Winston-Salem
Gibbs fought to rid N.Y. community of toxic waste
By Lisa O'Donnell
JOURNAL REPORTER
Saturday, August 11, 2007


Lois Gibbs was once so shy that she couldn’t bring herself to ask questions at PTA meetings.

But when Gibbs discovered that her sickly child was attending a school that was built near thousands of tons of chemical waste, she became the voice of a movement.

More than 25 years after the environmental disaster known as Love Canal became national news, Gibbs, who now lives in Virginia, continues her fight against the irresponsible management of hazardous waste. She will be in Winston-Salem on Sunday for a short speech and reception at the Blessings Projects Foundation on Reynolda Road.

The talk is sponsored by the Piedmont Environmental Alliance and local chapters of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League.

Love Canal is a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, N.Y. In 1978, Gibbs discovered, from a series of newspaper articles, that her child’s school was built near a chemical dumpsite used by Hooker Chemical (later Occidental Petroleum). She began to wonder whether exposure to leaking chemicals was connected to her son’s poor health, which included asthma, urinary-tract infections and a suppressed immune system.

After the school system’s board of education denied her son a transfer, Gibbs took action.

“I first went just to deal with Lois Gibbs and her children,” she said. “It was not about organizing a community. Had they transferred my son, I would not have become a leader. Once we started knocking on doors and talking to people, it was easy to move people to say someone needs to do something. We’re at serious risk here.”

Amongst themselves, neighbors had long talked about foul-smelling basements and sump pumps that corroded after just a few years.

Gibbs formed the Love Canal Parents Movement, which later turned into the Love Canal Homeowners Association.

The association found high rates of birth defects and cancer among the neighborhood’s residents. The national media soon took notice, and Gibbs became a leading spokesperson for homeowners.

The transition from quiet housewife to activist was not an easy one for Gibbs.

“When you have doors slammed in your face and you’re scared you’re going to lose children, that was the impetus to say, ‘OK, we have to talk with others and see if they are in the same boat,’” she said.

After two years of negotiations with government officials and Occidental Petroleum, the homeowners scored a major victory when Jimmy Carter approved the moving of 900 families from Love Canal in 1980.

Shortly thereafter, Congress created what is commonly called the Superfund, which is involved in cleaning up the nation’s hazardous-waste sites.

Robert Browne, a professor of biology and the director of environmental programs at Wake Forest University, said that Love Canal was a wake-up call for Americans.

“Love Canal sounded the alarm that environmental hazards might literally be under your feet, under your house, and making your children sick,” he said. “If direct chemical poisoning could happen in a quiet, leafy suburb, it could happen anywhere.”

Gibbs left the area in 1980 and formed the Center for Health, Environment and Justice in Falls Church, Va. Love Canal, she said, altered the way that she looks at government.

“I really believed that if there’s a problem and the problem is documented, somebody will fix it for you. This is how government works. They wouldn’t allow people to suffer,” she said. “When I had all those doors slammed in my face and government agencies telling me to go home, I was just shocked because that is not the way it was supposed to be.”

- Lisa O'Donnell can be reached at 727-7420 or at lo’donnell@wsjournal.com.

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If you go

Lois Gibbs will speak from 3 to 5 p.m. Sunday at the Blessings Project Foundation, 823 Reynolda Road. A reception will follow. The talk is free.

On Monday, Gibbs and other environmental activists will begin a weeklong campaign to raise awareness about megadumps with a news conference at 12:30 p.m. at the Forsyth County Government Center, 201 N. Chestnut St., in downtown Winston-Salem.

One of the participants in the news conference will be the Fight Forsyth/Stokes Dump, a group that is opposing a proposed 433-acre demolition landfill that will straddle the Forsyth-Stokes county line.

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