In many ways, the 99th Street School, in Niagara Falls, New York, was a very ordinary school. Built in 1955 on land donated by a local business, it held classroom space for about 400 elementary students, who came from the surrounding working-class neighborhood named after an abandoned artificial waterway—Love Canal.

The 99th Street School and Love Canal offered very little of interest to the outside world until 1976, when the State of New York commissioned a private company, the Calspan Corporation, to conduct some tests in the neighborhood. Public officials informed Calspan that the canal had been used as a dumping ground for some 30 years by the Hooker Chemical Company, the firm that had sold the land to the city in 1953. Since that time, Love Canal residents had been complaining of strange events in their yards and basements, and a series of mysterious illnesses affecting their families, and so...