Andrew Jenks

model city usa: the environmental COST OF VICTORY IN WORLD WAR II AND THE COLD WAR

ABSTRACT

Long shrouded in a cocoon of national-security secrecy, the history of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works site in western New York sheds light on the enduring environmental, political, and social costs of victory in World War II and the Cold War. A micro-study of a nuclear waste site, this article analyzes connections among U.S. nuclear weapons waste management and the environment, local politics, grassroots activism, and international diplomacy. Ultimately, it argues that a spirit of patriotic sacrifice, combined with a culture of secrecy, overrode concerns about safety. The end result of that sacrifice is today a legacy of environmental contamination and the progressive decline of local democratic controls over natural resources.

IN 1892 A MYSTERIOUS MAN named William T. Love arrived in western New York. A self-styled westerner, he promised to bring the spirit of an enterprising West back to the feckless East—in this instance to the Niagara Frontier, which had somehow been passed over in the great rush to tame the western frontier and make it useful. Against the backdrop of the famous Niagara Falls, this Elmer-Gantry-like figure spun visions of a Model City "free from defiling vapors." Fueled by "the late wonderful advance in electricity and by the aid of our limitless water power, we can heat and light our city by electricity and operate our factories by water power, in an atmosphere of ideal purity." Love published maps of a Niagara Frontier retrofitted for his vision of progress. One map depicted a five-mile canal connecting the upper and lower Niagara Rivers, which bypassed the legendary cataract. At the canal's end on the lower Niagara an artificial falls had been carved into the gorge, flowing into the river below and generating immense quantities of power. The envisioned power plant supported an industrial "megalopolis" to the north called Model City, which Love convinced the New York State Legislature to charter as his own personal company town. Model City, in Love's map, stretched all the way to Lake Ontario, neatly divided into boulevards and avenues. "No skill, art or effort will be spared to make it the most beautiful city in the world ... a monument to the progressive spirit of the age—to the genius, goodness and greatness of the American people."¹

While Love's Niagara Power and Development Corporation convinced a few hardy businessmen to take up residence in Model City, his company also excavated about three thousand feet of a canal leading northward from the upper Niagara River. Then he ran out of money in the late 1890s and the entire enterprise collapsed. For decades residents of the city of Niagara Falls swam and fished in the canal during the summer and skated on it in winter. By World War II, Hooker Chemical bought the canal and transformed it into a chemical waste dump. In 1952 Hooker threw soil on top of the filled canal and sold the land to the Niagara Falls School District for one dollar. While the school district built a school directly on top of the chemical wastes, the parents of baby boomers built suburban homes on adjacent land. By the late 1970s, as the toxic wastes percolated to the surface, the American dream turned into a suburban nightmare and the area gained notoriety as the infamous Love Canal—the ecological disaster that has since become the poster child of technological hubris and corporate greed.²

In the meantime, Love's Model City to the north remained a sleepy hamlet, attracting a few residents and a post office. It was taken over by the federal government during World War II to build a massive TNT plant. In 1944 the TNT plant was converted willy-nilly into a radiological dumping ground for nuclear-bomb related radioactive wastes. Some portions of the land, which turned out to be contaminated with chemical and radiological wastes, were then sold back to various private and public entities in the 1950s and 1960s. That land today includes one of the largest private hazardous chemical waste dumps in the northeast United States (called "Chemical Waste Management"), which is situated adjacent to a private conventional landfill and waste dump (known as "Modern Landfill"). Barbed wire fences separate these two dumping grounds from nearly 300,000 cubic yards of radioactive refuse from the Manhattan Project, now managed in a 110-acre site by the Army Corps of Engineers as the Niagara Falls Storage Site (NFSS). The radiological wastes (including the world's largest concentration of radium 226 and an irradiated bulldozer) are entombed beneath a clay cap and covered with top soil and grass. The sod is fertilized by the Army Corps of Engineers to maintain a lush green carpet of grass, "sort of like a good U.S. Open rough," quipped a Corps official.³ A public high school, middle school, and elementary school are located less than a half mile to the west of the radioactive materials; a KOA campground, private fishing pond, and state park are adjacent to the NFSS; and a drainage ditch at the NFSS connects directly with a creek that flows past a public golf course and into Lake Ontario. In the spring fishermen catch and eat the salmon that now run up this creek, which until the early 1980s received radioactively contaminated run-off.

This article investigates the portion of Love's original Model City, which became a dumping ground for nuclear wastes. This fifteen-hundred-acre parcel of land, known as the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (LOOW), played an important role in World War II and the Cold War. That victory, however, created a legacy of environmental degradation. Long shrouded in a cocoon of national-security secrecy, the history of the LOOW site illuminates the environmental costs of victory in World War II and the Cold War.⁴ As elsewhere in the United States during World War II and the Cold War, a climate of wartime emergency encouraged the public to accept the site as a necessary patriotic sacrifice. The end result of that sacrifice is today a legacy of environmental contamination and, equally alarming, the progressive decline of local democratic controls over natural resources—despite a brief period of greater environmental activism in the 1970s and 1980s.

Figure 1. Lake Ontario Ordnance Works

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Most of the original 1,500 acres of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works have been sold to various private and public entities. The area designated NFSS (for Niagara Falls Storage Site and covering 110 acres) now contains the nearly 300,000 cubic yards of radioactive wastes that earlier had been scattered across various parts of the original site.

THE MILITARIZATION OF MODEL CITY

THE CREATORS OF MODEL CITY during World War II and the early years of the Cold War imagined a future in which the vanquishing of enemies would be yoked to technological progress—in their case, to the quest to build ever more effective killing machines. So focused were they on that quest that government officials had little concern for Model City's past. Their goal was to transform Model City—not preserve it. Focusing their gaze almost exclusively on the present and future demands of national security, they suffered from a kind of historical amnesia, which is reflected, among other things, in the poorly maintained archive recounting the history of the LOOW site.⁵ The archive creates the impression of people who had little time to document, much less contemplate, the possible consequences of their actions. Letters, memos, medical reports, radiological surveys, contractor reports, receipts, and inventories are all thrown together—often in no particular thematic or chronological order. By the late 1990s, the Department of Energy pulled these incomplete and haphazardly compiled records out of filing cabinets, dumped them into boxes, and transferred them to the woefully underfunded Army Corps of Engineers, which took over the cleanup of former DOE sites.⁶ As of the summer of 2005, dozens of these boxes lay in random piles on a pallet in an Army Corps Buffalo warehouse. From the Corps perspective, they are virtually useless for helping to locate and clean up wastes at the site.

For many citizens in western New York, the absence of a coherent historical record suggests a conscious conspiracy to hide the truth about contamination from the public, which is seemingly confirmed by the culture of secrecy that long surrounded the site. The site was part of a gigantic infrastructure of secret weapons production created during World War II and the Cold War for $5.5 trillion and "hidden in plain view." As Tom Vanderbilt recently noted, the demands of war transformed the architecture of the nation. Obliterating the distinction between combatant and civilian, World War II and the Cold War that followed radically reconfigured the civilian built environment, of which the LOOW site was merely one part. Few noticed these transformations, in western New York and elsewhere, since Americans became conditioned to thinking of the physical effects of war in terms of the damage they caused on foreign terrains. When it came to the home front, they barely took into account the war's impact on their own environment, "the forgotten detritus of a war with no clear boundaries, no clear battlefields, a war of scientists and radar; a war waged in such secrecy that both records and physical locations are often utterly blurred." As one newspaper headline in Niagara Falls from 1954 put it, "Secret Project at Model City Stays Mystery."⁷

The culture of secrecy set the stage for the mismanagement of wastes at the LOOW site, as it did at military installations throughout the country.⁸ It was assumed that national security demanded citizen sacrifice. The linkage of basic notions of progress with vanquishing global enemies engendered a powerful spirit of personal and community sacrifice. While government officials concealed the activities of defense contractors, few citizens raised questions, especially since many were on the payroll of weapons-site managers and their contractors. As Michael D'Antonio noted in his study of the Hanford nuclear facility: "Coming out of World War II, the government maintained its wartime claim to extraordinary secrecy." Government officials and their contractors, "didn't believe that, given all the facts, citizens would make the right choices. So they simply declared the facts secret." And "everyday citizens," who were "motivated by fear," accepted this state of affairs, essentially abdicating "their responsibility to determine the national interest."⁹

