Paradise Falls: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe

by Keith O'Brien Narrated by Eileen Stevens

Overview

From the New York Times best-selling journalist, the staggering, hidden story of an unlikely band of mothers who discovered the deadly secret of Love Canal, and exposed one of America's most devastating environmental disasters.

Lois Gibbs, Luella Kenny, and other mothers loved their neighborhood on the east side of Niagara Falls. It had an elementary school, a playground, and rows of affordable homes. In the spring of 1977, pungent odors began to seep into these little houses, and it didn't take long for worried mothers to identify the curious scent. It was the sickly-sweet smell of chemicals.

In this propulsive work of narrative reportage, Keith O'Brien uncovers how Lois Gibbs and Luella Kenny exposed the poisonous secrets buried in their neighborhood. The school and playground had been built atop an old canal-the Love Canal, it was called. The city's largest employer, Hooker Chemical, had quietly filled this canal with 20,000 tons of toxic waste in the 1940s and 1950s. This waste was now leaching to the surface, causing a public health crisis the likes of which America had never seen before-and sparking new and specific fears. Luella Kenny believed the chemicals were making her son sick.
 
O'Brien braids together the previously unknown stories of Hooker Chemical's deeds; the local newspaperman, scientist, and congressional staffer who tried to help; the city and state officials who didn't; and the heroic women who stood up to corporate and governmental indifference to save their families and their children. They would take their fight all the way to the top, winning support from the E.P.A. and the White House, even President Jimmy Carter himself, and by the time it was over, they would capture the American imagination. Sweeping and electrifying, Paradise Falls brings to life a defining story from our past, laying bare how the dauntless efforts of a few women helped to spark the modern environmental movement as we know it today.

Cover images: Courtesy of the University Archives, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

Editorial Reviews

AUGUST 2022 - AudioFile

The listener would be forgiven for calling this audiobook a horror story. However, it’s not from the imagination of a writer like Stephen King. Instead, it is the true story of Love Canal, an environmental disaster in Niagara Falls, New York, that captured the attention of the nation in the 1970s. Narrator Eileen Stevens’s pacing is perfect. She seamlessly moves through a cast of characters who include heroic mothers, a young reporter, a do-gooder, unconcerned politicians, and sympathetic yet sclerotic bureaucrats. Stevens portrays all of them with great care. This remarkable and inspiring work will have listeners furious at the corporate greed and malfeasance described but also in awe of the mothers who fought to save their neighborhood and their families. J.P.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

02/14/2022

Journalist O’Brien (Fly Girls) delivers an immersive portrait of the citizen-activists who brought the Love Canal environmental disaster to light. In the 1940s and early ’50s, Hooker Chemical secretly dumped massive amounts of toxic chemical byproducts into a trench left over from an abandoned canal project in Niagara Falls, N.Y. Over the next 20 years, residents of the LaSalle neighborhood endured persistent chemical smells and seepage in their homes and suffered from unusual cancers, high rates of miscarriage, and other health problems. O’Brien pays particular attention to the many women who raised awareness about the issue, including congressional staffer Bonnie Casper, who pushed her boss to visit the area, and cancer researcher Beverly Paigen, who conducted soil sample tests and medical surveys. Eventually, the state and federal government helped relocate hundreds of families, and outrage over the case contributed to the passage of the 1980 Superfund Act requiring polluters to pay to ameliorate the damage they caused. O’Brien’s fluid retelling includes many startling anecdotes, including the time a local activist held two EPA officials hostage, and offers insight into how Love Canal transformed from a local disaster into national news. Readers will gain newfound appreciation for the regular people whose crusade for justice helped catalyze the modern environmental movement. (Apr.)

From the Publisher

CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE NOMINEE 

“Propulsive . . . A mighty work of historical journalism . . . Paradise Falls is a glorious quotidian thriller about people forced to find and use their inner strength. After all these years, they are fortunate to have a chronicler as focused and thoughtful as O’Brien. He brings their courage back to life.”
—The Boston Globe
 
“With stunning clarity . . . [O’Brien chronicles] the human tragedy of Love Canal. . . By the time I read of Jon Allen’s death, even though I knew the outcome, I cried. . . As the disaster unfolds, there are horrific discoveries, medical mysteries and plenty of screaming neighbors . . . so gripping it could almost be a thriller.”
—Erika Engelhaupt, Science News

