Roots of law professor’s mission run deep

Looking back, adjunct law professor Christen Civiletto realizes she should have sensed much sooner what was happening to her once-magnificent Niagara Falls hometown. Acrid odors clung to her clothes as she walked to kindergarten at 60th Street School in the 1970s under billowing clouds of chemicals from the nearby Goodyear, Hooker Chemical/Occidental and Carborundum plants.

When she poked around frozen Cayuga Creek in front of her next family home, she found slushy, rainbow-colored patches that never froze, even after a dozen days of subfreezing temperatures.

There’s much more to her background story leading to where she is now: most notably, cancer and death for her family and friends that she attributes to the toxic wastes companies dumped into Niagara County. She recovered from her own bout with a rare form of cancer when she was 32 and her children were still in diapers.

Like the dark ash particles lining the windowsills of her home — where she wrote her name as a girl, despite her mother’s regular dusting — all was accepted as normal.

For now, what’s important is her current work. Her forthcoming book, “Thundering Waters: The Toxic Legacy of Niagara Falls” (Princeton University Press/Island Press imprint, June 30, 2026) is more than an academic treatise. It’s a culmination of Civiletto’s search for answers and at the same time fills in the details of an extraordinary life she shares as both a personal declaration and a cautionary tale of the damage unbridled corporations inflicted on innocent people, the effects of which continue today.

She’s a prominent civil litigation attorney actively representing Niagara County residents against some of those same chemical companies whose hazardous wastes harmed families.

A 1986 alumna of UB with a bachelor’s degree in political science and communication, she’s also a popular adjunct faculty member at the UB law school, where she teaches Alternative Dispute Resolution and various environmental courses. She received the 2017 Kenneth Joyce award for excellence in teaching.

Civiletto’s search for information turned into two-plus decades of research, 15 years and counting of environmental litigation and 2,000 interviews with Niagara Falls neighbors, residents, classmates, sewage plant workers, laborers, city employees and family members. If she was permitted to talk to them, and they were willing to talk, she listened.

She soon learned that Niagara Falls was the birthplace of the billion-dollar commercial electrochemical chloralkali industry. Niagara Falls factories were turning out prodigious amounts of pesticides, chemical intermediaries, solvents, plasticizers and more. The volumes skyrocketed during World War II. All that chemical production resulted in leftover chemical waste. The waste had to go somewhere.

“For decades, those massive corporations dumped, buried, vented, incinerated and piled their millions of tons of toxic waste in the surrounding farmlands, rivers, meadows, canals and empty lots,” Civiletto wrote. “Those hazardous wastes migrated or were dispersed into our air, soils, waterways and sewers.”

Civiletto eventually realized that everywhere she lived, worked or attended school in Niagara Falls was in the pathway for toxic waste.

“Thundering Waters,” Civiletto’s fourth book, documents in trenchant and precise detail (she names names) what she calls “one of the most shocking and horrific tales of environmental desecration of the past 100 years,” as well as chronicling her family’s personal experiences and heartaches.

She’s a relentless storyteller, diligent historian and unwavering researcher. “Thundering Waters” contains a mix of science, history, law and vivid recreations of significant personal moments tied to Niagara Falls’ toxic history.

The damaging evidence keeps coming. A recent photo used in an investigation that simulated emissions in the Civilettos’ old neighborhood shows a plume of toxic gas directly over the former Civiletto home on Devlin Avenue. The only qualifier on the photo is that the emissions were much higher when Civiletto and her family lived there.

Through all this, Civiletto articulates the alarming theme of her new book with penetrating clarity.

“Virtually no one, including most of its residents, knows the true scope and horror of the environmental devastation that has beset this city,” she says. “‘Thundering Waters’ provides answers to those left wondering.

“People need to understand why they are so sick. There needs to be some accountability for the environmental harm visited upon Niagara Falls. This book is a start.”

“Thundering Waters” also chronicles the high-profile personalities and world-changing events that factored into the rise and fall of this iconic city. It connects Nikola Tesla’s revolutionary discovery of alternating current with the birth of Niagara’s dirtiest enterprise: the billion-dollar electrochemical industry. It reveals how J. Robert Oppenheimer and Gen. Leslie Groves tapped into Niagara Falls’ electrochemical factories to conduct top-secret work for the development of the atomic bomb and Cold War-era experimental weaponry. Love Canal is one of dozens of hazardous waste sites, some of which are larger than Love Canal in volume.

“There is so much that is beautiful about Niagara Falls — the people, the deep ethnic and cultural roots. Our contributions to history. The spectacular scenery,” Civiletto says. “But it cannot be denied that much has also gone wrong. Much of the land is shaped into artificial mounds that serve as burial grounds for chemical waste. Those bloated hills hide pumps and barricades. People are sick in numbers too high to ignore. To this day, hazardous waste migrates into the Niagara River and Lake Ontario. Carcinogens are still being released into the air. This city cannot heal until we understand and confront what happened — and what is still happening — here.

“This book will be the first to tell that big-picture story. The world will learn from us.”