Model City was no different, even before its official designation as a dumping ground for radioactive wastes. The federal government originally used the power of eminent domain to create the LOOW site in 1942 as a mammoth TNT plant.¹⁰ In less than a year the U.S. Army transformed the area from a "farmer's paradise into an 'arsenal' of democracy." Model City was now a secret complex of factories, railroad spurs, and concrete storage "igloos," bounded by gates and armed guards. Paradoxically, the transfer of the land from private into public hands decreased rather than increased public access, mirroring a phenomenon that was common throughout the United States, when vast tracts of land were declared "top secret" and transferred into the hands of the military-industrial complex. Public land now meant a gate with armed guards barring public access. As a result, much of the "landscape was defined by what could not be seen. The realms of public and private knowledge were bifurcated, and so too was space: A secret landscape was installed from Greenwich, Connecticut to Greenland, an invisible terrain replete with underground command facilities and emergency relocation centers." In the case of Model city, nearly 150 families, mostly farmers, were given thirty days to move off newly public land during an unusually cold winter in January 1942. Most stoically accepted their refugee status. Cooperation and complicity, rather than resistance and skepticism, marked the spirit of their move. One of those refugees remembered that, "Our country was at war. Our government needed a place to make TNT. Loving both God and country, [we] prepared to move."¹¹

Reflecting the war's emphasis on secrecy, the LOOWDOWN, an internal newsletter for LOOW employees, constantly reminded employees to keep their mouths shut (each issue was marked "confidential"). In a list of "10 commandments" posted at the site in February 1943, commandment number one was: "Thou shalt keep thy mouth shut." Those who talked about their jobs were reminded that they could be sent away for ten years for violating the Espionage Act. Aphorisms lined the walls of the boiler plant. "Clap your trap you sap! Information leakage too often is the result of our conceit." The LOOWDOWN stressed that, "what we know is the government's business, and not our information to impart." Should workers have doubts about the cause, they should "thank God they were born in Tonawanda, New York, instead of Lidice, Czechoslovakia."¹² As part of the newly militarized landscape "hidden in plain view" the boiler plants were made to look like gigantic barns with silos—so that anyone viewing them from the air might mistake the area for an agricultural complex. The result of this culture of secrecy was to remove a large part of the Niagara Frontier from public access and control. The inability to discuss Model City activities openly, and to deal with their social and environmental consequences, made Model City incomprehensible to its citizens—and even, as we shall see, to most of the government officials responsible for managing it.

While managers constantly emphasized the imperative of secrecy, they also placed a premium on speed and cutting corners, which necessarily came at the expense of safety. "Time Lost Brings Joy to Japanazis," went one headline for the LOOWDOWN. "I need everything the enemy's got ... and, above all, I need it NOW! ... and that goes for every branch of the service and every kind of munitions and supplies. SACRIFICE is no good without SPEED." It was a constant refrain, drilled into the heads of workers at every moment and always accompanied by the claim that slow work would jeopardize American lives abroad. LOOW managers apparently did not consider the possibility that an obsession with speed might also endanger lives on the home front.¹³

Relying on speed, secrecy, and patriotism the TNT plant thus emerged in just over a year. The entire plant came at a cost of $33 million, creating a 1,500-acre network of boilers, rail lines (369,000 spikes, 93,000 feet of rail, 51,000 ties), and storage igloos. The Army had financed six housing projects in the vicinity of Niagara Falls to house workers—a total of 237 buildings able to house 2,260 families. Another 400 government trailers were erected near the Love Canal area to house workers. And then something totally unexpected occurred in the summer of 1943: The plant was shut down before it barely began production. It was declared "excess."¹⁴

Almost immediately the Army converted the site into a dumping ground for the waste byproducts of the Manhattan Project. Embedded within the organizing principles of the LOOW site, as it acquired its new function, were attitudes that would shape views of the environment for decades to come: secrecy, speed, the need to make sacrifices to defeat a foreign enemy, and a lack of concern for preserving and protecting affected natural resources. To the extent that LOOW's managers were concerned about the environmental impact of nuclear waste, they maintained faith that science would eventually come up with a solution. These attitudes were certainly not unique to the LOOW site, as other scholars have shown. They were also similar to attitudes on the other side of the Cold War divide. In the USSR a climate of secrecy and wartime emergency also created a culture of ecological mismanagement, justifying the paradoxical idea that the public should be excluded from management and control of public environmental resources.¹⁵ The new Model City was thus forged in a climate of wartime hysteria that extended well beyond the end of formal hostilities during World War II.

Everything associated with the Manhattan Project was done at a feverish pace, from the processing of uranium at western New York plants to the dumping of radioactive wastes and other toxic chemical byproducts on the Niagara Frontier.¹⁶ "To expedite the war effort," Manhattan Project managers in Niagara Falls and Buffalo routinely raised permissible levels of radiological exposure for workers who processed uranium. As New York State investigators noted in 1981, "there was a clear realization that safety could be had only at the expense of production, and the needs of the war effort superseded the obligations of the project to protect its workers." In 1944, various defense contractors on the Niagara Frontier dumped the radioactive and chemical byproducts of uranium processing into drainage ditches leading to the adjacent Niagara River. Some contractors piled refuse into trucks and dumped it in Love's Canal. Others heaped radioactive sludge onto open heaps next to their plants. Another contractor dumped radioactive liquids into on-site wells, reasoning that "it is ... impossible to determine the course of subterranean streams and, therefore, the responsibility for any contamination could not be fixed."¹⁷

Desperate to find a more remote area to dispose of chemical and radioactive wastes, the Army chose the LOOW site, which was located within twenty miles of various uranium processing plants in the Buffalo-Niagara region. Convenience rather than the suitability of the site drove the decision to convert the LOOW site into a dumping ground.¹⁸ Army officials reasoned that since the land was already condemned and contaminated as a TNT plant, it should continue as a radioactive waste dump, a "bone-yard for the storage" of radioactive wastes.¹⁹

RECKLESS POSTWAR MANAGEMENT

CONTRACTORS SHIPPED WASTES to LOOW at night over back roads. Radium sludge frequently sloshed from the beds of trucks onto roadways. Once on site, radioactive sludge was scattered in piles around the grounds. Some of the sludge was housed in barrels, which were stored in the open air and in various buildings. During the early 1950s, contractors for the Atomic Energy Commission consolidated wastes into certain buildings and a storage tower, but little thought was given to the appropriateness of those storage structures. As a 1955 memorandum noted, the dumping of radioactive wastes at LOOW, "hinged more on availability rather than any unique features making it suitable for such storage." There were "no facilities for treatment of radioactive wastes." Structures designed originally for water treatment at the TNT site were hastily converted for storage of radioactive wastes, where they remained until the early 1980s. As New York State investigators noted in 1981: "There was no going back to the bucolic, pre-war days, at least not while the AEC, Army and Air Force still had designs on the LOOW site."²⁰

While some AEC officials and their contractors recognized the potential hazards to the local community as well as the inappropriateness of the storage facility, they did not communicate those concerns to the public or take any actions to correct the situation. "The area is already contaminated," remarked an AEC official in November 1949. "Removing the material would not decontaminate the area." When asked about a safe distance from the contaminated area, the AEC official said that "All I could do was guess. I think about a mile. The Medical Department would be the one to prescribe the exact distance. Every day we learn about radioactivity, but until we know a great deal more about it, we are taking every precaution."²¹ Yet the AEC took no further precautions. Hooker Chemical, a defense contractor from Niagara Falls that managed the site in the 1950s, noted in a 1953 memo "that many of the materials are stored on the ground in the open and are constantly being subject to being washed away from rains. Other materials are stored in drums which may leak and the drums are deteriorating so that it might be impossible to move them." It was entirely possible, said Hooker, that radioactive sludge "has leaked into the ground" and from there into the drainage ditches leading directly into Lake Ontario.²²

Figure 2. A Structure on the LOOW Site

Photo by author.
This was one of the few remaining structures on the LOOW site in 2004 (the rest of the numerous structures on the site had been razed and buried in the containment structure on site). It was originally built in 1942 as a boiler plant for the production of TNT but shortly afterward was used to store radioactive wastes for the Manhattan Project.

