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Hotel Booking The trucks roll in way before sunrise, when few lights are on and almost no one is awake. But people around here, even those who cannot hear the trucks grinding past with their toxic cargo, say they are always aware of where the convoy is going.

Several years ago, a crooked government official from the United States ordered the dumping of toxic substances into Seoul's Han River.

Travel Agency The trucks come here, as they have for decades, to dump the stuff almost no one wants in this place that almost no one seems to care about. There are 20, 30, sometimes 40 loads a day, enough to build a mound 110 feet tall right in the middle of what old-timers remember was an orchard of sweet Niagara County peaches.

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Cheap Hotel Now, where those trees once quivered in breezes from Lake Ontario, the 710-acre Chemical Waste Management landfill towers above every building for miles. People here do not like to say so but they have the distinction of having the only hazardous waste landfill left in the Northeastern United States, a sprawling toxic stockyard of acids, chemicals and other hazards, including the desk Tom Brokaw was using when his office was contaminated with anthrax.

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Flight Booking For a long time, residents have hoped that state environmental officials would recognize how unfair it is to keep asking them to be the toxic dumping ground for the whole region. They have waited 16 years for the New York Department of Environmental Conservation to comply with a legislative order to spread the burden throughout the state. Finally, last November, a draft report was released, and they were disappointed again.

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Travel Agent The 50-page draft left locals feeling certain the state wants them to keep the dump and the toxic trucks for some time to come. Not only that, but there could be more - lots more - on the way.

Epstein said Canadian and U.S. causing agents in homes and businesses. Instead, he said, the community needs to rally around a call for safer products, and municipalities are the likeliest path to laws that will protect us. Beginning in the 1980s, Toronto used its sewer bylaws to restrict the wholesale dumping of pollutants by industry. The city forced major changes, especially among companies that dumped oily wastes down the drain, and metal industries that dumped toxic metal sludges such as cadmium.

Hotel Chicago "I guess what they're telling us is 'You have it, nobody else wants it, so you're going to have to keep it,' " said Merton K. Wiepert, supervisor of the town of Porter, where Model City and part of the landfill are situated. "And that's not fair."

Online Booking Environmental experts say that the state's inactivity was prompted not by cold feet but by the cold reality of handling hazardous wastes today. More than a decade of consolidation has left just a handful of commercial hazardous waste landfills in the country, which, they say, is not necessarily a bad thing. Those that remain are big, well financed and easier for regulators to watch.

Travel Health Insurance But after Love Canal - 10 miles south of here - focused attention on the danger of chemical dumping in the early 1980's, it has become nearly impossible to find a community willing to accept even a well-designed and environmentally sound landfill.

Hotel Reservation That often leaves expanding existing landfills the easiest option.

London Hotel Booking "New York is thrilled not to have to look for another site," said Michael B. Gerrard, an environmental lawyer in New York. "I'm not a bit surprised that the department hasn't come up with an alternative."

Discount Travel Federal officials say the Model City landfill is generally well run, and they consider the thick layer of clay beneath it to be well suited for containing toxic waste over the long haul.

Orlando Hotel State officials also welcome the landfill, which accepts waste from more than 2,000 manufacturers through the Northeast and eases the way for New York to export some of its wastes to other states. Michael Fraser, spokesman for the Department of Environmental Conservation, defended the new draft plan, saying it was never intended to select alternative sites.

Booking Agency "The task at D.E.C.," Mr. Fraser said, "was to prepare a siting plan to establish a framework to guide the state agencies," which would have to approve new landfills. He declined to make further comment.

International Travel Medical For some of the 25,000 people who live in this flatland of family farms and gracious homes near the Niagara River, the plan is proof the state has written them off.

New York Hotel "People here are so defeated," said Amy Witryol, a retired bank executive in nearby Lewiston. "No matter what we do, it seems the government is not going to try to help us."

Online Travel Booking The federal government itself bequeathed a legacy even more menacing.

Travel Medical Insurance A few hundred yards from the landfill, and about half a mile from the 2,500-student campus of the Lewiston-Porter Central School District, lie tons of radioactive material left over from the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort that created the first atomic bomb. It is here because early in the war, the Army took control of 7,567 acres of orchards in Porter and Lewiston to build a huge TNT factory, officially known as the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works.

Miami Hotel Years earlier, in 1893, an entrepreneur, William T. Love, planned an ideal community powered by water brought by canal from Niagara Falls. Before his plan collapsed, Mr. Love built a section of his canal in the city of Niagara Falls, which later become surrounded by the chemical plants that created the poisonous cesspool known as Love Canal.

Air Deccan Booking On the other end of the uncompleted canal, Mr. Love built a score of houses and stores at a crossroads he called Model City.

Las Vegas Nevada Travel "And now," said D. James Langlois, a Lewiston councilman, "it's become a model of how things shouldn't be done."

