[1][2] The film portrays environmental and human health effects of toxic waste dump-sites in Niagara Falls, New York and other locations.
Governor of New York Hugh Carey provided $10 million in funding for residents nearest the canal to leave.
Of 187 households still occupied near Love Canal, she documented "17 nervous breakdowns, 34 miscarriages, 20 birth defects, 41 cases of respiratory disease, and 3 suicides, all well above the national average.
"[5] Dr. David Axelrod, former health commissioner of New York, then expanded the evacuations to include households with small children or pregnant women.
ABC News applied the Freedom of Information Act to obtain footage from a 1976 United States government film showing trucks dumping "raw chemical waste" at Kin-Buc Landfill near Edison, New Jersey.
The film further shows that the nearby Raritan River has been contaminated by PCBs, chloroform, benzene, and mercury.
The film alleges that one firm, Chemical Control Company (CCC), "simply unloaded drums into New Jersey's Meadowlands, pumped waste directly out of tank trucks into waterways, and mixed it with soil at the foot of a street so that seemingly harmless dirt could go to an ordinary garbage dump."
The head of CCC, William Carracino, was facing two years in jail for illegal dumping when he gave an interview for the film.
The economics behind it is, is if you don't have to treat it, there's no cost except transportation, and if you can get 20 and 30 dollars a drum for a chemical, and you can take it from a customer or a generator and carry it direct to a landfill or site, and dump it on the ground and bury it.
ABC News demonstrated via SEC filings that SCA and the company that owns Kin-Buc Landfill had a partnership.
The film includes an interview with Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards, who said he was "close to the industrial complex because of its effect on the economy.
We accommodated the industry where we thought we could, in order to get the jobs and the development, and in some instances we knowingly and advisedly accepted environmental tradeoffs.