WHAT HIGH SCHOOL PRINCIPAL checks out his football field—with a geiger counter? That’s what I’m pondering late one sunny afternoon as I stand outside the fence of Niagara Catholic High School’s gridiron. Having read EPA reports, I know the answer: a high school principal in Niagara Falls. A principal whose school lies about two miles west of Love Canal. Whose parking lot, according to the EPA, occasionally yields up mysterious waste drums. Who watches his team, the Niagara Catholic Patriots, play atop a field that doubles as a Superfund site. Whose town—even as its natural wonder was being rebuilt by the Army Corps of Engineers and publicized by Marilyn Monroe—was quietly playing a key role in developing, and disposing of waste from, America’s atomic arsenal.
For most communities, radioactive 50-yard lines and barrels of chemicals bobbing up in school parking lots would be bizarre anomalies; in Niagara Falls, they’re unpleasantly familiar. The town has had a hazardous waste problem ever since its waterfall was harnessed for power. Today the Environmental Protection Agency lists ten active Superfund sites in the city of Niagara Falls, three on the National Priorities List, meaning they are dangerous enough to be eligible for long-term remediation. The New York State Department of Environmental Protection lists 649 hazardous waste “areas of concern” in Erie and Niagara Counties, and designates about half the downtown of Niagara Falls as brownfields, former industrial sites where redevelopment is complicated by toxic contamination. And the Army Corps of Engineers’ environmental cleanup program for former nuclear weapons plants, the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, or FUSRAP, has more locations on the Niagara frontier than anywhere else in the nation: seven radioactively contaminated sites within ten miles of America’s waterfall.
Many of these sites were little-known until 2000, when USA Today published a multipart series detailing the extensive nuclear contamination of people and communities by government contractors during the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Even now, few people outside the region are aware of Niagara’s key role in the nuclear weapons complex. This is typical of the area’s environmental legacy. Like the toxic brew in the landfills, the history of both the Manhattan Project and its aftermath is covered over and hard to access, but bits of it burble to the surface from time to time. Cesium-137 in Love Canal. A silo full of radium in Lewiston. Radioactive sludge in the groundwater at Tonawanda. Roads and driveways throughout the region with gamma readings above background levels. Those are the things I learn about not from talking to activists, but from reading official government documents. Love Canal became a national byword for ecological disaster in the late 1970s, but few people in the nation realized what many Niagara locals knew in their hearts: that ditch full of toxic chemicals was not the end of the story; it was the tip of the iceberg.
The chemical industry began the practice of treating Niagara Falls, or at least its margins, as a dump. Throughout the forties and fifties, as dumping went on unabated, residents complained of noxious fumes emanating from sewers, mysterious barrels in vacant lots and substances that caused coughing or headaches or burns. What they didn’t know was that a new danger had been added to the mix: radiation.
When most of us think of the Manhattan Project’s race to build the atomic bomb, we think of physicists scribbling equations at Columbia and mushroom clouds in the New Mexico desert. The National Park Service recently proposed three locations for a national park commemorating America’s atomic legacy: the national laboratory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; the testing grounds at Los Alamos, New Mexico; and the plutonium production reservation at Hanford, Washington. But there were important sites all across the nation. The original offices of the Manhattan Engineer District, the army branch that oversaw the project, were in Lower Manhattan at 270 Broadway—two blocks from where I live. I like to walk by and imagine poker-faced generals inside, using code words to discuss the big shipment of uranium that was stored in a 20th Street warehouse, now home to trendy art galleries. The building at 270 Broadway, a state office complex, was converted to luxury condominiums a few years ago—four-bedroom units started at $4.6 million. I doubt many buyers realized they were buying a piece of atomic history along with their Sub-Zero refrigerators and Philippe Starck soaking tubs.
In the same way, few people think “Niagara” when they think of the Bomb. “When the TV specials speak of radiation problems,” local activist Don Finch wrote in an opinion column for the Tonawanda News in 1998, “you will hear the names Los Alamos, Hanford, and Oak Ridge mentioned time after time. Yet, Tonawanda is NEVER mentioned.” Nor is Lockport, or Buffalo, or Niagara Falls. But the factories of the Niagara frontier played a key role in making Fat Man, Little Boy, and all the unnamed bombs that came after those first entrants in the nuclear arms race. In 2000, the Department of Energy released a list of 336 facilities that had government nuclear contracts and would be covered under the new Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act, which guaranteed medical expenses to laborers made sick by their work on atomic weapons. Eight sites were in Tennessee, and two were in Washington. New Mexico had ten, Nevada four. New York State had thirty-six. Thirteen were on the Niagara frontier.
Why was Niagara so central?
“Several things were going on,” Timothy Karpin tells me by phone. “Most of the existing sophisticated chemical plants were in the Northeast. They had the labs and facilities in place to be able to take these materials. The other thing was that General Groves and others were looking at people they knew personally; a lot of business at that time happened through personal contacts.” General Leslie Groves, military director of the Manhattan Engineer District, was the manager of America’s atomic effort.
“They were worried about keeping secrets,” adds Jim Maroncelli. “And if they knew each other, they trusted each other. The people in charge of the companies may have been aware of what the projects were about, though the workers were not.”
Timothy and Jim are the authors of The Traveler’s Guide to Nuclear Weapons, available on CD-ROM, a must-have for anyone who likes road trips, American history and A-bombs, and really, who doesn’t? In addition to giving handy overviews of America’s nuclear timeline and the weapons production process, the book maps out the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, chapter by chapter, in order of production stage.
A nuclear bomb requires fissionable materials: enriched uranium or plutonium. Plutonium was created in nuclear reactors; uranium was mined and then processed and refined. There’s also a need for simple metal components, triggers, and fuels. Weapons must be fabricated and assembled. Physicist Niels Bohr told Edward Teller in 1939 that just separating the uranium for a bomb would require turning the whole country into a factory, and General Groves and his associates did just that: Colorado mined uranium, Rust Belt states like New York, Michigan and Ohio milled it, and Tennessee enriched it. Washington created plutonium, Ohio built polonium triggers, New Mexico fabricated the weapons, Pennsylvania conducted implosion tests, Utah and California test-dropped dummy bombs, and New Mexico, of course, saw the first detonation. And that’s just a sampling. Thousands of industrial sites were utilized, particularly in the years before the Atomic Energy Commission consolidated production at its own facilities. By the time the first nuclear device was exploded in New Mexico, locations in more than thirty-nine states as well as mines in Canada and Africa were involved, and more than two hundred private contractors, many of whom hired subcontractors of their own, had been recruited to the cause. Timothy and Jim’s book catalogs these sites, and includes handy tips on visiting them: how to get there, where to park, how to get the best view and whether you will need special clearance. It outdoes my hydroinfrastructure road trip by a long shot.
In the Niagara region, Linde Air Products, a division of Union Carbide in Tonawanda, was one of the most important sites. Linde scientists were already working with uranium to produce dyes before the war (that nifty orange vintage Fiestaware is slightly radioactive), and they brought this experience to bear turning the uranium oxide in mined ores into uranium dioxide, used in nuclear fuel, and uranium tetrachloride, a stepping-stone to making uranium metal. They also experimented with enrichment of uranium hexafluoride by gaseous diffusion, the method ultimately used to make the nuclear fuel for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Linde was perhaps the most critical Niagara region site for the project, and the reason the Manhattan Engineer District put one of its six field offices in Tonawanda, but many other local factories were involved. Electro-Metallurgical in Niagara Falls turned Linde’s uranium tetrachloride into metal ingots that could be used in reactors. Simonds Saw & Steel, a few miles inland at Lockport, rolled uranium fuel rods. Local metallurgical specialists, like Bethlehem Steel in Lackawanna, outside Buffalo, and U.S. Vanadium in Niagara Falls, developed ways of processing and reprocessing uranium. Hooker made additives necessary for uranium refining. All of it happened in secret.