"Paced like a thriller, it’s a remarkable story of perseverance against impossible odds."
—Chicago Review of Books

“A stunning, sad, and instructive story . . . [revealing how] Love Canal transformed environmental policy in the United States.”
—Psychology Today

“At once heart-wrenching and uplifting, infuriating and inspiring, Paradise Falls is an exhaustively researched and compelling excavation of the past that remains eerily relevant in this moment. O’Brien deftly knits together a tightly-paced, relatable, and definitive narrative of a watershed moment in the annals of environmental justice…and its profoundly felt absence.”
—Denise Kiernan, New York Times bestselling author of We Gather Together, The Last Castle, and The Girls of Atomic City

“Nearly two decades before environmental activist Erin Brockovich made headlines in California, a group of mothers on the other side of the country launched an epic battle to save their neighborhood in the shadow of Niagara Falls. Exhaustively reported and expertly told, Paradise Falls is the definitive, captivating account of the women who, against all odds, exposed the deadly secret of Love Canal. Keith O’Brien’s latest is narrative nonfiction at its finest.”
—Abbott Kahler, bestselling author of The Ghosts of Eden Park
 
“How does an environmental disaster become an inspiring tale of homemakers turned heroes? Start with Keith O’Brien, a gifted writer who expertly blends emotion and gumshoe reporting to tell the story of ordinary people who fought to save their families. Paradise Falls is a master work of narrative nonfiction.” 
—Mitchell Zuckoff, New York Times bestselling author of Fall and Rise and 13 Hours

“This book—about an historical event, an environmental catastrophe—reads like a thriller, even if you know the contours of that event and its outcome. In luminous prose, O’Brien brings people to life on the page. You’ll end up caring about them, and admiring them, for their courage and persistence.”
—Jonathan Harr, author of the #1 national bestseller A Civil Action

“Meticulously researched . . . gripping . . . This authoritative book deserves a wide audience and should provoke reflection on just how much we have progressed in the 45 years since the Love Canal disaster.”
—Library Journal, starred review

“Riveting . . . the text blisters with details . . . Paradise Falls is a narrative resplendent with ordinary people who stood up against overwhelming odds. O’Brien has accomplished an outstanding work of investigative journalism.”
—Booklist, starred review
 
“Deeply reported, masterly . . . a story [O'Brien] brings to life for a new generation. [Paradise Falls] is a marker we can use to measure how far we’ve come . . . in terms of environmental responsibility, and how far we still have to go.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Deeply researched . . . In this work of investigative reporting, O’Brien narrates a tale of corporate malfeasance and inaction, governmental response (or lack thereof), and, above all, inspiring citizen activism in the face of harrowing circumstances . . . A thorough retelling of an environmental tragedy and a renewed call for corporate accountability.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Library Journal

★ 03/01/2022

O'Brien's (Fly Girls) meticulously researched and gripping history of the massive environmental disaster at Love Canal draws readers into the unrest, anxiety, and bewilderment of everyday people discovering their beloved neighborhood is poisoned and deadly. In 1977, residents of a modest blue-collar neighborhood near Niagara Falls, NY, discovered that they were living atop a canal filled with toxic waste (dumped by Hooker Chemical Company 30 years earlier), which was now leaching to the surface and making them sick. O'Brien spotlights two of the residents whose determination and endurance proved extraordinary—Lois Gibbs, a young mother and housewife-turned-ardent environmental activist and organizer; and Luella Kenny, spurred into activism by the grief of losing her young son, who she believed was sickened by Love Canal. They endured years of corporate muscle flexing and of state and federal governmental delays, denials and stonewalling, until President Carter finally issued an emergency order aiding Love Canal's neighbors to relocate; in 1980, Congress established the Superfund Act. O'Brien describes the Love Canal crisis as citizen activism meeting politics and power and eventually prevailing, thanks to heroes like the beleaguered but undeterred scientist and civil servant Beverly Paigen, whose investigation of Hooker Chemical was steadily opposed by the New York State health commissioner. VERDICT This Love Canal story exposes the nation's utter unpreparedness to respond to that public health crisis and is very timely during the COVID pandemic. This authoritative book deserves a wide audience and should provoke reflection on just how much we have progressed in the 45 years since the Love Canal disaster.—Janet Ingraham Dwyer