A groundwater study in 1949 by the U.S. Department of Interior Geological Survey, requested by AEC, sounded numerous alarms, but its warnings were ignored. The survey noted that throughout the site, and in a site just south of the city of Niagara Falls, the Atomic Energy Commission had dumped "substantial quantities of liquid radioactive wastes ... on the ground ... It was originally thought that the radioactive liquids would seep into the ground, and by gradual dispersion and finally by fixation (absorption or adsorption) to the soil particles and ultimate decay of radioactivity would be rendered harmless." But other AEC officials thought that the liquids might "percolate" to the water table "and while still highly radioactive move to areas where groundwater was being withdrawn by wells for domestic, industrial, or other use; or eventually seep into nearby streams and contaminate supplies withdrawn from them." Since the area frequently received heavy rainfalls in the spring, and the LOOW site was crisscrossed by drainage ditches leading directly to Lake Ontario, it seemed likely that radioactive liquids had spread far beyond the site and into public water supplies. The study's recommendation for systematic testing of water wells near the site was ignored.²³

The absence of any coherent response to the water-survey report is all the more damning given the reasons for its original creation. It was the result of a February 8, 1948, memorandum from the AEC to its various sites around the country, which said that the AEC laboratories were "'newcomers' in areas of established rural or community life. If our operations ... may create hazards to or dislocations in the normal life of an area or region, the A.E.C. has a profound responsibility which it cannot evade." The memorandum said it was "unthinkable that A.E.C. would permit the discharge of long-life radioactive or toxic wastes into the ground or waterways without ascertaining ... what effect these actions will have." Yet that is precisely what happened at the LOOW site. The memorandum itself provides a clue as to why the AEC evaded its responsibilities to host communities: It wondered how the AEC, given the secret nature of its operations, could possibly share data with numerous other federal, state, and local officials. The demand for national security and secrecy trumped concerns about environmental contamination. While AEC officials were aware of potential dangers, the desire to limit their liabilities, protect their turf from other agencies, and limit expenditures prevented any action. It helped, of course, that local citizens did not question activities conducted in the name of their national security.²⁴

While AEC ignored the warnings of its own officials and contractors, it provided public reassurances about the innocuous nature of its activities. Responding to rumors of stored radioactive materials on the site, in August 1949 the AEC approached the local media to set the record straight. It issued a "flat denial that any health hazard exists." The site contained "reusable chemicals and materials slightly contaminated with radioactivity." Tellingly, the article in 1949 represents the only public mention of any radioactive wastes in Model City until late 1970. For more than twenty years after that 1949 newspaper report, local citizens entered into the government's conspiracy of silence surrounding the site. Local reporters and politicians asked no questions and AEC officials provided no answers. Taken off the local tax rolls, and sealed off with fences and "Do Not Enter" signs, the LOOW site became part of the architecture of the Cold War "hidden in plain view."²⁵

Public silence regarding the site partially reflected public ignorance about the possible effects of radioactive wastes, as well as the relative absence of grassroots environmental activism through the 1950s and 1960s. Similar to the Soviet Union, the weakness of civil society (especially regarding national security matters) contributed to environmental degradation at Model City. Moreover, as Hal Rothman notes, "an unspoken bargain developed between industry and workers." In exchange for "cradle-to-grave benefits," workers accepted the risks associated with working in a toxic environment—which at any rate were not widely understood and certainly not publicized by those who knew better. The bargain "extended beyond the factory to the noxious effects of the industry in the neighborhoods—air pollution that defoliated gardens, dumping grounds filled with waste of various kinds, and similar hazards."²⁶ The record of public silence and acquiescence is thus a reflection of public ignorance, the willful suppression of information by government officials in the know, and the spirit of willing sacrifice, both within and outside the gates of Model City. To take just one example, when locally elected officials were approached by defense department officials in 1954, they unquestioningly granted permission for LOOW managers to expand their use of local water services. The local officials were simply told that "the AEC is developing classified facilities," and there was "nothing about the situation [they] could talk about." The local officials granted approval for the new water works on the LOOW site, which connected to sewer facilities off site, including water for local farmers and a soon-to-be-built public school less than a half mile from the radioactive contaminants.²⁷

Figure 3. Radioactive Waste Storage

Photo by author.
The upraised mound is a sodded clay cap under which nearly 300,000 cubic yards of radioactive wastes are now stored. The structure, erected in the mid-1980s, was designed to last twenty-five years. There are currently no plans to upgrade or replace it.

The lack of local concern, combined with a tendency by AEC and its contractors to ignore potential risks, reinforced a culture of complacency in managing the materials on the LOOW site. Through the early 1950s the AEC continued to send tons of radioactive sludge, equipment, and scrap metal contaminated during uranium processing to LOOW, where some was then sent off to other AEC sites by rail car (and frequently leaked onto rail beds and cars).²⁸ The site was a staging point for uranium billets processed at Lackawanna Steel in Buffalo. Wastes from the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in Schenectady were shipped to LOOW. The site also received the remains of animals subjected to radiation experiments at the University of Rochester, known as the "Rochester Experimental Animal Burial Ground," which were part of experiments that also included human subjects.²⁹

In the meantime, the LOOW site's managers during the atomic era paid little heed to documenting and recording their activities. They were in too much of a hurry. As a DOE report from the late 1970s or early 1980s noted, "materials management and control practices [had their] origins in the urgency of World War II." When contractors managing the site discovered radioactive materials, they almost never could find historical documentation from their predecessors to indicate where they came from and what they were. A contractor report from November 1964 noted that most of the materials on the site could not be identified, echoing complaints from earlier and later site managers. When the state of New York investigated the history of the site in late 1978, it lamented the absence of documentation. "Accounting records were not found ... Very little documented information was found which pertained to the quantity of waste materials and their disposal location ... Certain employees who may have had knowledge are deceased or have retired outside of the area."³⁰ Reviewing its own records in December 1978, the AEC concluded: "We are not able to contribute much of value regarding hazardous waste disposal site locations during the past 50 years in Erie and Niagara counties." While the spotty record might suggest a conspiracy to cover up the truth, the truth is more prosaic. Secrecy, convenience, and speed were the governing principles of LOOW management, and as a result AEC officials and their contractors paid little attention to documenting their activities.³¹

If there is a dearth of information about the specific location, type, and date of dumped materials at LOOW, the historical record is sufficient to provide a general portrait of waste management on the site. It is a damning record. Inspection reports from the 1950s through the 1970s paint a picture of reckless disregard for the health of both the workers on the site and for the health of citizens living near the site. One LOOW building containing radioactive wastes "became so water logged as to create a completely unmanageable situation." A proposal in 1954 was made to burn the building, and in preparation managers conducted a test burning of radioactive sludge in the open air, "until the question of air-borne contamination from such burning arose." In 1958, Hooker Chemical, which was managing the site, noted that it did not have "an 'expert' in the radiation field," although in an earlier 1956 memo it had requested money (apparently denied) to send Hooker people to the New York Health and Safety Division for instruction in the use of radiation detection instruments. A 1960 inspection report found that most of the buildings "had become rotted and deteriorated due to windstorms, rain, snow, and sleet." Sidings and supports for buildings containing radioactive materials had collapsed, doors and windows had fallen from their hinges. In the case of another building with radioactive materials, "the sidings constructed of asbestos are being blown about the area, and a constant fear of these sidings being blown on the high voltage lines is always in existence." A consultant in 1965 noted: "I would strongly advise that some final solution to this excessive contamination problem be found in the near future." His recommendation was ignored because any long-term solution "would probably prove economically impractical."³²

