In 1978 news stories exploded about environmental disaster in a working-class neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York. Love Canal—an 1879 project to market energy from the Niagara River—was used in 1942–52 to dump chemical wastes from Hooker Chemicals (later absorbed by Occidental Petroleum). The city subsequently acquired the site for a school, knowing its past, and also permitted homes. Odors and residues forced EPA investigations by 1976; most residents fled over the next three years. Yet, their battles for compensation clarified the need for community organization to fight for environmental protection and against problems of regulations and responsibilities in corporate environmental damage. Final suits were settled by 1998, with Occidental paying $400 million to federal and state agencies; some went to clean-up and some to residents who complained of transgenerational impacts. The contemporary study of A. Levine’s (1982) Love Canal has been updated in L. Gibb’s (1998) Love Canal. An iconic environmental disaster, its impact permeates movies and readings in cases like the Worcester, Massachusetts pollution central to the 1995 book A Civil Action and the 1999 movie that followed.