Beyond Love Canal: Complex Systems Support to Superfund

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 experienced 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 (EPA), in coordination with other agencies, $1.6 billion to study and remediate potentially harmful toxic waste sites across the country.  

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

So we began our work in earnest, assembling a multidisciplinary team comprising economists, civil engineers,  geologists, hydrologists, data scientistsand other disciplines  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 workedto 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 to restore neglected and toxic sites to other functional and beneficial uses.

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 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 and promote the commitment to provide clean air, land and water for every American.