From the NYTimes:
“Eugene Leff… reached a record settlement for New York State with a chemical company accused of burying toxic waste at Love Canal, the Niagara Falls neighborhood whose contamination became a symbol of environmental disaster…
Cindy Schultz/Albany Times Union
“Besides arguing the Love Canal case he pursued litigation to remove PCBs..”
As an assistant state attorney general and New York’s lead lawyer in the case, Mr. Leff successfully concluded a 14-year lawsuit in which the former owners of a dumpsite at Love Canal agreed in 1994 to pay $98 million and to assume cleanup costs and other expenses that would eventually amount to millions of dollars more.
….bubbling up into the basements of houses that had been built on the site, a 16-acre former landfill…. Balls of caustic residue were observed burning on the ground after rising to the surface.
The Love Canal case spurred Congress to create the federal Superfund cleanup program. The New York settlement remains the state’s largest for a hazardous-waste case.”
Thank you on behalf of the planet and the rest of us.