“The people at Fernald (a plant in Ohio) would make a metal part and send it a few miles away to Ashtabula. The plant there would then cut it and ship it to South Carolina,” Jim tells me. “When we were talking with the people who worked at all these different facilities and laboratories, in many cases they did not know how they themselves fit into the overall operation.”
Only a small group of scientists understood the big picture, and they carried technology from one industrial corporation to another. Workers almost never knew what they were working on. Men who handled uranium were rarely told they were handling radioactive material. Drivers trucking uranium ore from one plant to another weren’t told what their cargo was. At Simonds Saw & Steel in Lockport, workers who were rolling uranium and thorium rods to be used in nuclear reactors were visited by federal agents and warned not to discuss their work—but they weren’t told what it was. Even the train engineers who brought uranium ores to the Linde Air Products plant at Tonawanda didn’t know what their train was carrying. The engineer had to stop the train at the factory gates and get off. A Linde employee would come out and steer the train into the plant for unloading. I imagine the guy pacing back and forth outside the gate, maybe having a smoke, waiting to get his train back.
“During that time period,” Timothy says, “it was perhaps easier to tell people to shut up and do your job and don’t ask questions.”
Timothy and Jim are atomic geeks, and I mean that in the best way. They talk with an almost breathless enthusiasm about the nuclear weapons complex; it’s clear they’re impressed by the scale and speed of the operation. Both of them work as environmental consultants, helping remediate the kinds of sites they list in their book. As scientists, their approach is superrational. At one point, Jim refers to America’s stockpile of waste plutonium as a “national treasure.” They seem slightly bemused by my focus on Niagara, as if contaminating America’s most famous natural wonder is no different from contaminating a strip of untraveled desert in Nevada. And they’re right, it really isn’t. Such carelessness with human life would be appalling wherever it happened. Timothy and Jim agree, but they point out there was a reason behind it.
“They were saving the world,” Timothy says.
They were so busy saving the world, in fact, that they didn’t care what they left behind.
“You’re not chicken, are you?” Ralph Krieger asks me. “Don’t be chicken. Remember one thing: Railroad tracks are federal property. And they can’t chase you off them unless they’re railroad people.” Ralph has promised to give me a tour of the Linde Air Products plant at Tonawanda. Now the sprawling Praxair complex, the former Linde plant is infamous today for the amount of radioactive contamination left behind. The most egregious, and unfixable, mess came about after the plant dumped 37 million gallons of radioactive uranium-laced sludge into shallow wells on its property in the forties. Radioactive isotopes eventually found their way into local creeks, and ultimately, the nearby Niagara River, which means that uranium from building the Bomb went over Niagara Falls. Linde chose this method of disposal because, as they wrote in a letter to the Manhattan Engineer District field office, “our Law Department advises us that it is considered impossible to determine the course of subterranean streams and, therefore, the responsibility for any contamination could not be fixed.” In other words, this stuff will make a big mess, but no one can trace it back to us.
Liquid effluent was only part of the contamination at Linde. The Army Corps of Engineers began remediating the site under FUSRAP in 2000, and work continues to this day. Ralph, who worked at Linde for thirty-four years, can’t take me onto the property, but he says there’s a good view from the railroad tracks.
But first he has some stuff to unload. We meet on Third Street outside the Seneca Niagara Casino, and Ralph promptly goes to the back of his black Chevy pickup and drops the gate. There are two white file boxes in the back, overflowing with booklets and papers.
“I’ve brought some materials,” he says. “I was up late last night, making copies for you.”
Ralph is a stocky man, with salt and pepper hair on a squarish head. He wears black jeans, a checked shirt and a black sweatshirt, and he stands solidly but bent slightly forward, the posture of a man with a lifetime of physical labor behind him. At Linde, he was president of Local 8215 of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (now part of United Steelworkers) for thirty years.
“I’m still vice president of Amalgamated Groups,” he tells me proudly. “I got eight companies.” I begin to see why Seneca Niagara security guards keep walking by the truck, casting dark glances our way.
“I got thrown out of there,” Ralph says, waving a hand toward the casino after two guards stalk by.
“What’d you do?” I ask him.
“Tried to organize the workers,” he says. “I handed the bartender a tip with my card folded inside it.” Ralph has brown, almond-shaped eyes that he fixes on yours when he talks, waiting to make sure you’re getting it. After a moment, he laughs fondly at the memory. When he laughs, his face cracks with a kind of relief.
Ralph opens the first box and pulls out a photocopied news article. Under the headline “Praxair Concerned with Cleanup Efforts,” there’s an aerial photo of the Linde plant.
“This is the infamous processing building,” he tells me, pointing. “You see it? That’s Building 30. That was the main processing building. And then over here is the roadway. Building 38 was right there, 27 was there, but we tore that down. That was radioactive and we tore it down.”
From 1940 to 1948, the years of its contracts with the Manhattan Engineer District, Linde processed 28,000 tons of radioactive ore from mines in Colorado, Canada and Africa.
“The richest ore came from Africa,” Ralph tells me. “That was the richest ore in uranium; it was twenty percent. That was great. But the bad part was, it was radium too.”
Actually, African ores, mined in what was then the Belgian Congo, could be as much as 65 percent uranium. When the ore came into Linde on railcars, stored in burlap bags, workers would unload it by hand. They were never told to treat it differently from any other ore. The burlap bags that had held the uranium ore were stacked up in the storage area, and workers used them as an informal place to sit and rest or eat lunch. The bags were eventually incinerated in the late 1950s.
According to the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, workers in only one building at Linde were required to wear dosimeters, badges to track their radiation exposure. But all workers were required to pass through a monitor when leaving the plant. If they didn’t clear the monitor, they were told to go scrub off in the shower and try again, until they could clear it. Workers were never told what exactly they were being monitored for.
Ralph didn’t work in the plant during the Manhattan Project years, but his father, who was union president for thirty years, did. I ask Ralph if the men at Linde then knew they were helping their country build a nuclear bomb.
“They had no idea, as far as I know,” he says.
Ralph spends two hours taking me through the documents that tell the story of Linde. Then we get in my car and drive to Tonawanda. He frowns at my Toyota Prius. When we zip through the E-ZPass tollgate on the Grand Island Bridge, he tells me that for every E-ZPass, a toll collector somewhere has lost his job.
We park at a vacant warehouse adjacent to the Praxair property and walk down the railroad tracks, toward the plant complex. Over our heads, high-voltage transmission wires buzz faintly. It’s a beautiful fall afternoon. Crickets chirp all along the Praxair fence, two rows of razor-wire-topped chain link posted with bright yellow radiation hazard signs. Ralph tells me he was walking there one day when some kids came along the tracks with their dog.
“I told them, ‘Look at these signs. What do you think that means? It’s all contaminated here.’ I told them, ‘Don’t be coming down here anymore, especially with your dog, if you want him to live.’ They asked ‘What’s it from?’ and I said, ‘This is where we used to make the atomic bomb.’” There’s a hint of pride in his voice.
