The John Henrys of Niagara Falls’ Public Works Administration never stood a chance against these steam shovels: City officials swooned last month when Morrisville, Pennsylvania’s Patch Management Co. demonstrated the spray-patching machine, which filled 50 potholes in just one hour. The city’s new go-getter of a mayor, Paul Dyster, quickly asked city legislators to approve a contract, assuring them that casino revenues would foot the bill. Only the Pothole Killer, the reasoning went, would give the Public Works Administration a chance to catch up on decades of neglect that had made an axle-breaking moonscape of the city’s roadways.

Simonds Saw & Steel in Lockport, a former Manhattan Project site.

How did the roads get so bad in Niagara Falls? Why have streets gone decades without repaving? Here’s one reason, which no one bothered to share with Scott Klieger, chief operating officer at Patch Management and the inventor of the Pothole Killer: Many of the city’s roadbeds contain radioactive waste, that pesky souvenir of the region’s nuclear industry.

From Lewiston to Lockport to the Falls, public works projects continue to run into the stubborn legacy of the Manhattan Project and the industries it spawned here. That legacy includes massive quantities of radiological material in a leaky containment structure on the former Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (LOOW), persistent radiological contamination issues at landfills throughout the county as well as at undocumented disposal sites no one will ever know about for certain, defunct industrial sites that continue to poison the surrounding neighborhoods decades after their abandonment, and all the attendant effects on human health and the economy.

Another legacy is road materials corrupted by what officials like to call “industrial slag,” but which might be more usefully termed derivative uranium products, the waste cast off in the process of refining uranium for weapons and reactors.

If “derivative uranium products” sounds a little like “depleted uranium,” or DU—the substance whose use by the military for armor-busting, incendiary shells is increasingly controversial, as its deleterious health effects on civilian populations and our own soldiers becomes more evident—that’s because they’re nearly the same thing. Nowadays the term “DU” is used to describe the very specific castoff material used for shell and armor, but that’s an inappropriate narrowing of the terminology. All the unused, waste uranium derived from the processes of refining and enriching uranium is DU.

Today there are industrial and military uses for derivative uranium. Back in the 1940s, when Niagara was the free world’s leading producer of uranium metal (and therefore of toxic derivative uranium wastes), it was a headache. Private industries conspired with each other and with local, state, and federal governments to free themselves of this headache, leading to reckless waste disposal practices that would be criminal today. (And might have been criminal back then: A plethora of documents indicate that both government and industry were well aware of the human health dangers posted by even low-level radioactive waste associated with refining, milling, and enriching uranium.)

Sometimes the waste from Niagara Falls plants (and others around the country) that handled uranium was buried on site. Sometimes it made its way to the federal property at the former LOOW site, where it sat in rotting barrels on train tracks for years before being first gathered into an open silo and finally buried underground. Sometimes it was dumped secretly and illegally in landfills, waterways, and farmers’ fields. (Former Niagara Falls City Councilman John Accardo once told us about accompanying his father and friends on night-time trips to dump barrels in Gill Creek for Hooker Chemical. A lot of people took that work, Accardo said, and justified it by pointing out the number of livelihoods that depended on the companies producing toxic waste.)

A tremendous amount of that radioactive waste material apparently wound up being used for fill and road projects. The results of that widespread contamination were systematically documented in the wake of the Love Canal disaster, when the Department of Energy commissioned an engineering firm called EG&G, a subsidiary of URS, to do a fly-over survey of the entire county to pinpoint radioactive hotspots. That was between 1978 and 1979. Subsequently, between 1981 and 1986, the Oak Ridge National Laboratories performed a survey that identified more than 100 radioactive hotspots in Niagara Falls, including in its roadways. Much of that contamination has never been remediated or even investigated. It’s rarely even discussed, though occasionally the issue rises to the surface, as it did recently in regard to a bowling alley on Niagara Falls Boulevard and road re-paving projects for Lewiston Road and Buffalo Avenue.

The City of Niagara Falls certainly never told Patch Management’s Scott Klieger anything about the issue.

“You’re joking,” Klieger said, laughing, when asked on Tuesday if he’d been told about the radioactive waste contained in Niagara’s roadways. Then his voice turned low and serious. “Do a lot of folks have cancer up there?”

Anyone who lives in Niagara Falls can answer that question in the affirmative, including Niagara City Councilman Steve Fournier. He grew up in Love Canal and had relatives who were stricken with cancer. As a child, Fournier himself suffered brain tumors and cysts, for which he underwent surgery at the age of 12.

Fournier voted to approve the leasing of the Pothole Killers, arguing that the city had to do something about the decrepit roads. But, the day after the vote, he also took the matter of roadway contamination to the city’s Public Works chief and to Mayor Paul Dyster and asked how the administration planned to address the issue. Fournier said Dyster told him that he’d look into it.

“Maybe that’s why those roads have never been done,” Fournier said, describing his reaction to reviewing the roadway contamination issue as documented in the Oak Ridge surveys, which were sent to both him and Dyster. Like a lot of Niagara County residents, he said, his understanding of the region’s toxic legacy hovered somewhere just beyond everyday consciousness.

“We know what we were at one time,” he said of the region’s nuclear and chemical industries and the environmental devastation they left behind. “But I think everybody believes that it was contained to Love Canal.”

The Love Canal controversy is part of the past now, Fournier said—adding quickly that he still wouldn’t buy a house there—and so people believe that toxic chemical and radioactive wastes are history as well. He acknowledges that doesn’t seem to be the case, and says he hopes the new mayor will do something about it, or force somebody else to own up to their responsibility.

“I want to know who dumped it,” Fournier said. “As a poverty-stricken city, we can’t financially afford to fix this problem. Maybe we might want to, but we can’t.”

Literally and metaphorically, toxic chemical and radioactive waste has been buried again and again in Niagara Falls for decades. If Patch Management’s machines pave it over again this summer, spitting contaminated dust into the air, those who inflicted this legacy on Niagara Falls will escape responsibility once again. And another opportunity to actually do something about the issue—as opposed to pretending it doesn’t exist—will have been killed.