The big sleazy: Love Canal ten years later.

• Author: Danzo, Andrew

For the residents of Love Canal, it was bad enough dealing with 21,800 tons of toxic ooze. Then they had to deal with the bureaucrats.

"The cap" is a masterpiece of engineering understatement. From the comer of Frontier Avenue and tooth Street, it appears to be nothing more than a huge expanse of turf, gently mounded toward the center. Even the brick building on the other side hardly seems intrusive. No doubt it's the groundskeeper's shop.

Visitors don't immediately grasp the significance, says Joann Hale, whose house is buried along with 236 others beneath "the cap," That's why she takes guests around to the opposite comer, the one farthest in from the streets, the place where the drums are, "Those barrels, they love it," Hale says. "It's a great visual."

What would Love Canal be, after all, without barrels?

Ten years ago, Love Canal spilled into its neighbors' homes and became the nation's first officially proclaimed environmental disaster. This wasn't a vague threat like smog or a dirty river or problems with the food chain. It was a chemical swamp 3,000 feet long. And it was in people's backyards-99 of them to be exact. It was drums popping from the ground where children played. It was ooze seeping through basement walls.

Within two years, in 1980, Congress created the Superfund, a multi-billion dollar program to search out and destroy-or at least confine-die abandoned dumps that suddenly seemed to be everywhere across the country. State governments also took an interest, creating their own mini-Superfunds. New consultants came forth, speaking the language of "remedial action master p"thermal destruction units," an "plasma arcs."

But after ten years, Love Canal is still an environmental and bureaucratic quagmire. The dump site itself, about ten football fields long, has only been contained, not cleaned up. It costs about a halfmillion dollars a year to maintain, and chemicals from Love Canal still contaminate nearby streams and a school yard. The U.S. Justice Department suit against Occidental Chemical to determine financial responsibility for the site-which has already cost about $250 million- is not expected to come to trial for at least another two years.

Two different evacuations allowed about 1,000 nearby families to leave, most with state and federal assistance. Bulldozers knocked 237 houses and an elementary school into their basements and buried them. surrounding that field are ten blocks of mostly empty, crumbling homes. But the arbitrary boundary that defined the buyout zone ran down the middle of creeks and split neighbors with adjacent garages. Those on the wrong side speak bitterly of being left behind with collapsed property values and possible health risks.

Most troubling of all, there has been no conclusive study of Love Canal's actual effects on its residents' health. As the New York state health department decides this year whether to try to resell the homes, it doesn't even know how healthy or sick the Love Canal refugees are because it hasn't kept track of them. It's just beginning the enormous task of locating those who moved. Residents of the area have complained of health problems ranging from miscarriages to cancer. But they still can't say whether Love Canal is to blame or whether it will affect their future health.

A tragic story in its own right, Love Canal points toward larger failings. Since Congress created the Superfund, the Environmental Protection Agency has put more than 900 sites on its list of the nation's most dangerous dumps. But only 13 have been cleaned up or contained to the point where they are now considered safe, Love Canal is hardly the biggest. In the Niagara area alone, Occidental has two other dumps with three to four times as much hazardous waste, and the EPA doesn't even rank Love Canal in the top 10 percent of the nation's most dangerous waste sites. But its significance is large. Ten years ago, Love Canal was a powerful symbol of environmental terror Today it symbolizes the state and federal government's limited ability to cope.

Basement sludge

The Niagara Falls tourist maps don't give Love Canal's location, but the cars with the out-of-state plates find it anyway, driving slowly through with home video cameras whining. Once visitors get over the fact that Love Canal itself now looks more like a fairway than a dump, they don't leave disappointed. There is something eerie about the surrounding neighborhood of closely spaced homes; it looks like a company town that the company left in a hurry. Only 70 households remain spread over ten blocks, dwelling among 527 private homes and a 304-unit public housing complex. "Nobody's got the guts to come out and say it's safe," says Louise Lewis, one of the holdouts who would like to have some neighbors again.

The presence of Lewis and the others only throws the desolation into sharper contrast-a woman carries groceries from a car parked on an otherwise deserted street; kids ride their bikes in lazy zigzags past crumbling, boarded-up homes. On 93rd Street, the venetian blinds hang twisted in the windows of the elementary school, as though a strong wind has blown through the empty building.

The 93rd Street Elementary School was only a couple of years old in 1955, when Emmett Berard and his wife moved into their new...