Meet the mom who took on toxic waste—and won

When Lois and Harry Gibbs moved to a three-bedroom home in Niagara Falls, New York, in 1972, the young wife thought she’d hit the jackpot. “I really thought I had succeeded in finding the best house in this entire country,” Gibbs recalls. Her husband, a chemical worker, had a good job. Her neighbors were close-knit, the area idyllic. And kids, were everywhere, roaming the neighborhood, swimming in the local creek—the Love Canal neighborhood was an area “alive” with children.

But things were not what they seemed. Under the surface, in the soil beneath its perfect houses, lay chemical contamination from a toxic waste dump—a ticking time bomb that would result in disease, tragedy, and Gibbs’ transformation from shy housewife into a nationally known environmental activist.

Buried dangers

Years earlier, the partially developed Love Canal became a dump, courtesy of the Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation, which buried over 20,000 tons of toxic chemicals there between 1942 and 1952. Eventually, the company leased the area to the Niagara Falls Board of Education for $1, complete with a deed that contained a disclaimer excusing Hooker Chemical from any liability related to the chemical dumping. In the years that followed, the land surrounding 16-acre landfill became a neighborhood complete with tract homes, churches, and trees.

By 1978, the site was home to an elementary school, and houses like Gibbs’ lined Love Canal’s placid streets. The school was a hub for the area’s stay-at-home moms, Gibbs recalls. Since the school didn’t have a cafeteria, Gibbs and other women would bring their children their lunches at mid-day. She’d walk to the 99th Street School, pushing her daughter in a stroller, and spread out a blanket on the school playground, where the family would eat along with the other mothers and kids.

“Oh, my God,” she says. “How many times did we eat on a toxic waste dump?”

Surfacing troubles

The first sign of trouble at Love Canal appeared in 1976, when the Niagara Gazette reported that some homes were experiencing chemical leaching in their basements. But Gibbs didn’t take note until her five-year-old son Michael began having seizures. “My sense was that the playground was where he was getting exposed,” she says. “I really thought that Michael was somehow more sensitive, and that the school board should move him [to another school] right away.”

The family had no history of epilepsy, and a consultation with her brother-in-law, a biologist, made her wonder if Michael’s problems had something to do with the chemicals. Citing the potential danger of the site, she petitioned the school board to move Michael. But when they denied the request, she sprang into action. 

“I have an Irish temper. You can’t sit there and tell me you’re not going to move my child,” she says, her voice still bristling forty-six years later. “We’re gonna fix this.”

Taking action

Soon, she was going door to door with a petition to shut down the school. But as she surveyed her neighbors, she realized she wasn’t the only mom whose kid was sick.

Health problems were everywhere in Love Canal, from hyperactivity to epilepsy, migraines to miscarriages. Neighbors began telling her about cancer, kidney problems, lung issues. Eventually, Gibbs realized that a full 56 percent of children born to Love Canal residents within the last five years had been born with a congenital anomaly.

“I heard about a 12-year-old who had to have a hysterectomy,” says Gibbs. “A woman with two crib deaths. These weren’t normal things.”

Though the state health department agreed to run tests on homes near the dump site, progress was slow. Once officials began environmental testing, residents were shocked by the sheer extent of the contamination. It wasn’t just the playground. It was the basements. The back yards. The bedrooms. The drains. An ocean of deadly chemicals was percolating upwards from the ground: benzene, dioxin, toluene. Ultimately, over 100 deadly compounds were confirmed at the site. The air was polluted; so was the groundwater.

Poisonous impacts

By then, Gibbs was president of the Love Canal Neighborhood Association, a grassroots group devoted to figuring out what was wrong in their neighborhood. Obtaining evidence of the unfolding disaster turned out to be the easy part. Getting the right people to listen was another matter entirely, says Gibbs.

The women put in hundreds of hours on the telephone, going house to house, begging local and then national officials to help. They circulated petitions, collected evidence, and lobbied. Once shy and reserved, Gibbs was now in the center of a tornado of publicity, unanswered pleas, and a continual sense of dread about what the chemicals were doing to her community.

Meanwhile, the life she loved was collapsing before her eyes. People had started dying, including a young boy, John Allen Kenny, who had often swum in the creek behind his house. Gibbs found herself advising and comforting her distraught neighbors, including one chemical worker who unburdened himself to her.

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“I had never seen a man cry before,” she recalls. “This was a macho, blue-collar man. He talked about playing football with the little boy.” These kinds of incidents became a daily occurrence.

So did the pressure. “No longer is her house clean, her floors waxed, and her dinner on the table by five o’clock,” a reporter wrote in 1978. This was a bone of contention with her husband Harry, who expected her to cook him dinner. “When is this going to be over?” he’d ask. “I want dinner.”

Fighting while female

Gibbs’ identity as a stay-at-home mother turned out to be a blessing and a curse. As one reporter wrote, it enabled her to ask “innocent but deadly” questions, disarming powerful officials without intimidating them. But it also opened her up to criticism, gossip, and sexism.

“I’m a woman, so I can’t be too bright,” says Gibbs. People would ask if it was her “time of month,” implying that her pleas were hysterical. Eventually, she says, she heard that lawmakers in Albany had given her a nickname. “Instead of calling me the Love Canal president, it was ‘The Bitch.’”

In August 1978, state officials evacuated pregnant women and children under the age of two from the Love Canal neighborhood. But that wasn’t enough for Gibbs and her neighbors. They filed lawsuits, picketed, and disseminated the growing evidence that the neighborhood was even more polluted than first thought. Finally, in May 1980, President Jimmy Carter declared a national emergency at the site. Ultimately, about 950 families left Love Canal.

The health consequences of Love Canal were dire. Follow-up studies showed that women living in the neighborhood during their reproductive years were twice as likely to give birth to a child with a congenital anomaly and at higher risk for giving birth to a baby with low birth weight. Residence in the neighborhood has also been linked to higher rates of rheumatic heart disease, heart attacks, and cancer of the lungs, kidney, and bladder. However, the exact effects of the environmental disaster may never be fully ascertained, given the difficulty of determining precise exposure rates to chemicals in the landfill.

Love Canal legacy

Today, Gibbs is considered one of the mothers of the environmental movement. Her efforts at Love Canal put the dangers of toxic chemical contamination into the national spotlight, prompting the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program, a program that cleans up contaminated sites, and the attention of scientists who continue to study the dangers of chemical contamination for humans.

Her story—and that of the others who fought for environmental justice in the Love Canal neighborhood—has inspired many TV films and documentaries. The latest is American Experience’s Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal, premiering on Earth Day 2024.

Their tale is closely tied to neighborly collaboration, but ironically, Gibbs’ fight led to the demise of the neighborhood she loved so much. Though she’s still in contact with her former neighbors, the Love Canal evacuation spread them all over the country. Eventually the entire Love Canal neighborhood was demolished. “It’s gone. It’s just gone,” says Gibbs. “It’s hard to put a value on that.”

Though her children are currently healthy, she says she still worries for their long-term health and that of their successors. “There’s always a cloud,” says Gibbs. Ultimately, though, she sees her work at Love Canal as a triumph. “We won,” she says. Gibbs went on to found the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice, becoming a key figure in the environmental movement and inspiring generations of grassroots activists.

And if she could do it, anyone can.

“Democracy works,” she says. “[We] stood together and had a united goal. You can do that for any issue. If people would participate in democracy, we could change the world in ways that are not even imaginable right now.”