Ralph points out every building as we walk. The Linde cleanup is still very much underway. Building 30 has been taken down and removed, but near where it used to be, a steam shovel is chewing up ground and depositing it, a shovelful at a time, into trucks. According to a 2004 press release from the Corps of Engineers, five buildings and more than 200,000 tons of material will eventually be removed from the site and sent for recycling and disposal at hazardous waste facilities outside of New York State. Some of that material awaits transport now; just inside the inner fence, stacked railroad containers bear signs saying Do Not Hump. I ask Ralph what that means.
“They can’t bang the car; they have to hook it,” he tells me. “Most of the time, when they’re switching tracks for going wherever they’re going, they’ll let the car roll down the hill and hit the next car. They can’t do that.” He stops and we both stand there, watching the shovel scrape away at the contaminated earth.
Ralph started working at Linde in 1964. Back then, only a few workers knew about the plant’s Manhattan Project legacy. But they did know that the plant had radiation issues. One worker there was nicknamed “Nuclear Eddie,” because he had the official geiger counter. Every now and then, Nuclear Eddie would be called to check something out. In the late 1970s, Linde decided to put new ventilators on the roof of Building 30. The old ones had been there since Manhattan Project days. Ralph’s maintenance crew was brought in to remove the old ventilators. They got them down, but when Ralph went to take them to the scrap pile, his supervisors stopped him.
“They came over,” he says, “and said, uh, no, don’t do that.” The supervisor told Ralph to take the ventilators into another building, where some plastic sheeting had been laid out. Two men were told to wire-brush them.
“They didn’t have white suits on; they didn’t have breathing masks. They had just regular paper masks,” he says. “They would wire-brush it, and then it would sit there for a couple of days. And Nuclear Eddie would come over with the geiger counter and read it, the whole thing: ‘No guys, wire-brush it some more.’ By hand! Not electric! This was a hand wire brush. They wanted it so they could just throw it out in the scrap. So after about three or four times, they finally got it down to where they thought it was okay, and they collapsed it and threw it out on the scrap pile for the scrap dealer to pick up. They did five of them like that. They took weeks to wire-brush them, read them, wire-brush them. Those were the exhausters that were exhausting uranium dust out of there.”
Ralph’s thick eyebrows draw together. “One of the guys is already dead,” he tells me. “Died at a very young age. Tommy Wheeler—he was probably in his late forties. Very good welder. Excellent welder-fabricator. But he happened to be working in maintenance and that was one of the jobs he got.”
Tommy Wheeler is only one of the cancer victims Ralph tells me about as we’re looking at the Linde site. He tells me about Bobby, who died of bladder cancer at fifty-six; Charley, who worked in the room with the African ore; Sam, who died of lymphatic cancer; and Eddie, who’s dying of cancer now. Whenever he starts talking about one of his former fellow workers, his fuzzy eyebrows draw together and his eyes soften. Then he looks at the plant and starts speculating about the cleanup some more. At the end of the day, he tells me that every one of his work partners has died of cancer, as has his brother, who also worked at Linde. Ralph’s personal experience, of course, does not constitute an epidemiological study. But Linde is one of the two private contracting sites where the federal government did do a worker health study. Carried out in the early eighties and reported in the USA Today series, the study found elevated incidences of cancers and respiratory ills among workers.
“Listen. It was horrific,” Ralph says as we’re heading back to the car, and at first I don’t know what he means. “But they wouldn’t surrender. They were told to surrender and they didn’t want to surrender. Do you want to sacrifice two million men in a fight like we got today? ’Cause that’s what it would have been. They would have fought to the death. Or do you drop a couple of bombs and convince them maybe we got a few more of them?”
Clearly, Ralph Krieger is no antiwar activist. I think of Timothy Karpin’s comment: They were saving the world. I ask Ralph what should have happened that didn’t happen. He stops walking and fixes me with that look.
“What should have happened here and at all the sites,” he says, “is they should not have been left knowing—and they knew—what the long-term effects are. They should have at least tried to clean it up better than they did, but they didn’t want to do it. And the reason was money.”
When I get back to my hotel room that night, my face has a line down the center. The right half is glowing red. I stare at myself in the mirror. For a minute, I panic. I never should have gone to that radioactive factory! And then I realize it’s just a sunburn. It’s only on one side because I stood there with Ralph, not moving for several hours, listening as he slowly unfurled his tale.
They wouldn’t surrender. The story we all learn about the Bomb is that it was a horrible thing to do to Japanese civilians, but we had to do it. What that story usually leaves out is that the Manhattan Project was also a horrible thing to do to many unwitting Americans. Would the calculus of acceptable collateral damage change if people were aware of how far that damage reached?
Pictures of General Leslie Groves show a portly man with a thumb-shaped head. In contrast to the natty, European-looking scientists whose knowledge of nuclear physics built his bomb, Groves looks like what he was: a manager, a company man who worked fourteen-hour days and never let on to his wife what he was doing. Coordinating supply chains, land acquisition, labor and manufacturing as well as the ongoing theory behind it all, Groves spent $2.2 billion dollars of the taxpayers’ money without Congress ever knowing the project existed. He convinced hundreds of corporate contractors to assist in a project they never fully understood. He hired hundreds of thousands of workers without ever revealing to most of them what they were doing.
On July 17, 1945, General Groves stood behind a cement and earth wall seventeen miles from the Trinity test site and saw the results of his effort light up the mountains around Alamogordo, an effect he later described as beautiful. Seven miles closer to the blast, Los Alamos lab director J. Robert Oppenheimer hunched in a bunker with test director Kenneth Bainbridge. “It worked,” Oppenheimer reportedly said, and Bainbridge declared, “Now we are all sons of bitches.” Three weeks later, a B-29 took off from Tinian Island in the Marianas with the bomb called Little Boy aboard.
History holds that a line was crossed at Hiroshima. But what was it exactly? The line between military and civilian targets had already been crossed in the long and awful war—German schoolgirls boiled to death in water tanks during the firebombing of Dresden; Londoners died in their beds during the Blitz. But the flights of the Enola Gay and the Bockscar still spawn a special feeling of horror, in part because of the seeming disparity between effort and result. One small bomb—Little Boy was 6 feet long—one quick flight, manned by eleven jolly-looking men, one opening of the bomb-bay doors. At Nagasaki, the target was clouded over, but then a small break in the cover gave Captain James Van Pelt a window to slip through. So much hung on so little. Or so it seemed, because the extraordinary effort behind that bomb was covered up.
Shortly after Hiroshima, 6 million leaflets were dropped on Japan, along with Japanese newspaper stories showing the destruction. “To the Japanese People:” the leaflets began, “America asks that you take immediate heed of what we say on this leaflet. We are in possession of the most destructive explosive ever devised by man.” We are in possession—as if it somehow fell into our hands. More than any other product of human effort, there’s a powerful ambivalence about having built the atom bomb. The White House press release after Hiroshima called the world’s first nuclear bombing “the greatest achievement of organized science in history,” but taking credit for the thing was never uncomplicated. Even General Groves, in a Trinity memo he and his deputy Thomas Farrell drafted for the secretary of war, described a feeling of having usurped power that didn’t belong to humanity. The sound of the explosion, they wrote, was a “strong, sustained awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved for the Almighty.” Here, once more, was the sublime, resurrected by the awful metaphysics of the mushroom cloud.
