Love Canal?

I became curious when I was watching the History Channel this morning. They did a little shpiel about the Love Canal. Of course at the first commercial break I decided to go read the Wikipedia article about it. The first few lines talk about how the Board of Education basically forced Hooker Chemical to sell the land to them. I thought to myself, why would that be? That sounds ridiculous. Luckily there is a footnote that takes you to the referring article.

After reading half of the article, I thought how could this be? That can't be right. How can a totally innocent company be so vilified? Then I finished the article and I started to realize that, although there are a lot of facts in the article, the overt bias against the rest of the world really gets to me by the end. A company produced a bunch of chemical waste and then just buries it in the ground. Then decades later, the chemicals are killing and maiming people. The primary point that the countpoint article seems to miss is that although the company managed to get wording into the deed that absolves them of responsibility, it was still the primary creator of the toxic chemicals in that dumpsite. It should have cleaned up the mess first before selling the land. I want to agree with the author, but the condescending atitude that paints the attacks on the rest of the world really push me back to the popular conclusion that Hooker is responsible and should have to clean up the mess. The Google local view is pretty interesting.