Wednesday · November 11, 2026

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Carter declares a federal emergency over a buried chemical dump under a Niagara Falls neighborhood

Backyards had turned to black trees and burst drums; 800 homes now sit atop 19,800 tonnes of Hooker Chemical's waste.

By 1977, families in the Love Canal section of Niagara Falls were reporting chemical odors, bursting waste drums, and children coming home from the schoolyard with burns on their hands. The land had been a Hooker Chemical dumping ground until 1952, then sold to the school board for one dollar and built over with homes and a school. In September 1978, President Jimmy Carter declared a federal emergency, opening the way for evacuation and cleanup. It was the first time federal disaster funds had been used for anything other than a natural disaster…

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More from August 7

Congress hands the new army to a civilian department; Washington signs it into law

Five employees, one secretary at war, and the whole of the United States Army to run.

Washington proclaims: pay the whiskey tax, or face 13,000 militiamen

Peace commissioners head west with one hand while the President musters an army with the other.

A tumbling satellite over Mexico snaps the first picture of Earth from orbit

One week after launch, a 64-element scanner aboard Explorer 6 built the image one spot at a time.

Morse and Gruening warn the chamber is signing off on a war without ever voting to declare one.

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Read the full August 7 edition →Everything that happened on August 7 →

More from Cold War America

We choose to go to the Moon, Kennedy tells 40,000 at Rice Stadium

Kennedy stakes the decade on a landing NASA's own administrator priced at 22 billion dollars.

Marines hit the seawall at Inchon; MacArthur's gamble is underway

Seventy-five thousand troops and 261 ships bet on a 29-foot tide the North Koreans thought made this coast unassailable.

A bomb tears through a Birmingham Sunday school; four girls are dead

The blast hit minutes after an anonymous caller warned the church secretary: three minutes.

Yeltsin stops at a Texas supermarket and asks what it costs to feed a family

Twenty minutes at Randalls #30 in Webster leaves the Soviet leader stunned into silence on the flight to Miami.

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