One historian later described that same blast as “a Niagara of white light.”
After the war, the government canceled many of its contracts, but the nuclear ones lived on; America needed an atomic arsenal. With the Soviet Union’s test of a nuclear device in 1949, the Cold War was officially on. The United States, ignoring the objections of Oppenheimer and some of the other Manhattan Project scientists, moved to develop thermonuclear weapons, with thousands of times the destructive power of the first generation of nuclear bombs. The government would eventually shift production to its own facilities at places like Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but many of the Niagara region factories continued to process uranium well into the fifties.
In the meantime, the long-term effects of radiation were becoming clear. The massive production effort of the Manhattan Project was accompanied by the collection of health data. Workers were tested, usually anonymously. Huge animal studies were done: scientists at the University of Rochester injected dogs, cats, rabbits and mice with plutonium and exposed them to plutonium dust in specially built gas chambers. They even injected eleven unknowing human subjects with plutonium in 1945 and 1946, a gruesome experiment that, along with other experiments on humans, was first made widely public in 1994, prompting a government inquiry and an apology from President Clinton’s energy secretary, Hazel O’Leary.
Human experiments on unwitting subjects bespeak a callous disregard for human life, but in an odd way, they also testify to a growing concern for worker safety. Scientists were beginning to fear the effects radiation would have both in the short and the long term. It’s hard to say how much they knew and when. In the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, General Groves seemed genuinely baffled by reports detailing the grisly effects of radiation sickness. Some scientists insisted the Japanese were simply suffering the aftereffects of regular burns, and in an attempt to calm the public’s anxieties, Groves, Oppenheimer and a few others were photographed standing at Trinity’s ground zero to prove there was no dangerous radioactivity lingering there. Of course, they were wearing special booties to keep from tracking radioactive sand off the site.
In the years after the war, the effects of both high and low doses of radiation were becoming increasingly clear. The newly formed Atomic Energy Commission, charged with maintaining weapons production, became increasingly concerned about issues of worker safety and waste disposal. But when they tried to issue guidelines and enforce standards, their contractors resisted on the grounds that safety standards would create fear and slow things down. According to Jim Maroncelli and Timothy Karpin, the atomic travelers, this was because of two things: patriotism and profit.
It’s a dangerous combination—the greater good and the bottom line. During the Cold War, military and civilian contractors alike were driven by what Timothy calls “piles of money and an almost religious desire to kill communists.” Love of country merged with love of cash to maintain the frantic pace of production.
“Under this combination of the national mission and pure profit,” Timothy tells me, “Atomic Energy Commission managers and corporate leaders decided that workers’ health and lives were not as important. And since the drum of patriotism was incessant, workers also accepted and often trusted the decisions of management as part of their duty to their country. And besides, the other choice, unemployment, was not an acceptable alternative.”
Ralph Krieger gives me the phone number of a man named Harry Wiest. I meet Harry on a Sunday at the Goodyear plant where he works. He’s standing at the gatehouse when I pull into the parking lot, a tall, good-looking man with a neatly trimmed mustache that forms an upside-down U around his mouth. He’s friendly and quick to smile, even in his hardhat and clutching a sheaf of blueprints: as union vice president, he’s doing fire inspections today. Harry is going to introduce me to his father Dan, and it’s easiest to meet here because, even on Sunday, Harry is working a double shift. Dan drives up within two minutes of my arrival. Together, we go through the security gate and into the Goodyear factory to find a quiet place to chat.
Inside, the plant looks like a college campus, spotless and immaculately landscaped. Metal tanks gleam and the sidewalks are so clean you could eat off them. Above us, framed against the brilliant sky, steam pipes and electrical lines in square metal exoskeletons connect buildings. A huge smokestack blinks down at us. We go into the empty lunchroom—also spotless—and sit down at a cafeteria table to talk.
Dan Wiest is one of the many Niagara workers who was unknowingly touched by the Cold War arms race. In 1950, he came from Pennsylvania, where he had been laid off from turnpike construction, and got a job at Linde.
“I had a friend on the turnpike who said ‘Let’s go to Niagara Falls; I hear there’s a lot of jobs up there,’” he tells me. “You coulda went to any plant in Niagara Falls and got a job back then.”
Dan is a striking older man, small, with a deeply lined face harboring electric-blue eyes. His thick white hair rears up in tufts that stick out in many different directions from his head. He has prostate cancer and has submitted a claim under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act. It’s still being processed.
After two months on the job at Linde, he was drafted for the Korean War. He came back to the Falls in 1952 and got his job back. He moved into Griffon Manor, the housing project built near Love Canal by the federal government. His children were born there, including Harry, who chips in that he remembers riding his bike around the neighborhood. It was a nice neighborhood; they liked living there.
Dan’s case illustrates one of the many problems with the Energy Employees Compensation Act: how to assign blame. In the fifties, he worked on and off at Linde, but whenever production slowed, he was laid off. Then he would go to other plants. He worked at U.S. Vanadium, also an Atomic Energy Commission contractor, at the New York Power Authority project, and at GM’s Harrison Radiator Division. He picked apples for a season in Ransomville, below the escarpment. He worked briefly at Olin Mathieson, another nuclear contractor.
“I was only there a month or so,” he says, “and I broke out in boils all over my body from the chemicals. They made me leave.”
Dan’s claim is against Union Carbide, Linde’s parent company at the time. One of his jobs there was to feed ore into a big crusher. I ask him what it was, but he doesn’t know.
“There was one place—I was trying to think of the name of it—where they had this smelly stuff,” he says. “It was part of Union Carbide.”
“Was it Electromet, Pop?” Harry offers.
“That’s it. Union Carbide Electro-Metallurgical. The last guy I knew that worked there died two years ago.”
ElectroMet was one of the earliest factories to begin producing uranium metal. In the first year of production, workers there made 1,000 tons of uranium ingots, most of which became fuel for Hanford’s nuclear reactors. The building in which all of this was done was demolished in 1958.
At Linde, Dan worked in Building 6, which has since been demolished by the Corps of Engineers cleanup, and in Building 8, the powerhouse. Its fate is uncertain.
I ask Dan if he knew Linde had handled uranium—supposedly the plant’s uranium processing went on standby in 1949—or that the place he worked made bombs for the Cold War. He shakes his head cheerfully.
“Nope,” he says. “Back then we had no idea.”
Dan seems a little surprised that anyone would want to talk about his experiences. Like many men of his generation, he’s a man of few words. The conversation proceeds in mild fits and starts, and when there’s silence, Dan glances at his son, his face lit with quiet pride.
“You’re looking real official there, with your hat, Harry,” he finally can’t help saying. Harry opens up the blueprints and shows his dad the spots he’s inspecting today.
“I work here eighty, a hundred hours a week,” Harry tells me. “We’re short-staffed. Us manufacturing people, we’re dinosaurs.”
Harry has been fighting bladder cancer himself. The Goodyear plant has had a mini-epidemic: thirty-nine cases. In 1989, the union brought in the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to investigate; they traced the cancers to the chemical ortho-toluidine used in making Wingstay, an antioxidant that prevents tires from cracking. When the epidemic was first noticed, Goodyear claimed they had no idea what could be causing it. But attorneys for the sick workers found documents showing that DuPont, previous manufacturers of ortho-toluidine, gave Goodyear a written warning in 1977—the year Harry started working there—stating that the chemical caused cancer in rats and mice. DuPont recommended giving workers protective gear. Goodyear did not. Today, after union intervention, they do.
