Docu Vidéo : l’histoire qui a choqué l’Amérique « Love Canal »

Sam.

Hello, my friends. Thank you for being here and welcome to this channel. For those who are not familiar with it, today we are going to talk about the Love Canal scandal. The Love Canal is in the United States, in New York State, Niagara Falls. So we are at the beginning of the last century and there is a vacant lot. There is a vacant lot in this region. There is a canal called the Love Canal, a canal with water flowing through it. And then there is a vacant lot that is used as a dumping ground where anyone can come and throw anything. In the 40s, a chemical plant called Hookers bought it. This chemical plant had increased its production rates during the war and in the post war period, and therefore ended up with more and more chemicals that were useless. This means that their production process produced waste. It was all sorts of waste, but it had no added value, wasn't necessarily saleable, and couldn't be reused for anything else. It had to be disposed of. It had to be disposed of and at a lower cost, of course, because if we start treating it to remove its toxicity or fix it somewhere, it's true that this increases the cost of the initial product. So it has to be disposed of as cheaply as possible. What do they do? They buy from the municipality of Niagara Falls, they buy a section of the Love Canal and they buy the surrounding land. And what do they start doing? They fill barrels with all sorts of chemicals and then bury them in there. They fill the canal with barrels and then they dig and dig and dig 6 to 7 meters down on the land and they put barrels in and cover them with earth. In the ten years following the acquisition of the land, so this is in the early 40s and up until the early 50s, they buried about 20,000 tons of all sorts of chemicals. Lots of carcinogens, lots of mutagens, dioxins, absolutely abominable stuff. About 200 different chemicals were found in 100 identified cases. To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, in the early 50s, the population began to move closer to the area. This meant that real estate developers were there, houses were being built, America was on tv, America was consuming. America wanted a house, a garden to raise a family. So the houses slowly began to move closer to the land. At that point, the lawyers and legal experts at Hooker's Chemical began to think, this land is becoming a liability and the boss of the company is asking us to stop using chemicals on this land because the population is now too close. And the lawyer said there are internal memos saying we have to get rid of it. It's not possible now. It's becoming a huge liability. And over the years it's going to come back to bite us. So it's a good thing. There's a school that's going to be built. There's a school project and the school is looking for land or because it's closer to the school. And they said, listen, we're selling you the land. But hey, he's protecting himself. There are 17 clauses in the contract saying be careful, there are products. All that, it's written by lawyers to make sure it's straight. They sold it for a symbolic dollar. It was just so they could get rid of it. So the school starts to be built. The first foundation is already being laid. The workers are starting to come across strange products. They are starting to come across barrels. They are starting to get barrels full of strange products with strange smells. And all this seems suspicious. What are they doing? The daycare. The daycare where they put the children. They move it a little. They move it a little by 20 meters and they build it and it gets built and then they go later. Throughout the 50s, houses also start to arrive. This means that the initial land that was sold to the school with the warning that there are chemicals, is being cut into slices and sold to real estate developers during these sales. This message doesn't get through. It's over. Now this story starts to get confusing, gets lost in the twists and turns of time. Houses are built, residents arrive and start having children. At one point, the school was attended by 400 children. This was in the early 60s. There were some strange things going on. The locals began to notice that when it rained, the. The puddles had shimmering colors. It was as if there was oil in their basements, in their houses. They began to see strange emanations. There were strange stinking smells. Sometimes it changed from one house to another. They began to see foam. Sometimes when water pipes burst or when it rained or something, a strange foam formed. The children played in it. They played in the foam. They played in the puddles. They could smell it everywhere. And in fact, even on the site, on the land, in the neighborhood. This time it was really a residential neighborhood. There was a strange smell. There's a rather peculiar stench in the air. The locals, those who came to live there, had no idea of the history of the place. They came because the highway was built to the south of the land. They came because there was economic activity. And that was it. We had to wait until the 70s. This story, you see, began in the 40s. We are already in the 70s.

In.