A storage silo with radioactive sludge, located less than a half-mile from a public high school, middle school, and elementary school, emitted high amounts of radon from the early 1950s to the early 1980s; it was covered by a plank of plywood. Recommendations in the late 1970s that the plank be replaced with a stainless steel cover were ignored. "Our plans for recaulking the present manhole cover and monitoring the radon emanation were discussed," as were plans for a more permanent steel enclosure. But "this question was not resolved." Another report noted "poor gate control" and trash and debris strewn across the site. People could enter and exit the site without being checked, since the gate was broken and it was rarely manned. Personnel on site in 1980 were not monitored for contamination, "and there was no documented schedule or specific procedures available yet for environmental sampling and analysis," although a 1979 report noted as a positive achievement that "an electric toilet ... was installed to reduce sanitary wastes." There was no fire-fighting equipment on site—and local volunteer fire departments had no training in handling a radioactive fire because radioactive materials on the site were a secret. Workers on site wore no special protective gear. It was as if the absence of defense against possible contamination meant there was no contamination. And so the inspection reports continued, each noting the same unresolved problems as previous reports going back to the 1950s.³³

The reason for the lack of concern had its origins in the culture of secrecy and the climate of wartime emergency in which the site was created. But there were other contributing factors. AEC managers, operating under both the perceived demands of national security and the protection of their turf, were loath to share information with other federal and state agencies. Moreover, when the site in the mid-1950s no longer received additional wastes and was designated as a "caretaker" facility, many of the site's managers (though not all) believed that the problem of radiation was overblown. This was especially the case in the 1950s and 1960s, when the dangers of exposure to radiation were less appreciated than in later years. Even the rare official who had doubts about the site's safety could rely on the site's secret status, combined with public complacency, to stymie any prophylactic action. Equally important, managers of the site simply did not have money in their budget to address contamination problems. The AEC, it turns out, had a blank check for creating nuclear weapons, but when it came to managing their radioactive byproducts the funding dried up; that dynamic continues today, as responsibility for cleanup has now been transferred to the notoriously underfunded and understaffed Army Corps of Engineers. Inspection reports from the 1960s to 1980 reviewed the usual list of severe contamination problems and then ended with a familiar refrain: "Money was not available," "Our Maintenance Department has no funds for this work," and "absence of policy motivation and funding approval."³⁴

Complacent attitudes were augmented by a special language that consciously obscured the dangerous reality of the work environment for workers processing uranium in Buffalo-area plants and for workers at the LOOW site.³⁵ Uranium was referred to as "material X"—although some more astute engineers knew better. An AEC Niagara Falls contractor in 1954 explained: "Code names were assigned to sensitive equipment and process materials during the design stages to protect this information from all persons not requiring it. The sensitive process equipment was fabricated as unclassified and transported in specially hired vehicles with 'Q' cleared drivers. It was transported after dark and stored in vaults until needed. They were then transferred to the restricted area after dark when uncleared personnel were not present." Spectrometers were called x-machines. Certain types of radioactive sludge were called cornflakes.³⁶ The culture of secrecy thus not only hid those dangers from those living beyond the fences of Model City; it also camouflaged those same perils for workers and managers within the fences.

The camouflaging of the site's radiological reality contributed to a lackadaisical work environment that allowed contaminants, through various avenues, to seep into the surrounding community. Believing that the materials at LOOW were innocuous, workers borrowed and pilfered materials as they rooted through the vast heap of scrap metal from decommissioned uranium processing plants. They stole ladders, radioactive slag, nickel trays, copper tubing, wooden planks, and various tools, most of them irradiated. In late March 1953 an AEC inspector discovered that the "misuse of Government vehicles and the taking of Government property for personal use prevailed" at the LOOW site. The workers, he concluded from his investigation, were not sure "who is directly responsible for the administration of the Area," a condition encouraged by infrequent visits from higher-ups at the AEC. During his visit the only guard for the entire fifteen-hundred-acre area had been on sick leave for the past three weeks. The foreman for laborers on site used the red AEC truck to transport loads of radioactive slag—apparently for his private paving business. He also allowed his employees to do likewise—not realizing, because of the AEC pretense that the materials on the site were innocuous, that they were in fact contaminated. The investigation itself was precipitated by a report that someone, who was not captured, had entered the site and attempted to steal valuable nickel trays from the scrap heap. Contractors frequently came to the site to dump unknown materials—and they were rarely stopped or questioned. One time in 1953 the foreman noticed contractors "rummaging around and [remarking] about the scrap and the value of it." In the surrounding community, it was apparently common knowledge that the scrap heap at LOOW had become a source of widespread pilfering for profit. One worker on the site, in the 1953 investigation by an AEC inspector, said his wife had been approached recently in the nearby village of Youngstown. She was asked, "if her husband was getting in on the gravy train" at the LOOW site.³⁷

As a kind of footnote to this incident, it was discovered after a 1978 DOE aerial and ground level radiological survey of the Niagara region that there were at least sixteen paved areas "having concentrations of terrestrial radioactivity not typical of ambient radiation background," including the asphalt of a bowling alley in Niagara Falls with twenty-five to fifty times the normal background gamma radiation level. "A dark, high density rock or slag was found in a pothole in parking lot. Analysis of samples of this material revealed 226RA and 238U concentrations of about 100 times the normal level for soils and rock from this part of New York; 238th concentrations were 400 times normal." The source of these phenomena, now referred to by the curious acronym T-NORM (for technologically-enhanced, normally-occurring radiological material), has never been explained.³⁸ But it seems plausible that the source was the slag pilfered from the site and then used for the private asphalt businesses of LOOW workers or their clients in the Niagara region. The lax management system at the site, which continued through the late 1970s, thus created a kind of informal recycling system whereby radioactive scrap and slag entered into the broader community.³⁹

While lax management practices inadvertently spread radiological contaminants, the condition of historical amnesia promoted the transfer of contaminated land into various local public and private hands. Once the entire fifteen-hundred-acre LOOW area was declared a "caretaker" site in the mid-1950s, the AEC periodically sold off portions of the LOOW territory. Before transferring lands AEC officials rarely checked historical records and warnings, which at any rate were rarely compiled. There is no available evidence that these portions of land were systematically tested for radiation, or cleared of buried radioactive and chemical wastes, before they were sold. Even when the AEC issued vague warnings, successive owners ignored prohibitions previously expressed regarding certain pieces of land. In July 1966, for instance, the AEC handed over land it claimed was cleaned up to the General Services Administration. GSA, in turn, auctioned off the land to a company that then resold the land to a succession of waste disposal companies, including the present proprietor, Chemical Waste Management. The original deed of transfer from GSA was explicit: "By the acceptance of this deed, the party of the second part for itself, its successors and assigns, covenants and agrees that it will not use the land conveyed hereby as a garbage dump and will not litter or deposit any refuse or residuals on said land that would tend to breed vermin or cause obnoxious odors." Despite the prohibition, the land in question by the early 1970s was parceled into a conventional garbage and toxic waste dump—and remains so to this day. On any given day, an average of more than fifty truckloads of toxic and conventional wastes are dumped at the site. Thousands of seagulls hover over the area, feeding off the refuse.⁴⁰

LIFTING THE VEIL OF SECRECY

THE FIRST PUBLIC RECORDS of contamination from the LOOW site since 1949 came in 1970, when a radiological survey revealed that land formerly part of LOOW and sold off to the public had radioactive "hot spots." It was a key turning point in the history of LOOW, a moment when the conspiracy of silence surrounding LOOW began to break down. That breakdown fed off of the general malaise of the 1970s, provoked by the disastrous Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, which seriously eroded public confidence in government. The first Earth Day and creation of the EPA generated a new spirit of skepticism regarding government and corporate environmental practices, stimulating a "new environmentalism." The new environmentalism, which often spanned class and racial lines, reduced public tolerance for industrial and nuclear wastes and focused broader attention, and scientific research, on issues of public health. "[A]cross the nation people looked at fences that concealed nuclear activity and worried."⁴¹ In this emerging climate, AEC embarked, ever so tentatively, on a new and unprecedented course of openness, seemingly fulfilling the dictates of community responsibility it had acknowledged but ignored in the earlier days of the Cold War.

