Beyond Love Canal—Supporting Superfund and the EPA

There were signs going back to the 1960s that something wasn’t quite right about the working-class community of Love Canal in upstate New York. Residents complained of acrid smells and unexplained pollution. One day, a child’s shoe seemed to inexplicably melt into the sidewalk. Dogs burned their noses after sniffing the ground, children developed illnesses, and women suffered miscarriages at alarmingly high rates.

It wasn’t until sludge, black as tar, started burbling up into people’s basements in 1978 that residents’ concerns were taken seriously. In the 1940s and ’50s, Hooker Chemical Company had buried 20,000 tons of hazardous waste beneath land upon which schools and parks now stood. The poison below was now leeching its way back to the surface.

It took nearly two years of pleas and protests from residents to convince state and federal agencies to declare an environmental emergency and finance a mass relocation program. The resulting media firestorm spurred Congress to pass new legislation in December 1980 called The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, quickly renamed “Superfund” for short.

The act granted the Environmental Protection Agency, in coordination with other agencies, $1.6 billion to study and remediate potentially harmful toxic waste sites across the country. While environmental groups cheered, EPA scientists confronted the scope and complexity of this new challenge. If early estimates were accurate, the agency would need to analyze 10,000 potentially harmful sites.

The EPA needed extra hands and trusted counsel, preferably from a consultant with a track record of handling complex, time-sensitive projects and environmental experience. Their partner of choice? Booz Allen.

In the 1960s, when Europe was investing heavily in supersonic jets, we compiled a report for the Kennedy administration recommending the U.S. not follow suit. Supersonic technology, we argued, was costly and unproven—and likely to cause damage to the ozone layer. Over time, interest in commercial supersonic jets temporarily peaked before declining as fuel and other environmental concerns were revealed. Meanwhile, efforts to protect the ozone layer became a global crusade. 

In 1981, we recognized that the stakes were even higher when it came to Superfund. Should the EPA’s efforts prove to be slow or ineffective, not only might the agency’s reputation suffer but the public’s support for government-funded environmental work might also fade. 

So we began our work in earnest, assembling a multidisciplinary team comprising civil engineers, economists, geologists, hydrologists, and other environmental scientists to address a diverse array of Superfund projects. 

We interviewed victims who’d fallen ill due to toxic waste exposure. We introduced desktop PCs, referred to at the time as “microcomputers,” to the EPA’s systems to improve data collection and performance analysis. And, most importantly, we worked side by side with EPA scientists to develop policy standards and establish best practices that would shape remediation work for decades to come.

Those efforts helped the EPA clean up a number of potentially deadly sites in the wake of Love Canal, including successful campaigns near the Valley of the Drums in Kentucky and Times Beach, Missouri. The work made a difference. The EPA’s Superfund work helped the American public recognize the dangers of environmental neglect while creating a framework for cleaning up toxic sites and suing polluters in federal court. 

Our collaboration with the EPA continued as its Superfund cleanup efforts grew more complex. By 1990, we were managing the EPA’s Superfund hotline, a responsibility that required us to field roughly 200,000 calls per year by 1997. Our commitment to the EPA mission has endured through the decades as we help our clients modernize and transform through technology.

Today, we are positioned to leverage our latest AI, advanced modeling, and machine-learning capabilities to accelerate the EPA mission in a rapidly changing world. Our goal, just as it was after Love Canal, is to provide the agency with the tools it needs to identify and prevent future ecological tragedies while directly addressing the climate and environmental issues that demand our attention and our most creative solutions.

Just as we continue to drive progress and reduce environmental impact in our own operations, we’re passionate about improving the sustainability of our world through the work we do for clients. 

As Booz Allen celebrates being 110 years young, we draw from our history of anticipating the future and clients’ evolving needs. Leveraging the power of tomorrow’s technologies and our in-depth expertise, we help transform how clients define and execute their missions. This is our legacy and our future—together.