Love Canal Turns Thirty

I just wanted to post this before I faceplanted for the night. It's been thirty years since the Love Canal mess landed on the front pages, and the problems are still going on for the people who used to live there......

Link to article

Quote:

Early surveys showed 56 percent of the children had a birth defect, and mothers had a 300 percent jump in miscarriages. In one family, a girl was born deaf and with a cleft palate, an extra row of teeth and slight retardation. Her brother had an eye defect.

Michelle Brown Skiba, a soft-spoken blond who works as a librarian at the University of Niagara, remembers playing in the "black muck" at Love Canal. As a child, she developed rheumatoid arthritis and had a growth removed from her knee.

She also never developed her second teeth. "All my friends had the same thing," she told ABCNews.com.

Skiba says her mother had six miscarriages before the family left when she was 12. Both her parents died last year -- two days apart -- each from cancer.

Now 42 and married, Skiba said she had decided never to have children. "In the back of my mind, I didn't know what the future would bring."