Listening to Harry discuss his cancer, so many years after the Manhattan Project, I can see why workers would have gone to work in factories that gave them boils and rashes, why men would have crushed strange metals without asking what might be airborne in the resulting dust, why the workers at Linde would have made jokes about “Nuclear Eddie” and gone on scrubbing a radioactive vent. Harry is grateful for his job at Goodyear. It’s a good job. He’s a unionized worker with a good hourly wage and medical benefits. After five years of working there, he got vested in his pension plan, so even if he’s laid off, he won’t lose it all, as workers used to do. Harry was laid off once for fourteen months, and he applied for other jobs, but when they asked him if he would go back to Goodyear if recalled, he was honest and said yes. He has seniority there.
“I want to retire out of this plant,” he tells me. He even met his wife on the job; she worked in the Goodyear lab. He’s not happy about the bladder cancer, but he credits Goodyear with putting a screening program in place, and offering the protective gear. He insists they acted quickly, and I don’t ask him about the 1977 DuPont memo. As a union officer in his local, he’s sending out letters to all workers, even retired ones, making sure they come in for screenings. His own cancer was caught early, though not by the factory’s screening.
“Goodyear has been good to me,” he says.
Dan Wiest, Harry’s father, still knows so little about what happened to him. The more people I talk to about the Bomb and Niagara, the more it begins to seem like the problem—just as much as ores and isotopes—is talk. Or rather, lack of it. For years, talk about the project was suppressed, and even today, darkness shrouds the activities of the government contractors. The radiological legacy they left behind is far less known than the legacy of government sites like Hanford or Oak Ridge. That, more than anything, is the line that was crossed with the Manhattan Project: the line between a knowable world and one based on secrets and lies.
“After spending more than $5.8 trillion,” write Timothy and Jim on their Web site atomictraveler.com, “the American public is still in the dark.”
One effect of darkness is rumors. Niagara County abounds in them: giant rabbits, glow-in-the-dark deer, plutonium in the drinking water, radioactive bowling alleys, driveways where geiger counters peg. Some of the rumors have clear groundings in fact; others point more toward emotion than logic. In the early eighties, just after Love Canal, the region saw an outburst of alleged sightings of a Bigfoot creature in the Lewiston area and a Loch Ness–like sea serpent was reported to be lurking in the Niagara River. Clearly, something monstrous was afoot.
Niagara’s role in the nuclear weapons complex was not unusual for an industrial region. Other Rust Belt communities today face the same legacy: the Corps of Engineers is currently cleaning up twenty-two sites in nine states, including sites in St. Louis, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Middlesex, New Jersey. But what happened after the Cold War at Niagara does stand out. In spite of its fame as a natural wonder, the Niagara Falls region became the dumping site for chemical and radiological waste not only from its own factories, but from those of other states as well.
Seven miles below the Falls, just east of the Lewiston crossing where slaves rowed to freedom, and just north of the reservation where the Tuscaroras took on Robert Moses, is Model City. Little more than a zip code today, Model City was originally meant to be a new, utopian metropolis at the other end of Love Canal. On the flat plain that stretches from the Niagara Escarpment to the south shore of Lake Ontario, “the most appealing and beautiful town site in existence,” William T. Love intended to build a workers’ paradise. Powered by electricity generated with the canal, Model City would eventually grow into a metropolis of 700,000, “the new manufacturing center of America.” Love got title to the land from the state, but his canal never made it that far. What’s now called Love Canal is the abandoned intake end of the canal. The never-built outfall is Model City.
The area, a bucolic plain of orchards and small towns, was sparsely populated before World War II. In 1942, a large chunk of it was commandeered by the federal government and turned into a TNT factory known as the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (LOOW). Today this flat rectangle of land is still called by that name, and it’s the site of a household sanitary landfill and the Northeast’s only operating hazardous waste dump, Chemical Waste Management’s Model City facility. When Tom Brokaw’s desk was contaminated by anthrax mailed in September 2001 to senators and news media, hazmat crews removed it, sprayed it with bleach, pulverized it, and sent it to Chemical Waste Management for disposal. Mr. Brokaw’s desk was only the latest entrant in a long list of things dumped at the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works, including high-level nuclear materials stored in the part of it called the Niagara Falls Storage Site.
“This area here is all of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works site, seventy-five hundred acres bought in 1942 by the U.S. government,” Vince Agnello tells me, unfolding a map. “By eminent domain, they told everybody, we’re buying this.”
We’re sitting in the Village Diner, a homey place on the quaint single block that constitutes the main drag in Youngstown. Youngstown is the northernmost of the Niagara River towns, the site of Fort Niagara and a pretty marina that hosts a regatta every year. Like its one-stoplight town, the Village Diner is classic. The room we’re in is painted the same minty green as the Underground Railroad exhibit at the Castellani Art Museum, and it has anchors and ship’s wheels on the walls. Outside the picture windows, a thicket of bobbing masts can be seen in the windy, gray morning.
Vince is a brown-eyed man with a thick head of salt and pepper hair. He wears a neat gray sweater with blue and purple stripes. Somehow, I’m surprised when I see him. He looks like a law professor, which he is, rather than an environmental activist. But he’s president of a local group called Residents for Responsible Government, and as he unfolds his map of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works with all of its current owners’ land shaded in different tones before I can even get a cup of coffee, it quickly becomes clear that he’s definitely an activist too.
Vince sketches out the history of the site—what’s known of it. The Army Corps engineers, currently charged with the cleanup, readily admit they don’t know everything that went on there. Their site history document is 339 pages long, with 46 figures and 14 tables. The story it tells is pretty much the same one Vince maps out for me over eggs and toast.
Lake Ontario Ordnance Works was one of hundreds of similar sites across the nation bought and hastily converted to TNT production after Pearl Harbor. The cookie-cutter factories quickly produced so much TNT that, by the middle of 1943, the War Department found itself with too much of the stuff. They ordered the plants to stop production.
Of LOOW’s 7,500 acres (about 14 square miles), 2,500 acres in the center were developed for the TNT plant and its attendant buildings: storage igloos, dining hall, hospital, security building and USO hall. The surrounding area was considered a security buffer zone. After TNT production ceased in 1943, the War Department did a rudimentary cleanup, then sold the buffer zone land back to private owners. The original TNT plant was taken over by the Manhattan Engineer District.
“All the other sites were being cleaned up,” Vince tells me. “This site was the repository for all the radioactive waste and other waste being shipped by rail.”
Beginning in 1944, the Manhattan Engineer District began to dump radioactive sludge from the Linde plant into a concrete reservoir at the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works. Over 10,000 tons of the sludge, containing radium and uranium, were trucked over from Tonawanda, accompanied by an unmarked vehicle watching for leaks. Although the Manhattan Engineer District originally intended to clean up the site, by 1948 the Atomic Energy Commission—their successor—declared that the site was too contaminated to be used for anything other than waste. The Niagara region thus became the site of one of the nation’s earliest nuclear dumps.
