A toxic issue is rearing its ugly head in Wheatfield once again.
It took a year and a half for crews to remove remnants of Niagara Falls' infamous Love Canal from a landfill off Nash Road. Those chemicals were shipped out in more than 80 truckloads this past June.
The Love Canal chemicals may now be gone, but years ago, the site also accepted industrial waste from places like Grief Brothers and the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station.
Now, to the surprise of some officials in the Town of Wheatfield, the State Department of Environmental Conservation has reclassified the site, calling it a significant threat to public health.
"All of this work was done by Occidental Chemical under the direction of the DEC and New York State Department of Public Health," said Wheatfield Town Supervisor Robert Cliffe. "Now we get this reclassification to a classification more serious than when it had serious chemicals in there, so at this point in time I haven't met with anybody, I haven't talked to anybody so I'm really not sure why they're doing this - but it's pretty clear they intend to do more work."
The question now is who will pick up the tab for this work? Supervisor Cliffe says that's still up in the air, but a meeting will soon be held to hash out a plan of attack with all parties involved.
"We expected to hear from the DEC that more was to come," said Cliffe.
"The reclassification was a little bit of an eye opener, I was surprised to see that all the bad materials are gone but now they reclassified it to a worse classification."
The landfill officially closed back in 1968.
The DEC shared more information with 7 Eyewitness News that is available here.
The Town of Wheatfield urges people to stay out of the area and not to use any motorbikes or ATVs on the land.
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