AUGUST 2022 - AudioFile

The listener would be forgiven for calling this audiobook a horror story. However, it’s not from the imagination of a writer like Stephen King. Instead, it is the true story of Love Canal, an environmental disaster in Niagara Falls, New York, that captured the attention of the nation in the 1970s. Narrator Eileen Stevens’s pacing is perfect. She seamlessly moves through a cast of characters who include heroic mothers, a young reporter, a do-gooder, unconcerned politicians, and sympathetic yet sclerotic bureaucrats. Stevens portrays all of them with great care. This remarkable and inspiring work will have listeners furious at the corporate greed and malfeasance described but also in awe of the mothers who fought to save their neighborhood and their families. J.P.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2022-01-18
A deeply researched history of a significant 1977 environmental disaster.

In this work of investigative reporting, O’Brien narrates a tale of corporate malfeasance and inaction, governmental response (or lack thereof), and, above all, inspiring citizen activism in the face of harrowing circumstances. Underneath the LaSalle neighborhood in suburban Niagara Falls, a company called Hooker Chemical had long filled a forgotten waterway, known as the Love Canal by locals, with chemical waste. By the late 1970s, residents noticed the stench of chemicals, clouds of fumes, gas leaks, spontaneous ignitions, and terrible health repercussions. O'Brien, a longtime NPR contributor, describes the personalities of a large cast of characters, including town officials, company executives, EPA administrators, Al Gore, Gov. Hugh Carey, Jane Fonda, even President Jimmy Carter. Thankfully, the author maintains the focus on the grassroots leaders and blue-collar workers who stood up to Hooker and its negligent corporate overseer, Occidental Petroleum. One government report noted “that a wide range of chemical compounds dumped in this industrial landfill might pose a substantial health hazard” to local residents. Other studies pointed out an "unusually high incidence" of miscarriages, birth defects, and malignancies, as in the tragic death of 6-year-old Jon Allen, a heartbreaking story fully recounted here. Evacuation of homes, relocation of residents, and toxic remediation work all proved daunting, as O'Brien's patient chronology of the crisis bears out. Part of the solution turned out to be national and sweeping: federal financing to address thousands of poisoned landfills across the country. At the end of the Carter administration, Congress passed the Superfund Act, $1.6 billion funded “almost exclusively” by polluting companies. Unfortunately, in 1995, the Republican-led Congress let the corporate tax component lapse. Citizen activist Lois Gibbs, whose evolution as an organizer and spokesperson runs throughout the narrative, receives the honorary title of "Mother of the Superfund." Readers who have followed Gibbs through years know that she has earned the laurels.

A thorough retelling of an environmental tragedy and a renewed call for corporate accountability.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176262711
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	04/12/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION
MAY 14, 1972
 
It was a Sunday afternoon, almost summer in Niagara Falls, and the children from the little bungalows on the east side of town scampered outside to play.
 
The parents, mostly factory workers and housewives, didn’t fol­low them. No adults were going to lord over the kids with rules and warnings that afternoon, because everyone knew the LaSalle neigh­borhood was safe and everyone knew where the kids were going. To the playground, they called it—a rectangular expanse of open land around the elementary school between Ninety-Seventh and Ninety-Ninth Streets in the heart of the neighborhood.
 
There were some play structures there—a swing set, a slide, and a baseball diamond, too—but mostly the grounds were wild: nearly sixteen acres of grassland, growing in clumps, untended and untamed. Parents sometimes wondered why no one had developed the property, dropped in among the tidy rows of single-story starter homes. It seemed as if someone should have built a real park there years ago. But the children asked no questions because, for them, the land was perfect. The vacant lot to end all lots. A place filled with possibility, and maybe even magic. The older boys, straddling their dirt bikes in tight shorts and white tube socks, told fantastic tales of rocks at the playground that burst into flames, that sponta­neously combusted. They said they had seen it with their own eyes.
 
Debbie Gallo—eleven years old, with dark hair and hazel eyes—wasn’t sure what to believe about the fire rocks. Her father was a welder, a son of Italian immigrants, and a Korean War veteran who walked with a limp from the shrapnel that had carved up one of his knees. The Gallos felt fortunate just to own a home in the neighborhood, and Debbie felt lucky that it was this one, on Ninety-Seventh Street. Her little one-story house, white with olive-green shutters, looked right out over the school and the empty land. She could be on the playground almost before the front door slammed behind her, skipping across the street to the open lot. On weekdays, it meant that she didn’t have to walk far to get to her fifth-grade class at the school. On weekends, it meant that her front yard seemed to stretch on like the sea—forever—with friends floating everywhere, coming and going on roller skates and bicycles. This Sunday was one of those days, so Debbie laced up her shoes and headed outside.
 
