Few images from the natural world conjure the same awe, power, and amazement as Niagara Falls. Each year, millions flock from around the world to hear the roar of the falls, feel and smell the spray, and maybe take in the sight up close by boat. What they don鈥檛 know鈥攏or do most of the locals鈥攊s that the city of Niagara Falls is the setting of one of the most shocking and horrific tales of environmental desecration of the past hundred plus years.
By virtue of the Falls鈥� might, Niagara Falls was the birthplace of the commercial electro-chemical industry鈥攁nd for decades, those massive corporations dumped, buried, vented, incinerated, and piled their millions of tons of toxic and radioactive waste in the surrounding farmlands, rivers, meadows, and empty lots. Venture minutes from the waterfall, and you鈥檒l find the bones of a decrepit city. Its residents are plagued by major health problems, often at rates that far exceed state and national averages. The harm is ongoing and generational. As in all such cases, the poor and marginalized bear the brunt of the injury.
Environmental attorney Christen Civiletto relates how the major chemical kingpins of the twentieth century relentlessly and indiscriminately laid waste to Niagara Falls in her eye-opening, harrowing, intimate new book, Thundering Waters: The Toxic Legacy of Niagara Falls. Expertly interweaving environmental crime, history, and memoir, Thundering Waters exposes the astonishing story of exploitation and ongoing abuse lurking in the shadows of one of the world鈥檚 most treasured natural wonders.
"This shocking debut expos茅 from environmental lawyer Civiletto details more than a century of the electrochemical industry’s poisoning of Niagara Falls, N.Y. . . Each revelation is more appalling than the last. . . . [Thundering Waters] sounds a fire-alarm fire."鈥�Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Simultaneously a crime thriller, environmental expos茅, geographic history, and personal memoir, Civiletto’s granular examination of an ecological disaster makes for sobering, frightening reading."鈥�Booklist
"Welcome to the true crime book about a waterfall. In this book, author Christen E. Civiletto takes us to Niagara Falls, but rather than focusing on the natural beauty, she dives deep into the millions of tons of toxic and radioactive waste that’s been dumped, incinerated, and vented into the area over decades. The birthplace of the commercial electro-chemical industry by virtue of sheer, hydrodynamic power, the falls and the surrounding area have paid a steep price, and it behooves us all to consider that price, and just who will end up paying it."鈥擫iz Greene, Nautilus
"Sobering. . . . A fierce indictment of the chemical industry’s long-term pollution of Niagara Falls."鈥�Kirkus Reviews
“A masterful historical narrative about growing up in Niagara Falls, New York, a city whose famous falls, groundwater, air, and soil have been disfigured by decades of industrial madness. Civiletto’s narrative of a ‘merry-go-round of poisoning’ indicts scores of malicious personalities and chemical corporations—Goodyear, Carborundum, Hooker Chemical, DuPont, Hammer—who unleashed horrifically hazardous substances on an unwitting public for more than a century. This is an absolutely essential story, infuriating, urgent, and indispensable.”—Caroline Fraser, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Murderland and Prairie Fires
“Brilliant and well-researched, Thundering Waters is a devastating and cinematic account of the collapse of world-renowned Niagara Falls—all in the name of profits for industrial barons.”—David L. Snyder, Academy Award nominee for Best Art Direction and inaugural recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Buffalo International Film Festival
“This extraordinary book shows how profit-driven industries and opaque bureaucracies conceal environmental and health dangers that fall hardest on the marginalized. It may cause you to question what lies beneath the surface of your own backyard, community, and country.”—Kirstin Lowry Sommers, former general counsel for the Seneca Gaming Corporation and enrolled citizen of the Seneca Nation of Indians
“Christen Civiletto tackles the complex, often incompletely chronicled story of the Love Canal disaster with rare insights, cohesion, and thoroughness. A true, gripping work of scholarship about a situation that should serve as a clarion call across the United States and the rest of the world.”—Michael H. Brown, author and former Niagara Gazette reporter who broke the Love Canal environmental disaster story
“A revelatory account of environmental crimes that affected thousands of families in Niagara County—and nobody went to jail for them. Read this book so this doesn’t happen in your community.”—Dennis Virtuoso, fifteen-term Niagara County legislator and past president of the United Steelworkers Local 12256
“Thundering Waters masterfully illustrates the excruciating failure of every level of government to protect the lives of the residents of Niagara Falls. I had a visceral reaction to this book and learned a lot.”—Steve Wodka, attorney representing injured Goodyear workers
