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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

The Love Canal story is such an incredible cluster. When the chemical company sold the land to the city, they mentioned the waste and indicated they take no responsibility for it once the city acquires the land.

Then "Not long after having taken control of the land, the Niagara Falls School Board proceeded to develop the land, including construction activity that substantially breached containment structures in a number of ways, allowing previously trapped chemicals to seep out."

Everyone knew what was there, but for some odd reason they still decided to build a new school and a bunch of housing there.

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>but for some odd reason they still decided to build a new school and a bunch of housing there.

The worst part about it is that it was then used to champion asinine legislation that hurts the people who want to do things right.

So now every municipality who wants to buy some old poisoned dump on the cheap (because it's poisoned and that restricts development) and not be idiots with it (e.g. turn it into a park or a parking lot or some other use not involving serious excavation) can't actually buy the land and do so because no sane company will sell it to them because they could just go and do something stupid and then turn around and make the company pay.

It's like the municipal equivalent of taking a free boat off someone's lawn in order to get an engine core and then acting like you got swindled when you find out it costs money or labor to get rid of a boat and then having the state pass a law making boat owners liable for disposal in perpetuity.

What a shame that companies are forced to pay for the poisons they produced while making profits off those same poisons.

Privatize the gains, socialize the losses of course.

FFS are you serious? These companies were following the law as it was written when they were doing these things.

How would you like it if you renovated a kitchen or added a deck and then 30yr later got sued because it wasn't adherent to the future code you didn't even know would exist?

You just can't run a society with retroactive liability like that.

My friend, the right thing to do is not half ass dispose of extremely toxic chemicals in a relatively populated area. It's the municipal equivalent of burying a land mine in your back yard, and putting a note in your deed that its there.

These areas mostly weren't that populated when these things were being disposed of and these companies were doing the "right thing" by the laws and common standards of the time.

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