It was warm and windy; a spring storm was coming. But Deb­bie and her girlfriends paid the weather—and the boys around them—no mind. While the boys churned up dust at the playground with their bicycles, clattering here and there on narrow paths carved into the high grass, the girls set about creating something pretty: sidewalk art. At their feet, they began gathering chunks of rock to use as chalk. The rocks were soft and white—“the whitest white I’d ever seen,” Debbie would say later—and best of all they were easy for the girls to find amid the topsoil. Debbie took one in each hand, ran them between her fingers, and then got down on her knees to draw on the concrete.
 
Later, she couldn’t remember how much time elapsed before her eyes began to burn. Had she been playing with the rocks for five minutes or fifteen seconds? She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that rubbing her eyes only made them worse. As she pulled her hands away, the pain came on like a wave, hot and searing. Her eyes burned as if from the inside. And then she was screaming, and she was running, stumbling across the playground, trying to find her way back to her house on Ninety-Seventh Street through a haze of tears and gauzy darkness. It wasn’t just the pain that worried Deb­bie, at this point. It was the panic growing inside her, panic over a realization that was hard to explain to her mother back at the house.
 
Debbie Gallo couldn’t open her eyes. She couldn’t see.
 
For one brief and scary moment, she was blind.
 
That night at the hospital—a short walk from the iconic water­falls, the tourist hotels lined up along the river gorge downtown, the young newlyweds walking hand in hand in a place still clinging to its reputation as the Honeymoon Capital of the World, and the souvenir vendors selling T-shirts, tchotchkes, and picture-perfect postcards from Niagara Falls—doctors flushed out Debbie’s eyes, pronounced her okay, and sent her home. The next morning, she went to school as usual.
 
But problems continued at the playground that Monday. Two boys, both third graders, also experienced burning around their eyes and went to see the school nurse. Someone reported the issue to the city fire department, and around 2:30 that afternoon a fire official placed a phone call—not to the school, but to a chemical plant along the Niagara River just east of the tourist district. He wanted to speak to the safety supervisor at Hooker Chemical, the largest employer and industrial taxpayer in town with a sprawling, 135-acre campus on Buffalo Avenue.
 
Within fifteen minutes, the head custodian for the Niagara Falls Board of Education was waiting in a car outside Hooker’s main gate. The safety supervisor hopped in, and together the pair drove straight for the school, where, working efficiently, they conducted a series of interviews: with the principal, the school nurse, and Deb­bie Gallo, too. Hooker’s safety expert then walked outside to the playground to inspect the grounds for himself.
 
The rains had moved in the night before, washing away Deb­bie’s chalk art and filling the playground with puddles. But it didn’t take long to find the evidence the children had reported. The safety supervisor spotted the rocks near the bicycle racks along the south­ern wall of the school, collected a sample, and brought it inside to the nurse—just to confirm. The nurse had not only treated the two boys that morning. By chance, she had cared for Debbie the night before in the emergency room. And when presented with the white rocks, this mushy material—whatever it was—the nurse noted that it smelled just like Debbie when she had been scared and blind and crying.
 
Hooker’s man returned to the plant that afternoon and typed up a one-page report about what had happened that day. Across the top of the page, in large, block letters, the report was stamped “CONFIDENTIAL,” though the safety supervisor made sure to send a copy to the company’s insurance department—just in case. After all, it wasn’t the first time Hooker had received phone calls about prob­lems at the playground between Ninety-Seventh and Ninety-Ninth Streets, and it wouldn’t be the last. Just two days later, a city health official asked Hooker’s safety supervisor to return to investigate a different problem. A metal drum had surfaced this time, belching what could only be described as “rust-colored material.”
 
