Welcome to
Toxic
Niagara
A self-guided driving tour
The waterfalls hide another landscape: uranium production, chemical manufacturing, rocket and aerospace research, buried waste, radioactive slag, landfills, and neighborhoods built beside — and sometimes over — the industrial record.
Location is off. The tour works without it.
Drive safely. Pull over only where legal. Stay on public roads and public property. Do not enter active industrial sites, landfills, fenced areas, rail corridors, vacant lots, or private property.
This is a landscape tour, not a contamination detector.
The app points to documented places and explains what happened there. A site can have a cleanup history and still carry restrictions, capped material, buried contamination, institutional controls, or unresolved questions.
“Remediated” does not mean contamination-free.
Location access is optional and used only in your browser to estimate which stop is closest. The app does not need an account and does not send your location to a Toxic Niagara server.
Pick your poison.
What are you in the mood for?
Follow the uranium step by step.
Uranium processed through this Niagara network was ultimately fabricated into fuel for the production reactors at Hanford, Washington. Those reactors produced plutonium for the Gadget—the device detonated during the Trinity test—and for Fat Man, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Processing and machining also left uranium-bearing slag, dust, residues, and contaminated equipment. Some of that material was buried or left at Niagara-area factory and landfill sites; later cleanups moved part of it to the federal LOOW / NFSS property in Lewiston. Some factories on the route continued uranium work after the war under the Atomic Energy Commission.
- 01 Linde Received Shinkolobwe ore · Belgian Congo (now DRC) → oxides + uranium tetrafluoride · Tonawanda Directions ↗
- 02 Electromet green salt → uranium metal · Niagara Falls Directions ↗
- 03 Hooker uranium recovery from Electromet slag + chemical industry · Niagara Falls Directions ↗
- 04 Carborundum experimental uranium-slug grinding + reactor-fuel research · Niagara Falls Directions ↗
- 05 Steel factories Bliss & Laughlin · Buffalo + Bethlehem Steel · Lackawanna + Guterl / former Simonds · Lockport · final uranium rolling, machining + straightening before Hanford
- 06 LOOW / NFSS separate waste route · storage, burial, consolidation · Lewiston Directions ↗
Polluters and what remains.
A regional network — not a single source.
Radioactive slag used as fill could have come from more than one industrial source. Federal and state investigations later separated some road and property anomalies from Manhattan Project waste and linked others to industrial slag beneath asphalt, driveways, parking lots, and roads.
The driving tour keeps those histories together because that is how the landscape works: factories, aerospace research, haulers, disposal areas, road fill, creeks, neighborhoods, and later cleanup programs overlap.
Want to see more? Visit the Greetings from Niagara interactive Hotspots map ↗. For landfills, spills, hazardous-waste sites, monitoring wells, and other contamination records, open the Niagara County toxic-sites map ↗.
Built from the record.
This self-guided tour brings together a history that is usually scattered across separate government files: uranium processing, chemical production, steel fabrication, waste hauling, disposal sites, and contamination that moved into roads, yards, businesses, and neighborhoods. Each stop is grounded in government records, federal worker-exposure documents, cleanup files, historical reports, and reporting gathered for Greetings from Niagara. The purpose is to make the connections between these places visible—not to replace environmental testing, agency guidance, or professional advice.
Save Our Backyards WNY is a resident-led advocacy group formed by people confronting radioactive and chemical contamination across Niagara and Erie counties. The group connects neighbors, shares information, organizes community meetings, and calls for comprehensive testing, cleanup, accountability, and clear answers from government agencies and elected officials.
Learn more + join Save Our Backyards WNY ↗