Contaminated soils and building rubble from wartime plants in St. Louis, Cleveland, Wilmington, Delaware, and Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, were shipped in. LOOW received radioactive wastes from fission reactions at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, uranium rods and billets rolled at Bethlehem Steel in Lackawanna and Simonds Saw & Steel in Lockport, and 1,400 barrels of radium-bearing sludge from Middlesex, New Jersey. These dangerous materials were shoved into existing warehouses, poured into cement reservoirs or piled up wherever space could be found. Drums and barrels were left standing along railroad tracks. Nearly half the radioactive waste was out in the open.
In 1949, K-65 residues, uranium ore remaining after most of the uranium has been separated from it, were brought from St. Louis and stored first outdoors, then in an open silo on the 182 acres that became known as the Niagara Falls Storage Site. These ores had little uranium left, but they were still very high in radioactive radium and thorium. The silo where they were stored, built as a cooling tower, leaked radon into the surrounding countryside for years.
The scientists at the University of Rochester sent over an especially macabre shipment: several hundred thousand animal corpses—dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs and mice—that had been injected with plutonium or exposed to plutonium dust. There was also unspecified medical waste from the secret plutonium exposure research on humans. All of it was buried at Model City.
According to the Corps of Engineers site history, shipping of radioactive wastes to LOOW ceased in 1953. But throughout the fifties and sixties, as Robert Moses was building his power plant and the Corps was carefully reconstructing Niagara’s natural wonder, the land in Model City was parceled up and used for all sorts of projects nobody else wanted. The air force got some land and contracted with Bell Aircraft Corporation to develop rockets, missiles and lasers there. The navy, and later the air force, used part of it to develop high-energy fuels with Olin Mathieson. The army built a Nike missile base at one end. The Chemical Warfare Service was given a plot to store incendiary bombs; later the National Guard used the same plot for weekend training sessions. The Atomic Energy Commission contracted with Hooker to build and operate an isotope separation plant on the site for boron-10, a neutron absorber used as a radiation shield in nuclear reactors.
“After the contracts ended,” Vince says, “everybody just walked away. Whatever was there was there. They just left it all.”
The land was considered a total loss. The various government agencies and their private contractors had carried out their activities without any concern for environmental contamination and had adhered to no standards for safe waste disposal. The place was a minefield of waste drums, many of them unmarked, contaminated soils, toxic surface water and combustibles stored in wooden crates. In 1972, a large chunk of the site was purchased by ChemTrol, later SCA Services, a waste disposal company acquired by Chemical Waste Management (a subsidiary of garbage giant Waste Management) in 1984.
One of the ground rules of waste disposal is that you don’t site a hazardous waste landfill on previously contaminated land. The reason is so that if something local shows signs of contamination, you know where it’s coming from. Furthermore, the digging and disturbance of earth on a landfill can spread toxins around. These rules didn’t apply in 1972: government regulation of landfills didn’t begin until 1976, with the passage of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Under RCRA, the owners of the Model City landfill applied for a hazardous waste permit. It was granted in 1980. The thinking was that the land was already so fouled it was useless for anything else.
Today, Chemical Waste Management has identified a number of contaminated sites on its property that it believes are the responsibility of the Department of Defense. In other words, they want the government to clean its mess off their hazardous waste dump.
After breakfast, Vince drives me out to look at the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works. The houses grow more widely spaced as we move from Youngstown to Model City. Residents have decorated for the holidays; there are bows, wreaths, plastic Santas and inflatable snowmen. At the end of each driveway is a blue plastic recycling crate. As we get to the western edge of LOOW, we pass the Lewiston-Porter schools—primary, middle, high school—all built on donated land in the buffer zone. Vince pulls into the school parking lot and indicates a scrubby woods on the other side of a football field.
“All that land behind the playing field, they can’t use,” he tells me. “They own it, but it’s not safe.” I have the map in my hand, so I know what’s less than two miles beyond that line of trees: the Niagara Falls Storage Site.
We leave the school and turn down Pletcher Road. We pass a KOA campground and slow down to turn near a giant greenhouse.
“What’s in the greenhouse?” I ask.
“Hydroponic tomatoes,” Vince says. He turns into a gravel drive and pulls up to a padlocked gate. The gate and chain-link fence are posted with signs: No Trespassing—U.S. Government. There’s no guard or camera. To the right of the gate, a neat red Army Corps of Engineers sign says Niagara Falls Storage Site. To the north and east of this little area sprawls the rest of the LOOW site.
I climb out of the car and walk up to the gate. About one football field away looms what looks like an outsized barn, with huge exhausters on top and three silos marching down its side. This is Building 401, formerly the TNT plant’s boiler building, later a boron-10 production building, after which its history is unknown. The building looks like a barn for a reason: from the air it was supposed to look like just another farm, albeit one on steroids. To the left of the hulking barn is a mound, a small one for Niagara County, but ominous all the same—it’s the landfill where the radioactive wastes were consolidated. In 1984, after high levels of radioactivity were detected in the area, the K-65 ores were taken out of the silo and encapsulated in the basement of a demolished building on the site. The silo was taken apart and put in there as well, along with anything else around known to be radioactive. The one-acre landfill was covered and capped. It was meant to be a temporary solution. Now, even if the Corps of Engineers dug up the wastes inside, they wouldn’t have anywhere to put them. No place in the nation would take them.
I stand at the fence and stare at the grassy rise. Why did they name it the Niagara Falls Storage Site? Why not Lewiston, or Model City, or Porter, the next town over? Why not Devil’s Hole? Devil’s Hole is only a couple of miles away, at the top of the escarpment. The Falls are about eight miles away, up the Robert Moses Parkway. But for some reason the army saw fit to name their ugly cache after America’s iconic falls.
Here, on the town site where William T. Love planned a city of dreams powered by the mastered waterfall, the real outcome of that mastery cycles through its decay chain under the earth. The atomic bomb could not have been built without Niagara. It wasn’t just cheap electricity and industrial know-how. At the waterfall, Americans embraced their power to remake nature. Leslie Groves claimed later that when the bomb exploded at Trinity, he thought of Blondin crossing Niagara Falls. He had gone out on a wire. Like Blondin, he had upstaged nature. But he had gone one step further: he had made the elements into a seemingly all-powerful tool. That process was begun by Niagara power, nature’s most awesome force now wielded by humans. We are in possession…The international coterie of scientists who built the Bomb are the direct descendants of the International Niagara Commission, convening at Brown’s Hotel to harness the Falls. Oppenheimer split the atom, but Tesla split the world.
It’s a gray, wet, windy morning when I drive to visit the Army Corps of Engineers at their district office in Buffalo. The Canadian skyline hunches miserably under a dark cloud bank, and even the Seneca Niagara looks subdued, flashing bleakly in the dull morning. I follow the Niagara River upstream: the Corps offices sit right on the riverfront at Black Rock—now a sprawling industrial warehouse district and working-class neighborhood on Buffalo’s west side.