For residents, these events were the latest in a litany of curious plights and odd problems. In recent years, people had reported chemical stenches in their basements; floating clouds of acidic fumes that made it hard to breathe; gas leaks that stopped traffic for hours outside the Hooker plant on the river; manhole covers that popped and blew on Buffalo Avenue, hurtling into parked cars like cast-iron Frisbees; and, yes, even rocks that could spontaneously ignite. Several years earlier, in 1966, a city official had confirmed the occurrence, warning that any child who found such a rock should not take it home, but rather submerge it in water or bury it.
 
The official offered this warning at the time because he under­stood what he was dealing with, and without question Hooker did, too. The safety supervisor believed he knew exactly what had burned little Debbie Gallo. In his report, he called it benzene hexachloride, BHC—a potent and malodorous poison exceptionally effective at killing boll weevils, spittlebugs, and other pests. It was so excep­tional, in fact, that some food manufacturers refused to buy crops from farmers who used BHC in their insecticides. They thought it left an odd flavor in the food itself.
 
But that week in May 1972, Hooker’s safety supervisor revealed little about what he knew. He couldn’t say what was in the metal drum when pressed by city officials for an answer; he’d have to get back to them. And he also denied any knowledge of rocks that could burst into flames. He did, however, dutifully inform other impor­tant Hooker men about his visits to the playground that week. On Wednesday, three days after Debbie’s trip to the emergency room and just hours after the discussions about the metal drum, a Hooker lawyer called a top city health official and denied any liability.
 
The health official on the phone found the call to be notable, because he hadn’t mentioned anything about Hooker Chemical being responsible for the incidents. He just wanted to understand what Hooker knew about what was in the ground, he said, to determine if it might be harmful to people, to the kids. Yet despite the interest, the site visits, and the phone calls that week, officials in Niagara Falls kept their silence, and the residents in the neighbor­hood heard almost nothing about what had happened.
 
The incident—which had involved the city health department, the city fire department, the city board of education, the school principal, the school nurse, the hospital, children from three fami­lies, and multiple people in at least three departments at Hooker Chemical—did what incidents in the city tended to do.
 
It disappeared, rushing away like water over the falls.
 
*
 
By the end of the 1970s, that changed. Secrets, long kept in Niagara Falls, began bubbling to the surface on the east side of town, seep­ing into people’s homes, newspaper stories, national headlines, and finally the American consciousness at large. Soon the entire country would know what had happened in this previously unremarkable suburban neighborhood until the name of the neighborhood itself became shorthand for a disaster. No one called it LaSalle anymore. Instead, people knew it as Love Canal—the name of an old, for­gotten waterway buried beneath the heart of the neighborhood, a waterway systematically filled with tons of chemical waste, and then erased, as if it had never been there at all.
 
For decades, almost everyone ignored the problem: health offi­cials and business leaders, the city’s power brokers, and even the local press. They said little, or nothing, about the contents in the ground on the east side of town while the people living in the neigh­borhood, the Gallos and about a thousand other families, went about their lives, unaware of the hazards lurking just beneath their feet, their homes, the school, and the playground where their kids liked to gather. The people in power chose silence, until silence wasn’t possible anymore and this issue, long buried, suddenly had the attention of The New York Times, all three national television networks, the governor of New York, a future vice president, and the White House, too. The president himself was calling.
 
The decisions made in this little window of time between 1977 and 1980 would change history, spark unprecedented federal action, launch landmark legislation, transform U.S. environmental policy forever, alter the way people thought about their own backyards, and upend the lives of thousands of people living in western New York. But none of it would have happened without a band of ordi­nary mothers from the neighborhood in Niagara Falls who refused to stay silent, who would not be belittled, who were willing to go to jail to save their children, and who were unafraid—even in the face of the multimillionaires running Hooker Chemical.
 
Working-class, just like much of the city itself, these women were neither trained nor prepared for this moment, and as a result they made mistakes along the way. They were, some officials suggested, just housewives, a term that was intended to put the women in their place and remind them that they didn’t know what they were doing. But the women wore the moniker, sometimes literally, as a badge of honor.
 
It was true: they didn’t know what they were doing. But they were about to realize that the men in power—the elected officials and corporate executives—didn’t know, either. And as mothers, the women quickly discovered they had certain qualities that made them more threatening than they could have ever imagined. They knew who they were and what they wanted. They wanted to protect their children. They wanted to leave their homes on the east side of town. They wanted to walk away from the little neighborhood there—the best place they had ever lived, their corner of paradise.
At all costs, they wanted to escape Niagara Falls

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