The 70s, there were two local journalists who started to poke their noses around a bit, started to do some research, because there was indeed a problem among the locals. The locals were getting sick very often, children in particular. There were many births. There were many lost children. There were many children who were born with deformities. There was a man, he said his daughter had 12 different deformities. There's a family, they have four children, two of whom were born with deformities. And there are also children who are in poor health. They have very low white blood cell counts. They have a damaged immune system. There are some strange things that catch the attention of these two journalists. They do their investigation. They publish two or three articles in 1976, and from there they. The story falls into oblivion for a while. These articles catch the attention of a journalist, an investigative journalist, like the ones there were at the time. This journalist is called Michael Brown, who wrote a book, by the way, that had the effect of a bomb in the country. He starts going door to door, he knocks on people's doors, he takes water samples, he takes samples of everything he can find soil and everything, and he starts asking for help to analyze all of this. Very quickly, the population began to realize that there was a problem, that each family that had only seen their own sick children, that had only seen their own pathologies, began to realize that they were not the only ones and that there was a huge incidence of pathologies in the neighborhood. Mr. Brown immediately began to receive threats. So where did the threats come from? The threats came from three different sources. The first threat was the chemical company. They threatened to send their lawyers to file a complaint to take him to court. They had lawyers who wrote letters. You know, they were very sure of themselves, and they knew that the guy would never have as much money as they did. So if they took him to court, the courts generally weren't there to provide justice. It was the one with the most money who won. So they promised him, promised to crush him in court. Compared to people who sometimes had black oil coming out in their garden, or even the vegetation didn't grow, aside from some stunted vegetation that would grow even in a nuclear winter. Plants don't grow in this place. And what about those people who have sick children and what the chemical plant is going to spread on them? You have no proof. Show us proof that your child is sick because of the chemical in your garden and that this chemical comes from our waste, that there is no connection. There is no way to prove it. That means they commit crimes, but they know that for a victim, they have to prove it. It's as if today someone came to burn you with an ultra sophisticated laser. And then they say, prove it. That means you have to prove it using science, using research, using knowledge that you don't necessarily have access to. So it was necessary to prove that the child was sick because of the chemical. And therefore medical research had to be conducted. Then they had to analyze this product, follow it into the basements, follow it, go to the FU, find the FU's serial number, and prove that the FU came from them. That means they are asking the impossible. The threats against journalism also came from local authorities. You know what the local authorities reaction is? They didn't do their job. They know it. They were complacent towards the industry. They signed authorizations, they let things happen. They gave building permits. And this is clearly causing illness, death, premature death, leukemia. They know it and they don't want it to happen to them. So what are they going to do? They are going to adopt this attitude of denial and threats. Thirdly, the threats also come from certain residents. Some residents who have invested in their homes do not like the work of this journalist. They said, we don't want you to draw attention to this neighborhood because it will hurt real estate prices. And we've invested in real estate. So they become aggressive toward it. In 1978, the issue finally escalated. And how far did it get? It reached the office of President Carter, the President of the United States. And then America woke up with a rude awakening. They realized several things. They realized that this extremely polluted site was uninhabitable, even though people had been living there for decades and decades who were sick. They sent doctors, they sent researchers. They found that, for example, 33% of the inhabitants had damaged DNA in this place and found huge incidences of all sorts of diseases. And of course, it was linked to chemicals. But they also realized something else. In the United States, there were a lot of sites like this. He realized that for a century, the industry had been buying vacant lots, burying them, covering them up, and then after a while, they sold them. And that was it. In 1980, the Superfund. There was a law that was called the Superfund for short. It was a law that was going to be passed, and it was a law that would allow certain places to be declared disaster areas. And then the first site that was declared a disaster area was the Love Canal site. Declaring this site a disaster area would allow the state to access funds. The funds would be used to do what? To buy all the houses. Compensating people telling them, I'll buy your house, you get out of here. Everyone left. The houses were razed. Then we started cleaning up the site. We had to dig. We had to remove the earth. We had to find the shells, remove them one by one and take them to treatment plants where these chemicals are destroyed. According to the rules of the art, the cleanup bill was $400 million, almost half a billion dollars of cleanup that lasted 21 years. Note in passing, note that the company threw away chemicals to save money and therefore improve its production margins. For every dollar that was saved by this company on waste, the taxpayer will perhaps pay $100. You see, these companies have no problem doing that, you know, transferring the responsibility to the taxpayer because the compensation had to be made by the community. You see, the thing, for every dollar that they. They save money there, you pay $100. They don't care. The important thing is that they're not the ones paying for it. The problem is that a lot of these companies work, throw away waste, and then what do they do? They sell their land. They sell it several times. They merge. They close everything down so that when the problem is discovered, it's impossible to find the culprit. And precisely, society as a whole was left with sick people, left with absolutely astronomical bills because someone wanted to make a few million 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Okay, so the land was declared completely cleared in 2004. In 2004, it was considered completely cleared. Until now. A large part of the land is enclosed by barbed wire. Well, not barbed wire. A sort of. Yes, barbed wire. Actually, there's wire fencing and barbed wire above it to prevent anyone from entering. Some houses on the edge of this land were resold when they declared the site clean and it was removed from the Superfund list. Personally, I wouldn't go and live there, but just to tell you. What's also extraordinary to see is that this journalist, Brown, despite the threats, and at the time many journalists were doing this kind of work, they were threatened by politicians. When those like those who exposed Nixon Franklin, for example, like those who exposed the tobacco lobby, these journalists really did in depth investigative work. Today, I don't think it would have happened the same way. I think that in most cases, journalists would have worked on behalf of the industry, would have worked on behalf of the authorities to cover up the residents and treat them as conspiracy theorists and mentally ill and all that, and then just hushed up the affair. The big journalism. I think that since it was done at the time. It's not something we're likely to see in our time. But that's just one scandal among many others. And the story is that from then on, when the laws began to tighten in the United States, American companies began to go elsewhere to go to other countries. And in these other countries, well, there weren't any regulations either. There were naive states that didn't have the same level of safety requirements as in the United States. And the result was that it allowed them to do whatever they wanted. They went to Africa, they went to Asia and all that. And that's why, in this context, I'll talk about it another time. We find the Bhopal disaster in India. There was an American company that stored extremely dangerous chemicals very close to people. And in conditions, the state of the factory, the maintenance and safety were appalling. So this meant that one day the tank leaked and it caused thousands of deaths and poisoned people who are sick to this day, sometimes for generations. So there you have it, my friends. This, this was just something I wanted to tell you because I think it makes a lot of sense, especially in this day and age. See you soon and thank you for watching this video. One final note before we go. The industries recruited a woman who created an association for health and science. This woman worked as a lobbyist, a scientist, right. And she declared that the diseases, cancers, DNA damage and malformations that were observed in the population had nothing to do with chemicals. She declared that it was linked to media stress, that the media generated stress about completely harmless chemicals, that the population began to believe in them.

Wow.

And by believing them well, the population began to somatize and therefore develop health problems that are expressed physically in their DNA and even from generation to generation in their children. This was just a quick note to say goodbye this time too.

Sa Sam.