The open house held last Friday afternoon at CWM Chemical Services in the Niagara County town of Porter dissolved into a public relations nightmare for event organizers. An extremely heavy thunderstorm frightened children in the parking lot where the event took place, sending those in attendance scrambling for shelter in the big tent that housed a buffet at one end and a live band at the other.

With little warning, sheets of hard rain poured horizontally into the tent, shorting electricity for the musicians and disabling the PA that was also being used to announce the winners of a random drawing for various prizes: an iPod, a shop-vac, some pretty nice stuff. The landfill has held these picnics for local residents for the past six years, giving away hot dogs, hamburgers, ice cream and prizes as a good-will gesture to local residents who have overwhelmingly opposed expansion plans at the only remaining active hazardous-waste landfill in the Northeast.

Next to a splashing fountain centered in one of the manmade lakes at the base of one of the towering landfills, one local resident explained, “I think they do this because we don’t really want them here.”

But it wasn’t even the rain that clouded the picnic so much as it was the unidentifiable odors that began to rise as the wind died down and the sun came back out. Many in the crowd remarked on the “perfect storm” of smells that seemed to hang in the humid air—somewhere between the raw essence of sewage, the stale aroma of garbage and the biting scent of chlorine. The manmade lakes, swollen and murky from the sudden gully washer, crept eerily toward the top of their banks.

Built on land once owned by the federal government and used for weapons production and toxic chemical and radioactive waste storage, CWM is to garbage dump as atomic bomb is to firecracker. Within the next couple weeks, Governor Eliot Spitzer is expected to weigh in on a bill that would require hazardous-waste landfill operators to demonstrate they have no potential to discharge into the Great Lakes. The lower Niagara River is less than four miles to the west of CWM, while Lake Ontario is less than four miles to the north.

During the open house, local residents were able to take tours of the big, fenced-off facility, and hear explanations of the technology being employed to contain these by-products of our modern society. During the deluge, an event organizer simply shrugged and asked: “What can you do?”

“This is what happens when you screw with Mother Nature,” remarked another guest, as the rain dropped down on a biblical scale. As cars exited through the security gate, attendees were offered dwarf Alberta spruce trees to take home for planting. A “green” gift, they grow to a maximum height of five feet after 10 years.