Peter Porter would be appalled to know that his beloved Black Rock is now incorporated into its hated rival, but no doubt his entrepreneurial heart would be warmed by the sight of the big lock the Corps of Engineers built there to guide ships through Black Rock’s treacherous narrows, and the railway bridge connecting it to Canada. (He would probably also approve of the Border Patrol SUV parked at the bridge, keeping fugitives out now, instead of in.) I’m a little early for my appointment, and I’m sure the Army Corps engineers are sticklers for the schedule, so I drive to the foot of Breckenridge Street, where the old Porter depot was. The architecture along the river is still heavily industrial, and many of the buildings are gorgeous, with old hand-painted signs: Great Lakes Pressed Steel, Bison Storage & Warehouse, S. A. Day Manufacturing, Hohl Machine & Conveyor. Many have For Lease signs stuck on their sides. Breckenridge Street, named after Porter’s slave owning Kentucky relatives, is still a brick road. It ends before the water at a scrubby fence, because Interstate 90 plows right through this part of town, cutting off the warehouses from the river. A toll plaza stands on the very spot where the Porter depot must have been. My favorite Niagara region sign is posted at the dead end: No Dumping. I back up and turn right to ease down a brick alley littered with strips of metal and discarded tires.
At the Corps security booth, Bill Kowalewski, project manager for the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works, is waiting for me. A neat, sandy-haired man who rarely smiles, Bill has a slightly worried air about him. He takes me to a conference room overlooking the Black Rock lock and introduces me to Judy Leithner, project manager for the Niagara Falls Storage Site. The Niagara Falls Storage Site is inside LOOW, but unlike the rest of the site, it’s still owned by the federal government, so it’s dealt with as a separate project. Joan Morrissey, a community outreach specialist, is also there, and Bruce Sanders, a public relations officer, pops in occasionally with a digital camera, getting snapshots for his monthly newsletter.
Bruce is an affable, happy-go-lucky guy, and Joan Morrissey is as chatty as you would expect of someone whose title includes the word “outreach.” She has a way of talking herself into an increasingly excited state, but Bill and Judy both have the careful, thoughtful attitude of engineers. There’s a short flurry of introductions and coffee-getting, and then they slide into their chairs at the conference table with the resigned air of schoolkids sitting down in the principal’s office.
Many community activists hold Bill and Judy personally responsible for what happens—or fails to happen—at the LOOW site. The Corps is the only agency currently taking any action there—they are, as Bill puts it, “the only game in town,” and they’re thus the focus of the community’s frustration and ire. Much of the anger is really about Chemical Waste Management, the current operators of the hazardous waste dump on the site, who are seeking to expand their landfill. Many in the community are suspicious of Chemical Waste Management, though as Lewiston’s economic engine, they have their supporters too. But everyone seems to mistrust the Army Corps, which moves at a glacial pace. Add to that the history of Love Canal, in which the community was fed lies and misinformation for years, and you have the makings of a pretty dysfunctional relationship.
“The legacy so overshadows anything we can say technically,” Bill tells me.
“I worked for Oxy during the Love Canal,” Judy adds, referring to Occidental, which bought Hooker Chemical, “and believe me, this is like going through it again. Nowhere near the hazard, but the perception of the hazard is there.”
“Why is it nowhere near the hazard?” I ask.
“The radiation that is currently present is confined,” she says immediately.
If the radiation is in fact confined—and if so it only became so in 1984, when it was moved out of the silo and into the ground—the Army Corps has not done a good job of helping people understand that. In fact, they seem pessimistic about getting the community to understand much.
“Some of the problem,” Judy tells me, “is a few people who don’t have a technical background but truly believe that if only we did our job right the property would have zero radiation. To try and get it across that there is no place on earth that there is no radiation—that there’s naturally occurring material—they think that’s a story.”
“People are incapable of understanding the concept of background radiation?” I ask, and she nods. “Some of them are.”
I think about the people I’ve talked to—Dan Wiest, for instance, or Ralph Krieger. I’m pretty sure that, even if they came to a conversation without an understanding of background radiation, it wouldn’t be that hard to explain it to them. The thing that the Corps of Engineers might find harder to accept is that the public might not believe it coming from them. They are, after all, the same organization that secretly brought what they like to call “rad” to Niagara in the first place. Nor would residents necessarily agree to whatever the army decided was a safe level of radiation to live with. It was the army, after all, who let Linde pour their uranium sludge into underground streams, who figured it was fine to stick radium in a silo and see what happened.
Corps press releases declare that “restoring the environment is the Army Corps of Engineers’ ultimate goal.” In truth, their mission in the region is not defined as broadly as those words suggest: they are there to clean up potentially harmful sites that were the direct result of War Department contracts. To this end, they have produced a working history of the site; the binders full of paper they’ve generated in their investigations fill a wall of bookshelves at the Lewiston Public Library, their official public repository for this project. But they readily admit this doesn’t mean they know everything; piecing together the history is a process of historical sleuthing that often leads to dead ends. And even if they did know everything that was wrong with the site, they wouldn’t try to fix all of it, but only the part that was the direct result of War Department activities. Local community activists characterize this attitude as passing the buck, leaving Niagara County burdened with a mess they didn’t make. The Corps of Engineers points out that they can only do as much as Congress authorizes—and budgets—them to do.
“We’re a federal presence,” Joan tells me. “It doesn’t matter that we’re one agency with no regulatory authority…. When you try to explain that, it sort of sounds like ‘That’s not our job.’”
The Corps gained responsibility for the site in 1998, when Congress took the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program away from the Department of Energy and reassigned it to the Corps. Like any bureaucrats, the engineers in the Corps have a strict protocol, which they follow to the letter. They move slowly and deliberately, and they throw up a lot of paper as they do; it’s their idea of transparency. They also talk to the community regularly, but that doesn’t always seem to go so well. On top of it all, the cleanup itself is hardly straightforward.
“I’ve been told it’s one of the most complex environmental cleanup projects historically for the army,” Bill tells me. “And the challenge is that the site did so many things, was so big and was then broken up into so many parcels that it’s like this huge three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle that we have to put together.”
He hops up several times as we’re talking to get charts or reports. At one point he brings in a giant, laminated flow chart of the United States Nuclear Weapons Complex. It’s colorful and packed with information, and when I’m enthusiastic about it, he couldn’t be happier.
“You can keep it!” he says with delight. Later he gets me a giant rubber band to keep it rolled.
We go over the history of the site: the war work, the postwar waste, the sale of the lands to private owners, the arrival of waste disposal companies. For all their mistrust of one another, the Corps and the community activists basically agree on what happened at LOOW in the forties and fifties. Their opinions diverge when it comes to what’s still there now.
I ask about the infamous “Rochester burial,” the creepy cache of plutonium-laced guinea pigs and radioactive mice. The Corps spent $100,000 digging a huge trench looking for the site of the burial.
“We had maps that showed where it should be,” Judy tells me. “We dug the whole area, huge trenches looking; there was nothing in there except one remaining animal bone which somebody called a ‘bunny bone.’ We also found some laboratory waste—petri dishes, vials with samples in them and so on, very few, fit in a garbage pail.”
If it’s not there, I ask, where did it go?
“The records show, although the public doesn’t believe it, that it went to the Argonne National Labs area,” Judy says. “It’s somewhere in Oak Ridge. They had a couple of spots where they disposed of it, but the records say it went to Oak Ridge; I can’t say what the facility is exactly.”
For some activists, that’s not enough of an explanation. They insist the Rochester burial is probably still there, possibly hidden beneath one of Chemical Waste Management’s toxic lagoons. One of the problems for engineers and activists alike is that ongoing hazardous waste dumping makes it impossible to search the whole site. The Corps specifically excludes from their cleanup those areas that have been made “inaccessible” by “subsequent activities by the present owner.” This includes the landfill’s soil piles, drum storage buildings, lagoons and roadways.
