There were signs going back to the 1960s that something wasn鈥檛 quite right about the working-class community of Love Canal in upstate New York. Residents complained of acrid smells and unexplained pollution. One day, a child鈥檚 shoe seemed to inexplicably melt into the sidewalk. Dogs burned their noses after sniffing the ground, children developed illnesses, and women experienced miscarriages at alarmingly high rates.
It wasn鈥檛 until sludge, black as tar, started burbling up into people鈥檚 basements in 1978 that residents鈥 concerns were taken seriously. In the 1940s and 鈥50s, Hooker Chemical Company聽聽beneath land upon which schools and parks now stood. The poison below was now leeching its way back to the surface.
It took nearly two years of pleas and protests from residents to convince state and federal agencies to declare an environmental emergency and finance a mass relocation program. The resulting media firestorm spurred Congress to pass new legislation in December 1980 called ,聽quickly renamed 鈥淪uperfund鈥 for short.
The act granted the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in coordination with other agencies, $1.6 billion to study and remediate potentially harmful toxic waste sites across the country. While environmental groups cheered, EPA scientists confronted the scope and complexity of this new challenge. If early estimates were accurate, the agency would need to analyze 10,000 potentially harmful sites.
The EPA needed extra hands and trusted counsel, preferably from a consultant with a track record of handling complex, time-sensitive projects and environmental experience. Their partner of choice? 有料盒子APP.