Resident Refuses to Leave : Love Canal: It’s Still Home Sweet Home

Spring rains have turned the expansive mound that is Love Canal into a green playground for worm-fat robins feeding at the site of the former chemical dump.

“It’s peaceful here,” said Nunzio LoVerdi, one of a few residents fighting to remain in their neighborhood among the boarded-up houses and yellow signs that warn of toxic contamination.

LoVerdi and others are in danger of losing their homes. But it’s not directly because of the industrial chemicals that once made the community synonymous with environmental disaster.

Federal and local officials want to tear down the low-income housing project where he lives because they say it will cost too much to renovate.

“I feel double-crossed,” said LoVerdi, who with other residents hired an attorney for possible court action to block the city’s plan. “They said we could stay here until there was proof that we were in danger from the chemicals.”

In the summer of 1978, people in the quiet residential community began to complain of fumes and chemicals oozing from their basements. The state Health Department investigated, declared an emergency and moved families out of homes built on the dump.

Families living in a 10-block area near the site were given the option of a buyout and those in the nearby Lasalle housing project, where LoVerdi lives, were given the option of moving to another city project.

LoVerdi stayed because he doubted a chemical peril after the extensive containment efforts and because the park-like project was a nice place to live. The Lasalle project’s modern apartments with spacious yards were unlike any other public housing in the industrial city of 77,000.

LoVerdi said officials promised residents that they could stay until the completion of a study on whether the neighborhood is habitable. An estimated 175 other families are awaiting the results of the study to decide whether they can return.

LoVerdi, 54, and his wife are one of the 19 families that stayed in the 304-unit project.

The embattled few in the project and several dozen families who live in nearby homes all know each another and stick together. They have been to countless meetings with officials and know all about dioxin and the other chemicals dumped by Hooker Chemical Co. in the 1940s and ‘50s in the aborted waterway project that neighborhood children used as a swimming hole.

Generally, the remaining residents are older and stubborn about not leaving their homes, said Anita Gabalski, who works at the state Department of Environmental Conservation office in Love Canal.

“Many of them are hostile and bitter at this point,” Gabalski said. “They raised their families here and want more than anything to have the place restored to the way it was. They see the fight over the Lasalle project as a threat to their future and life style.”

She said residents are particularly resentful of environmentalists who want to preserve Love Canal as a symbol of the dangers of industrial pollution.

“We don’t want to be anybody’s cause,” said Louise Louis, a longtime resident. “They (environmentalists) would be just as happy if the whole area was torn down. But this is our home and we’ve got to fight for it.”

Michael Raymond, director of the Niagara Falls Housing Authority, said the decision to tear down the project was not an environmental decision but an economic one.

Federal officials are unwilling to spend the $35,000 per unit, or $8.7 million, to renovate the buildings, Raymond said. In the 10 years since the emergency declaration, there have been few repairs to them and the weather and vandals have taken their toll.