It’s hard to prove something is not somewhere. One of the results of the secrecy with which the Manhattan Project and Cold War arms buildup were conducted is that it spawned rumors that are impossible to prove or disprove. During a radiological survey in 1970, the Atomic Energy Commission found signs warning that phosgene, World War I–era mustard gas, was buried on the site. The Corps of Engineers hasn’t found any phosgene, or any government documents referring to it. They admit it could have been brought there later by a private owner, but then it wouldn’t be their problem. The exact location of this supposed phosgene is now unknown. There are other rumors: one railcar was allegedly brought to the site and buried whole because its cargo was so dangerous. The Corps did geophysical analysis looking for metal; they never found it. They have aerial photographs showing mysterious circular white marks, but they don’t understand those either.
“We suspect they might have been burning waste out there,” Bill says, pointing at the marks on the photos. “But we went in and sampled and there’s nothing there now. Unfortunately, I can’t close the book on it, but I can tell you that there’s no risk to anybody now and that’s really our mission, to determine if there’s a risk to anyone now or in the future.”
For the Army Corp engineers, not finding a threat means it was probably never there. For the community, it means it must still be there.
I ask Bill and Judy about the things that they do know about the site. They’re just as horrified as anyone else at the lax safety precautions and disregard for the environment that happened long ago. Judy tells me about interviewing a ninety-one-year-old man who worked on the Niagara Falls Storage Site. She asked him how he handled the K-65 ores when they came in.
“He said when the drums came in, they had a conveyer, and the drums would go on the conveyer, but they still spilled K-65, so he shoveled it up,” she tells me, shaking her head. “He lived to ninety-one, but most of [the workers] died in their thirties and forties.”
“I’m amazed at the science and technology and production that occurred to get a bomb delivered within five years,” Bill says. “And yet the health concerns and the handling of it—that end of the situation is so crude. It just wasn’t a priority or it wasn’t known.”
“Some of it wasn’t known, and I think some of it was, you know, ‘For my country,’” Judy says. “You know, the old patriotism. I’ve taken risks for my country that I wouldn’t take for myself. And so have you.”
Bill, an air force reservist, nods.
“Well, they were saving the world, right?” I say.
“Yeah,” agrees Bill. “Well, they were, frankly.”
“Actually,” Judy says, “they did.”
For my country. Like Bill, my father was an air force reservist when I was growing up. My uncle Howard, an air base commander, used to spoil family holidays by showing a film called The Price of Peace and Freedom to all of us kids. It detailed the imminent danger posed to us personally, right there in rural Michigan, by the evil Russians. My uncle Howard was twenty years older than my father, who was my grandparents’ late-in-life surprise baby, and we younger cousins used to think he was wacky, a throw-back to a Cold War that had already fizzled out. We’d sit giggling through the satellite photos and stolen footage of troop maneuvers and then race outside to brandish my grandfather’s broken rifle and lock each other in the barn. But I always felt oddly impressed by my uncle’s clarity of vision. It was all so simple—good and evil, right and wrong. My cousins and I, a scrubby bunch of post-Vietnam, post-Watergate slackers and punks, would never be able to see the world that way.
In the same way, I like engineers. I often find myself envying people who can think so rationally about the world. Rationality, I’m convinced, is much needed these days. The Army Corps engineers seem like nice people. When I leave, in addition to the laminated Nuclear Weapons Complex chart, they give me an Army Corps of Engineers lapel pin and a board-mounted aerial photograph of Niagara Falls. I go away convinced—by their genuineness, not by the swag—that they really believe in their mission. They want to do what’s best for the public. But, walking to my car in the sleety rain, I feel like I’m picking my way along the edge of a giant abyss that slowly yawned wide as we talked. It’s the gulf that opens up when governments lie to their citizens.
Those radioactive lab animals obsess the community not just because the image is so gruesome, but because they seem like a symbol somehow. The Niagara region was itself, in many ways, a guinea pig. Its factories were commandeered for a project the public never even knew about, let alone condoned; its workers’ health was endangered without their knowledge or consent, and its ground was contaminated with materials the community—and even the contaminators themselves—could barely understand. Now the land lies ruined and discarded with no one even sure what happened to it.
It’s not that the community is naturally mistrustful or rancorous. They were poisoned by the bitter pill they unknowingly swallowed in the midst of their own war feast.
We all want the place we live to be spotlessly clean, exuberantly healthful, and beautiful besides. The people in the Niagara region feel doubly betrayed, because they had so much of that beauty—still do, if you look beyond the landfills and ignore what you can’t see. Which is exactly what tourists do. Locals don’t have that luxury. When I talk to Lou Ricciuti, one of the angriest of the local activists, he tells me with simple conviction how much he used to love the Niagara region. Lou used to work in the tourist industry; now he blogs under the name “Nuclear Lou” and datelines his emails “Los Alamos East.”
“It was a place of opportunity,” he tells me over the phone. “To me it was Eden. Before I found this stuff out, to me there couldn’t have been a more beautiful place in the country…vast open water in the Great Lakes and little tiny lakes where you could go out and teach your kid to fish. To find out this stuff just changes your perspective entirely, from seeing it as Eden to seeing it as a place where everything that happened was for a profit motive.”
In 2001, Lou and another activist named Geoff Kelly published a seven-part series on the area’s radiological contamination in a local Buffalo magazine called Artvoice. Titled “The Bomb That Fell on Niagara,” the piece is angry, heartfelt, exhaustive, and at times, paranoid. Ricciuti and Kelly outline the history of the Manhattan Project and what’s known about waste disposal at LOOW. They mention the Rochester burial, the rumored railcar, the possible phosgene. They talk about ex-Nazi scientists working for local companies. They even speculate that there might be sinister motives behind the Corps of Engineers’ 1969 dewatering of the American Falls. Were they searching for contamination? They admit that such a suggestion is “wild speculation,” but ask, “What else can one do but speculate when it is so difficult to pry information from those who have it?”
What else indeed? The history of lies and cover-ups has made it all but impossible for the two camps in Niagara County to talk to each other. Even the environmental activists are divided among themselves, sniping at each other on Web bulletin boards and protecting their sources of information. I once read through a long list of posts and replies, complete with pictures, in which two locals were arguing over whose geiger counter was better.
Geographer Patrick McGreevy once suggested that for Canada, Niagara Falls acted as a front door. Thus, they landscaped and decorated it, the way you do your front walk, so that arriving guests get a good impression. In contrast, for the United States, McGreevy proposed, Niagara Falls was a backyard: the place where you park your old bicycles, pasture your broken-down couch, and stick your trash. It’s a nice, neat theory. But of course, America, no less than Canada, sees Niagara as an emblem for itself. It’s why we have spent so much effort “remediating” it, disguising the effects of our use and abuse of the waterfall and its landscape.
“Niagara was treated in a very unusual way,” Lou tells me. “There was no reverence for this place.” It does seem odd. And yet I’m not sure reverence is the answer to Niagara’s—or nature’s—ills. Reverence is standing apart. We need to put ourselves back into the landscape—not to harness it or preserve it, but to live in and with it. Moving forward means opening our eyes to a world that is always complex.
Unfortunately, that’s becoming harder and harder to do. Niagara Falls today needs help, environmentally and, on the American side, economically. But from the sixties to the present day, the movement to save Niagara has focused on tourism development. The future of Niagara may hang on whether tourism can offer a clear vision, or whether it will just produce one more counterfeit myth.