'Mad Traveler' works for good

Governor Kathy Hochul needs to visit Niagara Falls and to talk about the reemerging legacy of Love Canal as well as the radioactive waste that may be tainting 100s of homes in the Town of Niagara, on Grand Island and in Niagara Falls.

Hochul understands the severity of the situation, at least judging by her decision to send the commissioners of the State Department of Health and Environmental Conservation to be ambushed at the Niagara Falls Convention Center two weeks ago for a meeting with residents.

That meeting was chaotic because EPA and DEC officials did not have answers, only a spin the people easily stopped.

Reality is Gov. Hochul needs to visit before residents understand she is taking their nightmare seriously. She was in Buffalo on the day of the meeting at the Convention Center and has been invited to meet with residents. If she really cared, she would.

The biggest revelation Saturday was the Youtube video released by Mad Traveler David Seminara, who has visited Niagara Falls multiple times to cast dark light on poverty, focusing on once-great neighborhoods and cheap motels, never telling the good of the community except for maybe that time he ate at Gadawski’s.

His videos, before now, felt like trash jobs designed as clickbait, feeding into the narrative that our city is trapped in an irrevocable dark hole splashing across the universe in a death spiral. He even cast a better light on homeless Floridians living at an abandoned resort than he has on a city about which he claims to care.

This time, he actually has a negative story worth presenting negatively, the radioactive waste found in the Town of Niagara neighborhood last in the news a few years ago for racist graffiti painted on a resident’s fence after the mass shooting at Tops Market in Buffalo. He attended the meeting last week at Chill 442 inside the Wyndham Garden.

The bureaucracy has been unresponsive to the people moving with no sense of urgency, claiming raw data from aerial scans can’t be released because false positives are problematic and that privacy rights preclude releasing raw data even in a public health emergency.

And that problem only started in the Town of Niagara.

Homes on the east side of Hyde Park Boulevard near the golf course have also begun getting letters from the state asking for permission to do more testing.

The elevated radioactivity is believed to be from fill remaining from the refining of uranium during the Manhattan project. It was sold cheaply as a building material post World War II when many of the homes in question were built.

Meanwhile, the degradation of the cap over Love Canal with toxicity coursing into basements in LaSalle and through the Falls Street tunnel where it is mixed with treated wastewater continues.

It’s not just one home on 101st Street but a failed cleanup impacting a whole swath of the city.

In the Town of Niagara where homes have tested positive for thorium and radioactive nuclides hundreds of times acceptable levels, homeowners actually have the attention of the State and EPA. It’s a good thing, even if Gov. Hochul or Sen. Charles Schumer has yet to visit.

Meanwhile on Grand Island, it’s a new version of Groundhog Day when the Town Government says “nothing to see here, move along, and please keep playing soccer on that contaminated field.”

Niagara has moved cautiously, but it has moved. Grand Island remains in denial, home to the sort of people who vote down school budgets and chase away Amazon so the land can be removed from the tax rolls and donated to the Seneca Nation by a scorned developer. Gas and cigarettes anyone? It’s only a matter of time. They got all of the Amazon truck traffic and none of the tax revenue which went to the Town of Niagara.

We all look to Sen. Schumer as the senior representative but Kirsten Gillibrand should make an appearance as well. We need them to actually do something for Niagara Falls, not just posture at the Rainbow Bridge to talk about “flagpolling” when no one knows what it is, as Schumer did in one of his recent visits.

And not just host a press conference outside the Air Base to talk about preserving the vital role of that critical institution as Gillibrand did.

The Express has said it before and it bears repeat: The largest failure of our elected officials, locally, in Albany and in Washington over the last 50 years was the failure to include $500 million in the Infrastructure and Jobs Act passed under President Biden to address the need for a new wastewater treatment plant and cleanup of Buffalo Avenue and other toxic scars in Niagara Falls.

Rep. Brian Higgins, and Senators Schumer and Gillibrand did nothing for Niagara Falls and there is no evidence anyone asked them to. Higgins successor Rep. Tim Kennedy is eqaully inept and remains obsessed with Buffalo even though his district is best defined as the Niagara Region.

As for the state money, Buffalo gets a billion, Rochester gets $300 million. Albany gets $500 million. Niagara Falls keeps sending Republicans to Albany and accepting nothing in return while its mayor obsesses over an event center.

As for Seminara, here’s a link to his Youtube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SyZToZgpq8