AEC's rare public admission followed a 1970 radiological study it had conducted in preparation for selling off more of the LOOW land. To the AEC's great dismay, it discovered that "radioactive contamination ... existed on land adjacent to the AEC Niagara Falls Site." AEC contacted New York state authorities and publicly announced the findings in order "to take the initiative in relations with the press to avoid being forced into a defensive position." The press release announced that AEC "merely found some 'hot' spots," and that the lands in question "were not that dangerous." After the press announcement, the AEC congratulated itself for avoiding a public relations disaster.⁴²

The celebration was premature. "What is going on at Model City?," demanded an outraged editorial from the Niagara Gazette on November 28, 1970. It was the first time since 1949 that Niagara County residents had even bothered to ask the question—itself a powerful testimonial to the internalization of Cold War values of secrecy in the name of national security. "It is apparent ... that the people of Niagara County still don't know the full extent of the radiation danger at Model City ... It's time somebody made a stink—and not a chemical stink, either. There is a growing conviction in many circles that the American people are being had by an unholy combine of bureaucrats and businessmen. One lies, as the saying goes, and the other swears to it." That unholy combine, continued the editorial, assigned "health and safety risks to the American public without letting the public judge whether it, indeed, wants to take those risks." The editorial writer also implicated Niagara county citizens for putting too much faith in government. "We have been trusting our official guardians, the agencies of government ... but they are proving to be not very reliable. We are thus compelled to ask the question posed 19 centuries ago by the Roman satirist Juvenal: 'But who is to keep watch over the guardians?'"⁴³

The public erosion of faith in Model City's managers, however, did not significantly alter AEC operating procedures on the site—suggesting the limits of grassroots environmental activism in spheres deemed essential to national security. The new activism was sufficient to provoke new public relations initiatives but not, in the case of LOOW, to change actual practices. In fact, management practices on the site worsened. For Department of Energy officials (the AEC had become the DOE in 1978) the problem of contamination was still not a priority issue—and to the extent that it had to be dealt with by the late 1970s, DOE officials considered it a public relations problem and not a health hazard. As in earlier decades, the federal government's operating procedure at the site was to do things as cheaply and quickly as possible. The federal budget crisis accentuated this tendency. Through the 1970s, LOOW site maintenance was reduced to a bare minimum. An inspector in May 1980 reviewed all the by-now familiar problems of dilapidated buildings, poor site control, and potential off-site contamination. "However, eliminating these hazards would be a monumental undertaking and would involve a great deal of expense. My opinion is that such effort could not be justified ... To attempt to do so would be very expensive and not justifiable." He made these claims despite radiological tests the same year that revealed "airborne particulate radiation" on the site averaging "1000 times background" and contaminated drainage ditches that would pose a hazard to fishermen eating "certain aquatic species feeding in/on sediments."⁴⁴

While the DOE publicly minimized potential risks, relations between citizens and managers of the LOOW site since the late 1970s were marked by a new attitude of extreme distrust and mutual hostility. Typical of these encounters between public officials and citizens was one gathering in February 1983 between DOE officials and Niagara County citizens at the local high school located less than a half mile from the radioactive wastes. "Two of my uncles were forced from their active farms ... in 1942," said one resident, as local television news cameras rolled. The federal takeover, he added, was "the beginning of a host of problems." Local government lost a significant tax base since the land was taken off the tax rolls. People were exposed to radiation. Surplus lands were contaminated and improperly cleaned up before being handed over to new owners. About the only thing the area was good for any more, he added, was the privately run toxic waste dump now operating on former LOOW territory, which in turn was driving down property values. Said another speaker: "There is a school a quarter mile away from there, which is insane ... People are going to school and living and hunting and camping and just existing in a very unhealthy environment."⁴⁵ The speaker, no doubt, had heard of the occasional public reports about deer "with deformed antlers among the bucks and large tumors in both sexes" taken in the area. The New York State Department of Health's radiological department performed tests on some of the deer in 1980—those not eaten—and found high levels of Cesium 137 in deer body organs.⁴⁶

By the early 1980s, DOE recognized that it could no longer store the wastes in the open, although it had little idea how to resolve the problem. One reason for DOE's new appreciation of the LOOW problem was the public demand that it confront the issue—itself a serious challenge to the long-standing acceptance of the Model City commandment to "keep thy mouth shut." This was particularly true after the Three Mile Island crisis of 1979, which combined with the Love Canal crisis of the late 1970s to produce a far more active grassroots movement on the Niagara Frontier as well as the landmark Superfund legislation. The movement cut across class and racial lines and involved workers in local chemical and defense industries; it also involved New York state and local officials who demanded greater regulatory authority over environmental resources under federal control.⁴⁷ But there was another reason, perhaps the decisive one, why DOE finally tackled the problem of LOOW, and it also helps to explain the long history of careless waste management at the site. It is an improbable story that begins in the Belgian Congo, Conrad's heart of darkness.

Most of the radioactive sludge deposited at the LOOW site originated in the Belgian Congo, mined by a Belgian company known as the African Metals Corporation. The Manhattan Project created an unexpected market for the Belgian uranium ore, which was much purer than other uranium ore available during World War II. When the Army bought the ore, which was shipped to New York during the war, the contract stipulated that the African Metals Corporation would have an option to retain the wastes. Since those wastes contained large quantities of radium and other heavy metals (originally the valuable material to be extracted from the Uranium ore when it was mined in the 1920s and 1930s), the African Metals Corporation considered the sludge a potential asset rather than a liability. Banking on the hope that a new technology might permit extraction of valuable materials from the radioactive wastes once the war ended, the Belgian company thus negotiated the right to possess the materials. In addition, as part of the purchase agreement, the U.S. federal government accepted the role of caretaker of those wastes until the company could take possession of them. It agreed to do so, fearing that shipping the wastes back to Belgium might allow valuable materials to fall into enemy hands. As far as LOOW managers were concerned, this unique contractual arrangement provided another disincentive to manage the wastes: Since the AEC didn't own the wastes, it literally felt no ownership of the contamination problems associated with their storage.⁴⁸

The original contract with African ran out at the end of 1958, at which point the company negotiated a new contract with AEC lasting twenty-five years. As with the previous contract, the new contract stipulated that African Metals would retain the wastes but AEC would manage their disposal at LOOW until the company could figure out how to profit from the radioactive residues. That contract stipulated, among other things, that AEC needed the permission of the African Metals Corporation for "any alterations, additions, and improvements" in handling the wastes. Another clause absolved the U.S. government "for injury to or death of persons or injury to or destruction of property" resulting from the storage of the materials. Instead, all liability was transferred to African Metals. From 1958 to the termination of the contract in 1983 the AEC and its successor organizations thus operated under the assumption that the wastes were not theirs—and that they therefore had limited responsibility for maintaining them. At the same time, the African Metals Corporation, based in Belgium, took no active role in the site's management and rarely even visited the site.⁴⁹

In the 1960s and the 1970s, it became clear that the wastes were a financial and environmental albatross rather than a potential source of profit. The market for radium had collapsed because of a new appreciation of the dangers of using radium for various industrial purposes. The unique contractual situation surrounding the LOOW wastes, combined with a general culture of carelessness and secrecy at Model City, thus created a regime in which the people managing the site literally passed the buck to an absentee foreign corporation, which was doing as much as possible to avoid its contractual responsibilities. A contractor managing the site noted in July 1976: "It is our understanding that we have no responsibility ... other than routine physical security surveillance." The contractor added that "any maintenance activity" was the responsibility of African Metals Corporation, which routinely refused to pay the bills it received from AEC (and its successor DOE) for upkeep and maintenance of the area.⁵⁰

