TOWN OF WHEATFIELD – Long ago, Jane Neumann used the woods behind her home as a playground. She's lived near the border of North Tonawanda and Wheatfield for more than 50 years, just feet from a vacant, tree-filled landfill.
But the new kids in the neighborhood should probably find another place to play.
"They're telling us," Neumann said, "that there's contaminated soil buried here."
And it's not just any contamination.
It's the same toxic waste from Love Canal-- considered one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter designated Love Canal in Niagara Falls as an emergency area, upon discovery that waste buried under the residential neighborhood had started to make people sick and cause birth defects. The people who evacuated the neighborhood received enormous settlements, and the Environmental Protection Agency eventually cleaned up the waste.
Nobody ever bothered to clean up the very small portion of this same waste in the Town of Wheatfield, though. It's been buried deep below the surface of the ground since 1968, when the Department of Transportation decided to relocate some of the Love Canal material in order to build the LaSalle Expressway.
But the waste will be gone soon. Glenn Springs Holdings Inc., which is affiliated with the company that was previously associated with Love Canal, expects to begin work to remove the toxic waste as soon as possible. The Army Corps of Engineers must award a permit for the process to begin. In total, the preparation, digging and cleanup should take a few months at most.
"It's going to be taken up to Canada and incinerated," Town of Wheatfield Supervisor Robert Cliffe said. "It will be gone."
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has tested the landfill periodically for decades, including a recent sample in 2013. It has always steadfastly maintained that the small amount of Love Canal waste has never been a threat to public safety, since tests have consistently shown that the material has not spread beyond the vacant landfill.
Carl Krolczyk does not accept that answer. Although he lives in Germany now, he took an international flight to Western New York this week to attend a question-and-answer session with state and local officials about the waste in Wheatfield. He and his brother, Steven, grew up on Forbes Street, just like Jane Neumann.
"We always knew it was weird," Carl Krolcyzk said. "You could see orange ponds that never froze."
He has now spent the past few years documenting illnesses in the neighborhood—and he claims he's found several instances of cancer. His nephew – Steven's son – has been in remission for six years after doctors diagnosed him with Neuroblastoma. Coincidentally, Carl Krolcyzk's best friend and former neighbor also has a son who was diagnosed with Neuroblastoma.
"They took love canal and put it in our backyard," Krolcyzk said. "And everybody forgot about it."
Gregory Sutton, a regional remediation engineer for NYSDEC, stressed at the question-and-answer session that there is no evidence the toxic waste has leaked from the landfill site to residential neighborhoods like Forbes Street.
However, he said the Department of Health would need to investigate any causation between the material and any illnesses in surrounding communities.
"Before the Department of Transportation even put this material there, they did a number of studies to confirm it was very tight clay," Sutton said. "And they encapsulated [the waste] in that clay by digging this hole, putting the waste in it and covering it with up to 15 feet of that tight clay. So we took soil samples all around that area, and we didn't see any movement of that material outside of where it's contained."
