Blobs Familiar to Love Canal Survivor : Mobile Home Park Oozing Toxic Waste

When Terry Freiermuth began talking to his neighbors about the oily patches of soil in the trailer park where he lives, he couldn’t find many who shared his worries.

But the 29-year-old truck mechanic knew what he was talking about. He had grown up four miles away at Love Canal, the neighborhood declared a national disaster area a decade ago because of chemical pollution.

“People thought I was crazy,” Freiermuth said, “but I know something about chemicals. It’s the same damn thing all over again.”

Last month, federal officials advised that industrial chemicals in the soil and ground water under the Forest Glen mobile home park pose a significant threat to the health of the 51 families living there. They urged people to move away.

“There is continuous danger to you and your children if you stay,” Robert Salkie of the Environmental Protection Agency told a gathering of the residents.

Authorities think the ground on which the trailer park was built was once a chemical dump. EPA enforcement official David Payne said several companies are under investigation. They include Occidental Chemical Corp., which a federal judge earlier this year held partly responsible for Love Canal’s contamination.

Forest Glen residents have reported problems a lot like those at Love Canal: allergies, unexplained rashes, headaches and fears--as yet unproven--of higher-than-normal rates of cancer and other serious illnesses.

Freiermuth, who has lived in Forest Glen nine years, had been pestering federal officials about the seepage since early in 1987.

He ordered his daughters, ages 4 and 8, to play on the sidewalk, to stay away from the grass and dirt. He warned them against playing with the taffy-like clumps of soil.

Protective of Children

“I figured there’s nothing anybody can do for me after all these years,” he said, “but I hope it’s not too late for my kids.”

He blames the chemicals for his youngest child’s eczema, and he worries about Kathy, his wife, who is pregnant.

Five contaminants were identified in Forest Glen: aniline, phenothiazine, benzothiazole, mercaptobenzothiazole and polyaromatic hydrocarbons, said David Payne, an EPA enforcement official. They apparently were byproducts from the manufacture of other chemicals, he said. He added that exposure to aniline causes cancer.

EPA officials suspect that the contamination came from some of the many chemical companies attracted to the area for the cheap hydroelectric power from the rushing Niagara River.

That was the story at Love Canal, where chemicals dumped in an abandoned waterway project in the 1940s and 1950s began seeping into cellars and back yards in the 1960s. And they caused illness.

About 1,030 families evacuated a 10-block area around Love Canal in 1978 and 1979. Today, the neighborhood is a ghost town except for cleanup workers in rubber suits and a few residents who chose to remain.

Freiermuth wasn’t the only one who moved from Love Canal to Forest Glen, but he was one of the few who didn’t quietly accept the new situation. “Part of it is that we came here to forget about Love Canal,” said Freiermuth, a small, serious man with unruly blond hair and bushy sideburns. “But a lot of people figure that the chemicals are everywhere in this town.”

Federal officials have promised to help the residents of Forest Glen. The EPA’s Salkie said the neighborhood will become “a model site, to show how Superfund (toxic waste cleanup project) can work.”

The residents aren’t cooperating, though. Most of them, including the Freiermuths, have refused the government offers of temporary housing.