Eugene Leff, who reached a record settlement for New York State with a chemical company accused of burying toxic waste at Love Canal, the Niagara Falls neighborhood whose contamination became a symbol of environmental disaster, died on April 12 in Philadelphia. He was 73.
His sister, Ilene Leff, said the cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
As an assistant state attorney general and New York’s lead lawyer in the case, Mr. Leff successfully concluded a 14-year lawsuit in which the former owners of a dumpsite at Love Canal agreed in 1994 to pay $98 million and to assume cleanup costs and other expenses that would eventually amount to millions of dollars more.
Homeowners said the chemicals appeared to have caused tumors and birth defects after bubbling up into the basements of houses that had been built on the site, a 16-acre former landfill that featured an unfinished 19th-century canal. Balls of caustic residue were observed burning on the ground after rising to the surface.
The Love Canal case spurred Congress to create the federal Superfund cleanup program. The New York settlement remains the state’s largest for a hazardous-waste case.
“Like Three Mile Island, Bhopal and Chernobyl, Love Canal has become an emblem of technological disaster in the modern industrial age,” Allan Mazur wrote in “A Hazardous Inquiry: The Rashomon Effect at Love Canal” (1998). “It is the paradigm example of a community poisoned by toxic industrial waste.”
Continue reading the main storyBesides representing the state in the Love Canal settlement under Attorney General Robert Abrams, Mr. Leff headed its environmental bureau. He pursued litigation to remove polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, and other contaminants from the Hudson River and to remediate a decades-long oil leak into Newtown Creek, between Brooklyn and Queens.
Beginning in 2011, as deputy state environmental conservation commissioner, Mr. Leff drafted legislation to safeguard against future toxic chemical catastrophes.
“Gene was indefatigable in pursuing the cleanup of the most notorious toxic waste site in the world,” Mr. Abrams said on Monday in an email. “While soft-spoken, he was tough as nails in standing up to the might of a reckless corporate giant.”
In the Love Canal case, Judge John T. Curtin, of Federal District Court in Buffalo, had held in 1988 that Occidental Chemical was liable for environmental damage and cleanup costs.
However, the judge later ruled that the state’s demand for punitive damages was not warranted because dumping on the site by Hooker Chemical and Plastics, which was acquired by Occidental in 1968, was not illegal when it occurred, between 1942 and 1952.
The only remaining question was how much Occidental had to pay for the damage and cleanup.
The state sued for $150 million, but later said it was satisfied with the $98 million out-of-court settlement because that amount exceeded its legal and cleanup costs.
For its part, Occidental dropped a countersuit, in which it claimed that a sewer line installed by the state had been partly responsible for spreading contaminants.
The state settlement did not affect a federal suit against Occidental, which was settled in 1995 for $129 million, or claims by hundreds of homeowners, many of which remain pending.
As early as 1945, Hooker employees had warned that the site could become a legal quagmire.
Hooker nevertheless entombed 21,800 tons of hazardous chemicals there over time. Sparsely populated originally, the area was developed, and the abandoned canal — an aborted 19th-century project conceived by an entrepreneur named James Love to bypass Niagara Falls — became a neighborhood swimming hole.
In 1953, the company, after warning about the landfill, sold a portion of the site for an elementary school.
Beginning in 1978, when the environmental danger became obvious, state and federal officials evacuated hundreds of families within a 10-square-block area around the landfill. Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, popularly known as the Superfund, in 1980.
After years of remediation, Love Canal was finally removed from the priority list of Superfund cleanup sites in 2004.
In 2008, a state report found higher rates of birth defects among families who had lived in the neighborhood but concluded that overall cancer rates appeared to be no different from those of the surrounding population.
Eugene Joel Leff was born on Aug. 10, 1944, in Manhattan to Dr. Abraham Leff, a psychiatrist, and the former Rose Levy, a pharmacist. He grew up first on Long Island, in Huntington, and then in Wood-Ridge, N.J.
After graduating from Union High School in Union, N.J., he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Columbia College and a law degree from Yale Law School. He also received a master’s in Russian and East European studies from Yale and sang with the Yale Russian Chorus.
His marriage to Ann Martin ended in divorce. (For a while he went by the name Eugene Martin-Leff.) In addition to his sister, he is survived by a daughter, Melanie Martin-Leff; his companion, Michele Richman; her daughter, Isabelle Rostain; and her son, Julian Rostain.
After receiving his law degree, Mr. Leff clerked for a federal judge and then joined a Wall Street law firm whose clients included Johns Manville, the building-products manufacturer. He defended the company against lawsuits claiming medical damage over its use of asbestos.
Hailing from a family of health care workers, Mr. Leff switched sides, joining the National Employment Law Project, which enforces workplace standards, and then the attorney general.
He retired from the state in 2016.
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