After 25 years, Love Canal still haunts.

Byline: Amy Worden

NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. _ From the expressway that runs across its southern edge, the site of the nation's costliest environmental disaster looks like a well-tended airstrip.

But buried deep beneath the half-mile-long, flat-topped mound covered with manicured grass and surrounded by barbed wire are tens of thousands of tons of toxic waste, the legacy of Love Canal.

Twenty-five years ago Saturday, the New York State Department of Health finally declared an environmental emergency in the southwest edge of this industrial city, after neighbors had complained long and bitterly of foul odors in their cellars, a mysterious sludge bubbling up from the ground, and an inordinate number of ill children. That decision set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the first permanent evacuation of a community because of an environmental emergency and the passage of federal legislation creating a multibillion-dollar "Superfund" to clean up toxic-waste dumps, and, for the first time, hold polluters liable.

In the years to come, the words "Love Canal" and "Superfund cleanup" would be burned into the American consciousness, linked with the worst kind of environmental ...