Frederick Street: Life and death on Canada’s Love Canal

What does it feel like to come home and find men in protective white hazard suits posting warning signs in your backyard? Or to wonder who on your street will be next to come down with another disease? Worst of all, how does it feel to have the government repeatedly tell you that the toxic waste site next to your backyard -- the source of the orange sludge seeping into your basement -- doesn't pose any health risk at all?

The people of Sydney, Nova Scotia, know exactly how it feels to live next door to the once-belching coke ovens of the Sydney Steel Corp and the contaminated estuary known as the tar-ponds, and now the worst toxic waste site in North America. Their story is chronicled in Frederick Street: Living and Dying on Canada's Love Canal, a moving, thoroughly researched expose of an environmental and human disaster over 30 times worse than Love Canal.

This is the story of a community, ordinary people with kids and mortgages, who, in most cases, can't afford to move away from their unsaleable homes. Their fight for their health, their homes and their lives as they demand evacuation and compensation for a ruined present and a threatened future makes compelling reading.

Most Canadians have seen the headlines on what has become an important national story: Frederick Street reveals the real story of a scandal that has far-reaching consequences on a human, environmental and social scale.