In the meantime, DOE officials believed that once the term of the contract ended in 1983, there would be no new contract. African Metals would assume ownership of the wastes, pay to have them hauled away, and clean up the site. African Metals, for its part, referred the matter to sympathetic officials in the Belgian government, who contacted the U.S. Department of State and DOE officials. They wanted to convince the U.S. government to take ownership of the LOOW wastes from African Metals and to relieve the company of all liability and costs associated with their storage. In 1982, the Belgian Ambassador to the United States wrote Secretary of State George Shultz about the LOOW problem. He pleaded for the U.S. government to relieve African Metals of the obligation to take control of the wastes. As justification, he invoked the rationale of wartime emergency—that the Belgian government had agreed to "acquiesce" in offering the uranium ore "without normal business negotiation because of the importance of the war effort." As a result, he argued, African Metals should be relieved of contractual obligations entered into during a war emergency. To the great dismay of DOE, which up to the end of 1982 hoped that the LOOW problem would soon become Belgium's problem, the Belgian ambassador's proposal was accepted: On behalf of African Metals the Belgian government paid $8 million for cleanup (estimates for cleanup were estimated at $16 million and have since been many times that) and in exchange the wastes were now fully owned by the United States. In violation of the terms of the 1958 contract, African Metals also was relieved of any liability associated with their past, present, or future storage.⁵¹

For DOE, which had assumed that the LOOW problem would soon no longer be its concern, it was a stunning and unexpected reversal of fortunes. An August 1982 meeting between DOE, African Metals Corp., the U.S. Department of State, and Bechtel officials laid out the rationale for the unexpected decision. Officials reasoned that "both countries are pro-business with large nuclear programs" and that the financial interests of the nuclear industry (under assault in Europe and the United States after Three Mile Island) should therefore be protected. They also believed that African Metals should be relieved of any liability for the wastes because of its contributions to U.S. national security. Finally, as one DOE official concluded after consultation with the U.S. Department of State, it was necessary to "consider NATO aspects," by which he meant a clear quid pro quo: if the U.S. government took over the LOOW wastes, the Belgian government would fully support controversial U.S. efforts to upgrade its nuclear arsenal in Europe.⁵²

Tellingly, like everything else at LOOW, resolution of the situation did not involve local officials or citizens. The list of the officials at the meeting noted above does not include a single local politician, New York State representative, or anyone with a long-term stake in western New York.⁵³ As is the wont in Model City, federal officials invoked national security concerns to burden western New Yorkers with a toxic waste problem that will last millennia. It was a revealing illustration of the Cold War ethos: the progressive erosion of local control over the area's natural resources, even as the environmental costs of national security were shifted to local governments and citizens least capable of dealing with them. When news of the deal leaked, local citizens could only lament their powerlessness. "It's unfortunate that the people of the Town of Lewiston are being sacrificed for the sake of the arms race," said one.⁵⁴

The upshot of the African Metals fiasco was that in June 1983 the DOE finally had no choice but to deal with contamination at LOOW. It chose the cheapest possible recommended solution: the creation of an "interim" containment structure (to last twenty-five years) that involved demolishing most of the buildings on the site, digging up thousands of cubic yards of nearby contaminated soils and burying them beneath a clay cap. It hoped, wrongly as it turned out, that the cleanup would encompass most of the radioactive contaminants. Selecting the cheapest alternative was business as usual at LOOW, but it was also encouraged by the Reagan-era attack on environmental regulation, in which "the emphasis on deregulation and the accompanying cuts in the budget for the EPA devastated much of the legislative and attitudinal ground that had been covered in the previous decade."⁵⁵ Contemplating a list of costly alternatives, one DOE official noted that "non-technical considerations," by which he meant the Reagan Administration's general downgrading of environmental protection, should ultimately condition any final storage arrangement.⁵⁶ At precisely the point that some local citizens began demanding a solution to the LOOW problem, the Reagan revolution challenged the federal government's role in environmental protection.

DENOUEMENT

THE VERY PROCESS of digging up and burying wastes briefly intensified the dangers of contamination—a paradoxical feature of toxic waste "remediation." For instance, all the equipment used during the cleanup itself became contaminated and had to be discarded. In addition, from late 1982 through 1984, as bulldozers dredged contaminated soils, the holding pens for water used in the cleanup process overflowed during heavy rains. During that time, nearly 3 million gallons of radioactively contaminated water washed into Lake Ontario, much of it with the permission of the State of New York. Now that the life-span of that structure is approaching its end (the twenty-five-year life of the "interim" structure hardly seems adequate given the sixteen-hundred-year half life of the radium on the site) there is no money available for upgrading it and thus for creating a permanent replacement for the "interim" solution. As one prescient DOE memo from remarked, "Past experience has shown that 'temporary' often becomes 'permanent' ... a 'quick-fix' solution ... will end up saddling us with long term costly problems."⁵⁷

Chemical and other wastes continue to fill up land formerly part of LOOW, layered on top of areas which have tested positive for plutonium. New York State Department of Health restrictions on former LOOW land, which is now a growing hazardous waste dump, have been ignored. The LOOW site itself is deceptively "wild," maintaining a green appearance to the outside world that disguises the site's toxic past. Almost all of the structures have been demolished and buried, another example of Model City's historical amnesia. Trees now grow where buildings and tracks formerly existed. Deer, fox, and other animals freely breach the area's fences and roam the compound. "It's like a wildlife refuge," said a Corps of Engineers official in June 2005, although he hastened to add that there is still "some surface contamination."⁵⁸

Figure 4. Entrance to the LOOW Site

Photo by author.
The structure is one of the many boiler plants built in 1942 for TNT production—and designed to appear as a barn with silos from the air. FUSRAP stands for Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program.

Meanwhile, many Niagara Frontier citizens, though by no means a majority, are vaguely aware of living in the midst of severe environmental contamination. Yet the historical record that might indicate the precise nature of that contamination, and thus help in its containment, does not exist.⁵⁹ As one DOE-commissioned survey noted in 1982: "Landfills and lagoons used for chemical waste treatment have significantly changed the topography in certain areas; therefore it is unlikely that all previously identified burial sites will be found." Exacerbating this vacuum of knowledge is a growing public complacency which suggests that the "new environmentalism" from the 1970s has run its course. On the one side are environmental activists, spurred on by Ralph Nader, who in 2005 came to the area and described LOOW as an instance of "institutional insanity," "toxic terrorism" and a "silent form of violence." On the other side are many neighbors of the Nader supporters. They characterize environmental activists such as Nader and Lois Gibbs as tree huggers and alarmists, whose activities needlessly alarm residents, drive down property values, and scare away potential investors and tourists. The latter prefer the "unspoken bargain" referred to by Hal Rothman and encouraged by the Reagan-era backlash against environmentalism: a return to the 1950s when environmental degradation in the community and the workplace was calculated as the cost of progress and maintaining jobs. That unspoken bargain lives on in western New York, where many believe environmental cleanup must come at the expense of economic growth. In the meantime, government officials at all levels, with ever-shrinking budgets for cleanup, can see no way to rid the area of the radioactive wastes. They reason that since the area is already contaminated, and most of the old manufacturing jobs have gone away, they might as well make the best of a bad situation and develop the region's most promising line of business: the processing of chemical wastes.⁶⁰ As Chemical Waste Management (one of the largest employers in Niagara County) put it on their web site: "Life is not perfect," a telling commentary on the fate of William T. Love's original utopian vision for Model City.⁶¹

Meanwhile, surviving workers from the LOOW site and uranium-processing plants in western New York have labored unsuccessfully to receive compensation for their exposure to radioactive contaminants: No one can locate the records they need to prove their work history and receive compensation.⁶² And so, as they die off from various illnesses, the citizens of western New York live in a state of insecurity and ignorance in relationship to their local environment and to the government officials charged with cleaning it up. As one local environmental activist put it: "Perhaps the biggest Urban Myth of all is that the U.S. government which dumped the remnants of history's ultimate weapon gives a shit enough about the residents here now and into the future to clean it up."⁶³ As much as the waste products themselves, the belief among most locals that there is nothing that can be done about getting rid of them has had the most corrosive impact on civic and public life in western New York. From a utopian metropolis "free of defiling vapors," Model City has become a place perceived as dangerous, dirty, and forever accursed with toxic wastes. That sense of insecurity and hopelessness is one of the most enduring legacies of victory in World War II and the Cold War. It is also a sad commentary on the failure of environmental activists to confront the claim that environmental protection is too costly—and to force federal and corporate officials to clean up their toxic and radioactive messes.

