Al Gore claimed yesterday that he was the person who had first drawn attention to the contamination at Love Canal, after receiving a letter from a worried high school student about another contaminated site in Tennessee. “I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue … I was the one that started it all,” he said during a speech at a New Hampshire high school. Gore did hold congressional hearings on the matter, but what he neglected to mention was that two months earlier, Pres. Jimmy Carter had declared Love Canal a disaster area and the feds had offered to buy residents’ contaminated homes.
