Allegany County is as rural, Republican, and conservative as any in New York State. Yet in the winter and spring of 1989 and ’90, its people banded together to successfully resist the placement of a nuclear dump within the county’s borders.
Western New York has more than its share of nuclear waste pits, most notably throughout Niagara County, dating back to the days of the Manhattan Project, but also in places like West Valley in Cattaraugus County and Tonawanda in Erie County. Given that history, it made sense that in 1988, New York State identified five potential sites in Allegany County for a nuclear waste dump the federal government required it to install by 1993.
But when state inspectors arrived at Belmont, the county seat, in May 1989 to announce a “windshield tour” of each site, they were met by protestors who formed a human chain blocking their exit. Some 48 were arrested by sheriff’s deputies. The pattern was set: the inspectors would encounter stiff nonviolent resistance everywhere they went. That fall, two local anti-nuclear groups, their leadership deliberately decentralized for both ethical and tactical reasons, trained hundreds of ordinary citizens in civil disobedience.
In December, demonstrators linked arms and blocked an inspection team outside Angelica. At Caneadea the following month, the inspectors’ way was blocked by farm equipment, so they tried an alternate route---only to be blocked again by more farm equipment. The State Police arrived and arrested eight protestors, but they couldn’t get through either. Two days later at West Almond, the whole process was repeated…but this time when state troopers asked those they were arresting to identify themselves, each protestor said, simply, “My name is Allegany County!”
So it went through the rest of the winter and into the spring---each encounter was nonviolent, thanks to the well-trained demonstrators and the restraint of the sheriff’s department, who kept the State Police from overreacting. But when the state siting commission won a court order prohibiting protestors from blockading inspectors, the stage was set for the climactic confrontation in Caneadea in April.
This time, the state inspectors were accompanied by a phalanx of more than two dozen State Policemen. But the protestors, who numbered in the hundreds, were ready. They blocked the way at a small bridge; at the front of the blockade sat a line of six elderly grandparents, chained in place. It took some effort for the troopers to unchain and arrest them before proceeding forward… where they ran into another blockade of farm gear. Still, they continued, intent on arresting as many chanting, singing protestors as necessary… only to encounter a group of masked, mounted protestors. The state troopers tried to force the riders to dismount from the dozen or so horses, but to no avail; in the milling chaos that ensued, at least one trooper’s foot was painfully trod on. Still a mile from the site, their way still blocked by hundreds of protestors, the inspectors gave up.
The successful resistance at Caneadea turned out to be decisive. A few days later, Gov. Mario Cuomo ordered the siting commission to end its activities in Allegany County. Not only did Alleganians deny the dump from being built in their county, their efforts led to a Supreme Court ruling clearing states of the obligation of storing nuclear waste altogether, ensuring that the practice would end in New York State.
Thanks to the people of Allegany County, not a single new nuclear waste dump has been established in this state since 1990.