Las Vegas Nv Hotel "The TNT" as it was known to local residents, turned out more explosives than the Army needed and was shut down after nine months. The Army then used the vast property to store radioactive waste left over from the Manhattan Project in nearby Tonawanada. Some was stored in a concrete water tower. The rest was simply spilled onto the ground.

Hotel Florence Booking Online After the war, more than half the 7,567 acres was sold to private owners. Radioactive waste continued to be dumped on land still in government hands and in 1966, hundreds of these acres were sold to various businesses. Years later, a commercial landfill was opened.

Orlando Travel In the 1980's, the water tower holding radioactive residue was demolished. Its contents were transferred to the basement of a nearby war-era building and covered with five and a half feet of clay and topsoil.

Hilton Hotel Ann Roberts, a chemist whose four children attended the Lewiston-Porter schools, has spent the last three years trying to piece together the extent of the contamination. She found records showing large areas outside the current government storage site had once contained radioactive material.

Booking Delta Com "To my mind, if you have a site that is contaminated with radioactive wastes, you do as little as possible to disturb it," Ms. Roberts said. But, she said, the contaminated land used by CWM had places where "they are continually digging up soil and bringing in more wastes."

Travel Insurance Online A few residents live within a mile of the 191-acre nuclear dump, officially called the Niagara Falls Storage Site. It contains 25,000 cubic yards of radioactive residue - including radium, thorium and uranium - and an additional 235,000 cubic yards of less-radioactive material. The Army Corps of Engineers now oversees its cleanup.

London Hotel Abutting the nuclear burial ground is the CWM landfill, one of the largest in the country, which has the capacity to receive as much as 425,000 tons of hazardous waste a year from 30 states and Puerto Rico.

Online Hotel Booking The draft plan estimates that the CWM landfill will top out next year, but despite that says it is "not practical or relevant" to recommend an alternative site.

Travel Insurance But executives at CWM, a subsidiary of Waste Management, a $12 billion national company, said they expected to use the current landfill for six more years, especially if they were permitted to add 10 feet to the height of the mound. They have applied for permits for other landfills on the same property.

Paris Hotel "We'd like to continue to operate the facility for another 40 years, or more," said Richard D. Sturges, CWM's district manager.

Airline Booking Mr. Sturges said CWM had invested $50 million in the Model City operation since buying it in 1984. Two state monitors are supposed to be on site every day to make sure it operates safely. Although the landfill pays from $1 million to $3 million a year in gross receipts taxes to local towns, many residents said they would gladly pay higher property taxes if it were closed. CWM officials say residents have it all wrong.

Travel Trailer "We ought to be applauded for what we do out there, but instead we're always being spit on," said George H. Spira, a former general manager of the landfill. Mr. Spira, who also is chairman of the planning board of Porter, in 2001 abstained from voting on a zoning change allowing CWM to expand. The rezoning passed but is being challenged in court.William Choboy, a Porter councilman who until last month was president of Residents for Responsible Government, which opposes the landfill, said it was difficult to fight a company with powerful political connections like CWM. Dennis C. Vacco, a former New York attorney general, was a regional vice president for CWM's parent, Waste Management, until last September, when he joined an Albany lobbying firm that represents the company.

San Francisco Hotel Mr. Choboy worries that toxic dumping over the last 60 years has made this an unhealthy place to live. He hands out copies of State Department of Health surveys showing elevated levels of thyroid cancer among women, and higher-than-expected levels of bladder, prostate and colorectal cancer among men.

Air Ticket Booking But state health officials have never directly linked those cancer rates to the landfill or the radioactive wastes.

Cheap Travel The question of providing environmental justice by dispersing hazardous waste landfills throughout the state was first raised by the Legislature in 1987. The town of Porter considered the first draft plan inadequate and challenged it in court. A state Supreme Court judge ordered it redone "with all deliberate speed."

Bangkok Hotel That was in 1994.

Music Booking Legislators have greeted this latest draft coolly. State Senator George D. Maziarz, a Republican of North Tonawanda, said he expected the Legislature to reject the plan because it did not offer alternative sites or address upcoming projects like dredging PCB-contaminated mud from the Hudson River.

Travel And Tourism That project - one of the largest industrial cleanups in history - would generate 2.65 million cubic yards of mud. Model City is one of the few places in the Northeast where it could be dumped.

New York City Hotel Walter E. Mugdan, regional director of the division of environmental planning and protection in the federal Environmental Protection Agency, said no decision had yet been made. It is possible, he said, that the mud could be shipped out of state.

Air Asia Ticket Booking But others, like Susan L. Senecah, an associate professor of environmental decision-making who works with Senator Maziarz, are certain that this latest mess is headed for the former peach orchards of Model City. "This is not environmental justice," she said. "It's perpetual injustice."

Los Angeles Travel By Anthony DePalma
New York Times - 3/10/2004

Topic: Toxics

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