Andrew Jenks is assistant professor of history at California State University, Long Beach. In addition to a monograph on modern Russian identity, he has published on the history of Soviet science and technology. He currently is working on a comparative history of secret cities in Cold War Russia and America.

NOTES

^1. William T. Love, Description and Plan of the Model City Located at Lewiston, Niagara County, N.Y. Chartered by Special Act of the New York Legislature. Designed to be the Most Perfect City in Existence (Lewiston, NY: The Model Town Company, 1893), 12, 25.

^2. Rich Newman has recently reexamined Love Canal and its impact on environmental politics and activism: Rich Newman, "Making Environmental Politics: Women and Love Canal Activism," Women's Studies Quarterly 29 (2001): 65–84; Rich Newman, "From Love's Canal to Love Canal: Reckoning with the Environmental Legacy of an Industrial Dream," in Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization, ed. Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 112–35.

^3. Notes from personal tour of the LOOW site, June 14, 2005.

^4. On the need for research into links between the environment and the Cold War, see Kurk Dorsey, "Dealing with the Dinosaur (and Its Swamp): Putting the Environment in Diplomatic History," Diplomatic History 29 (September 2005): 573–87. On the relationship between war and the environment, see Richard P. Tucker and Edmund Russell, eds., Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004). For a general and voluminous overview of the costs of the U.S. nuclear weapons programs, see Stephen Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons since 1940 (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1998). While the book contains a chapter on nuclear waste management, it contains only one mention, in a footnote, of the LOOW site (600, n. 19).

^5. The declassified archive concerning the LOOW site is located in the Buffalo offices of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, hereafter referred to as the Army Corps Archive.

^6. The Army Corps of Engineers received the job of maintaining and cleaning up the site from the Department of Energy during the Clinton presidency. No longer in the dam-building business, the Corps of Engineers found a new mission in taking over decommissioned Department of Energy sites. This transfer of the LOOW site came at a time when Hazel O'Leary, the head of the Department of Energy, reversed the long-standing culture of secrecy surrounding Department of Energy activities—a policy that was encouraged by the discovery of human radiation experiments conducted by DOE and its predecessor organizations during the Cold War. On the human radiation experiments, see Eileen Welsome, The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War (New York: Random House, 1999).

^7. Tom Vanderbilt, Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 88; Niagara Gazette, March 2, 1954, 1.

^8. See especially Schwartz, Atomic Audit.

^9. Michael D'Antonio, Atomic Harvest: Hanford and the Lethal Toll of America's Nuclear Arsenal (New York: Crown Publishers, 1993), 4, 6–7.

^10. There has been no scholarly treatment of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works. The history of LOOW, however, was the subject of a New York State investigation in the late 1970s. The special "Task Force on Toxic Substances" produced a voluminous archive, now located in the New York State Archives, and a two-volume "interim" report (but never a final report). The report attempted to draw connections between chemical and radiological dumping at Love Canal and dumping associated with the Manhattan Project at the LOOW site (also managed by Hooker Chemical Corp.). The report was titled: The Federal Connection: A History of U.S. Military Involvement in the Toxic Contamination of Love Canal and the Niagara Frontier Region. January 29, 1981. An Interim Report to New York State Assembly Speaker Stanley Fink. New York State Assembly Task Force on Toxic Substances, 2 vols. All of the documents cited in this article from the New York State Archives in Albany (but not from the Army Corps Archive, which were not examined by New York State investigators) were gathered for the Federal Connection report. I cite documents used in the Federal Connection report as I found them when they were later cataloged and housed in Albany following the New York State Assembly's publication of the report in 1981.

^11. Letter to the Editor, Niagara Gazette, July 30, 2005, 8A; Vanderbilt, Survival City, 16; LOOWDOWN, November 1942, no. 2, 1.

^12. LOOWDOWN, October 1942, no. 1, 6; November 1942, no. 3, 1; February 1943, no. 9, 1; April 1943, no. 10, 1.

^13. LOOWDOWN, November 1942, no. 2, 1; January 1943, no. 6, 1.

^14. LOOWDOWN, April 1943, no. 11, 1; June 1943, no. 12, 1.

^15. For examples of these attitudes in the United States, see, among others, Michele Stenehjem Gerber, On the Home Front: The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford Nuclear Site (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992); D'Antonio, Atomic Harvest; Hugh Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), especially on the climate of secrecy at nuclear weapons sites. On the Soviet Union, see Paul Josephson, Resources under Regimes: Technology, Environment, and the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Loren Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Murray Feshbach, Ecological Disaster: Cleaning Up the Hidden Legacy of the Soviet Regime (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995). For a fascinating comparison of how Russians and U.S. citizens have dealt with the legacy of environmental degradation from nuclear weapons development, see Russell Dalton et al., Critical Masses: Citizens, Nuclear Weapons Production, and Environmental Destruction in the United States and Russia (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).

^16. Schwartz, Atomic Audit, 356, notes similar careless attitudes at Manhattan Project sites throughout the country. In addition, the New York State Assembly Task Force on Toxic Substances, which investigated the history of the LOOW site, detailed numerous incidents of radioactive dumping and chemical contamination all along the Niagara Frontier and at the LOOW site. The Federal Connection, vol. 1, iv–x, 120–47.

^17. The incidents described in this paragraph were investigated and reported in the Federal Connection, vol 1., 120–47, 156. The following documents cited in this paragraph were used in the New York State investigation and later deposited in the New York State Archives in Albany: New York State Archives, Albany, L0132, B20, July 3, 1945, letter from the Army Corps of Engineers to the Linde Air Products Company; The Federal Connection, vol. 1, 163; New York State Archives, Albany, L0132, B20, October 17, 1945, Linde Air Products memorandum; March 29, 1944, Linde Air Products Memorandum; L0133, B1, sworn statement of Frank Ventry, July 19, 1978.

^18. The Federal Connection, vol. 1, 2, 179, 220.

^19. Army Corps LOOW Archive, Box NFDOEK 025–026.

^20. New York State Archives, Albany, L0133, B1, "Notes of Conversation w/Roy Anderson, Oak Ridge, TN, 9/18 and 19/1980."; The Federal Connection, vol. 1, viii, 186; L0132, B1, folder titled, "DOE Documents re: Contaminated Land," June 2, 1955 memorandum from the Hooker Chemical Corp.; Army Corps LOOW Archive, Box 9, "ERDA-Niagara Falls Radioactive Waste Management Plan, June 16, 1975."

^21. New York State Archives, Albany, L0132, B28, text of phone conversation between the LOOW-site manager and a Bell Aircraft executive, November 22, 1949.

^22. New York State Archives, Albany, L0132, B1, Hooker Chemical office memo, April 6, 1953.

^23. Army Corps Archive, Box 9, Theodore Arnow, "Ground-Water Condition in the Buffalo Area in Relation to Radioactive-Waste Disposal by the Atomic Energy Commission," U.S. Department of Interior Geological Survey. Albany, NY, March 1, 1949, 1, 4–5, 6. The report is discussed in The Federal Connection, vol. 1, 249–251,

^24. New York State Archive, Albany, L0132, B1, February 9, 1948, AEC memorandum, "Cooperation with Other Federal Agencies in Problems of Waste Disposal, Water Supply and Environmental Hazards." The report is discussed in the Federal Connection, vol. 1, 247–49.

^25. Niagara Gazette, August 31, 1949, 1.

^26. On the link between environmental degradation and authoritarian states, see Josephson, Resources Under Regimes, especially chap. 2; Hal K. Rothman, Saving the Planet: The American Response to the Environment in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 132.

^27. Niagara Gazette, March 2, 1954, 7.

^28. In 1952, nearly five thousand drums of radium were shipped from the LOOW site to Fernald, Ohio. The memorandum notes frequent instances of leakage of radioactive material during the entire process of loading, shipping, and unloading the drums. Army Corps LOOW Archive, Box 9, memorandum from the National Lead Company, "K-65 Shipping Operation at LOSA," November 18, 1952.

^29. Army Corps LOOW Archive, Box 9, Undated Atomic Energy Commission report titled "Radiation Survey and Decontamination Report of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works Site," II-5; Box LFDOEK, November 2, 1954 memorandum, 080; Federal Connection, vol. 1, 154 (on the Rochester animal experiments). On the human radiation experiments, see Welsome, The Plutonium Files.

^30. Army Corps LOOW Archive, Box LFDOEK, November 16, 1964, memorandum, 114; October 23, 1970, AEC safety report, 208; Box 9, Undated Atomic Energy Commission report titled "Radiation Survey and Decontamination Report of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works Site," II-5, IV-1, II-9.

^31. Army Corps Archive, Box LFDOEK, December 27, 1978, letter from the AEC to the EPA, 565. As New York State investigators noted in 1981, "Federal mismanagement at the site was manifested by sloppy and deficient record-keeping procedures, inadequate mapping of buried wastes, and technological primitivism with regard to waste storage and disposal." Federal Connection, vol. 1, viii.

^32. New York State Archives, Albany, L0132, B1, folder titled "Disposal of KAPL Wastes," September 13, 1954 memorandum; Army Corps Archive, Box LFDOEK, April 27–29 inspection report, 149, 150, 161, 162, 169, 180; "Radiation Survey, Buildings 411 and 413, Lewiston, New York, August 10, 1966."

^33. Army Corps LOOW Archive, Box 7/12, "Report of Trip to DOE-Niagara Falls, New York Site on June 12, 1979," 4; "July 24, 1979 Trip," Report from National Lead Company of Ohio, 3; "Trip Report to Niagara Falls Storage Site on November 4–5, 1980," 1; Box 9, undated report (probably early 1980), "Radiation Survey and Documentation Report of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works Site," II-7.

^34. Federal Connection, vol. 1, ix, 146; Army Corps Archive, Box 7/12, July 24 Trip Report, National Lead Company, 4; April 30, 1980, "Notes—Meeting to Discuss Falls Storage Sites"; Box LFDOEK, October 23, 1970, inspection report, 208; February 15, 1966, inspection report, 166; Box 2, May 7, 1979, letter from LOOW to Oak Ridge, 575.

^35. On the use of a special nomenclature and language in nuclear facilities, see Gusterson, Nuclear Rites.

^36. Army Corps LOOW Archive, Box 9, untitled 1954 report from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, 14; New York State Archives, Albany, L0132, B20, November 3, 1947, memorandum to employees from the Electro Metallurgical Company. On the exposure of civilian workers in western New York to uranium dust and radiation, and their lack of knowledge about the materials they worked with, see Federal Connection, vol. 1, 91, 131, 151–171.

^37. New York State Archive, Albany, L0132, B1, April 6, 1953, "Administrative Review of Lake Ontario Storage Area"; this incident is described in Federal Connection, vol. 1, 244.

^38. Army Corps Archive, Box 9, "Formerly Utilized MED/AEC Sites Remedial Action Program: Exploratory Aerial & Ground Level Radiological Survey of the Niagara Falls Area, Niagara Falls, New York, July 1979," 6, Table 1 and Table 2. See, also, a 1986 Department of Energy report on the hot spots available at: www.ornl.gov/info/reports/1986/3445601478227.pdf.

^39. New York State Archive, Albany, L0132, B1, April 6, 1953, "Administrative Review of Lake Ontario Storage Area"; Army Corps Archive, Box LFDOEK, April 27–29 1960 inspection report, 148; The Federal Connection, vol. 1, 244. In 2005 those radiological hot spots were again in the news when they were re-remembered in advance of a planned road reconstruction near the city of Niagara Falls: "Hidden Hazard on Lewiston Road," Niagara Gazette, 19 October, 2006, online version.

^40. Army Corps Archive, Box 9, "Transfer from GSA to Ford Conti Corp. of Title to Land Formerly Occupied by AF-68," July 23, 1966; The Federal Connection, vol. 1, 202–18, 258, on land transfers.

^41. Rothman, Saving the Planet, 184.

^42. Army Corps Archive, Box 9, "Radiation Survey and Decontamination Report of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works," 1; Box LFDOEK, 269, 270; Niagara Gazette, November 20, 1970, 15.

^43. Niagara Gazette, November 28, 1970, 6.

^44. Army Corps Archive, Box 7/12, "Trip Report—Visit to Niagara Falls Storage Site, May 8–9, 1980," 1; Box 2, August 1980 radiological survey, 683, 685; June 1981 site survey, 1107.

^45. Army Corps Archive, Box 7/12, Transcripts of a public meeting between DOE LOOW officials and concerned local citizens at the Lewiston-Porter High School, February 19, 1983, 28, 32–34, 61.

^46. New York State Archive, Albany, L0134, Box 1, reports of radioactive deer taken by local hunters in 1980 and 1981 are contained in a file labeled "Miscellaneous Documents."

^47. On environmental activism on the Niagara Frontier because of the Love Canal crisis, see Rich Newman, "Making Environmental Politics: Women and Love Canal Activism," Women's Studies Quarterly 29 (2001): 65–84. See, also, Adeline Gordon Levine, Love Canal: Science, Politics, and People (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1982); and Lois Gibbs, Love Canal: The Story Continues (Stony Creek, CT: New Society Publishers, 1998), who recounts the grassroots environmental activism of lower middle-class residents, many of whom were workers in local defense and chemical industries.

^48. Army Corps Archive, Box LFDOEK, "History of the African Ores," undated but probably written in 1947, 16–17; April 1954 bill from AEC to African Metals for maintenance of the wastes, 93, 94.

^49. Army Corps Archive, Box LFDOEK, copy of the 1958 AEC contract with African Metals Corporation, 133–38; July 9, 1976, AEC memorandum, 504. New York State investigators were apparently unaware of the renewal of the contract in 1958. The Federal Connection, vol. 1, 226.

^50. Army Corps Archive, Box LFDOEK, February 15, 1966, AEC memorandum, 166; August 26, 1978, AEC memorandum, "Background of Current Situation at LOOW—History, Responsibilities and Problem Areas," 540–42.

^51. Army Corps Archive, Box 2, letter from African Metals to DOE, October 6, 1981, 1047; letter from the Belgian Ambassador L. Tindemans to Secretary of State George Shultz, August 7, 1982, 1555–57; "Afrimet Meeting on August 19, 1982," 1551–54; final agreement with African Metals, July 29, 1983, 1837.

^52. Army Corps Archive, Box 2, "Afrimet Meeting on August 19, 1982," 1551–54.

^53. Ibid., 1554.

^54. Niagara Gazette, August 18, 1983, 4A.

^55. Jacqueline Vaughn Switzer, Green Backlash: The History and Politics of Environmental Opposition in the U.S. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997), 8.

^56. Army Corps Archive, Box 2, June 1981 survey of the site, 1132.

^57. Army Corps Archive, Box 2, various communications on the radioactive water releases from 1982 to 1984, 1680–1702, 1759–60, 1905; Box NFDOEK, May 19, 1978, memorandum, 526.

^58. Notes from personal tour of the LOOW site, June 14, 2005.

^59. As a history professor at Niagara University from 2002–2005, I regularly polled my students (almost all of them from the Buffalo-Niagara Falls region) and I was amazed that almost none had ever heard of the LOOW site—and only a small minority knew anything about the Love Canal controversy or environmental activists such as Lois Gibbs.

^60. Army Corps Archive, Box 39, November 1982 site survey by Bechtel Corp., 1625; author's notes from Ralph Nader's discussion of the LOOW site at the Lewiston-Porter High School, Lewiston, NY, April 14, 2005.

^61. See the Chemical Waste Management web site: http://www.cwm.com.my/cwm_english/main.html.

^62. The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act went into effect July 31, 2001. Administered by the Department of Labor, it promises $150,000 in compensation to employees who can prove they worked in western New York facilities related to nuclear weapons work. Few of those workers, even with the aid of the Army Corps of Engineers, have been able to locate documents recording their work history—a prerequisite for receiving the compensation.

^63. E-mail correspondence with Tim Henderson, member of the LOOW Remediation Advisory Board, July 19, 2005.

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