Infamous Environmental Disasters of the United States

What were the most infamous American environmental disasters before the recent Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? The most infamous of the older disasters would still have to be the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 in Prince William Sound off Alaska, though the Love Canal toxic waste disaster, ongoing for decades but reaching national prominence in 1978, in Niagara Falls, New York and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident of 1979 in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania were also of great import. The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill The Exxon Valdez was an oil tanker shipping oil from Alaska's North Slope to California struck a reef in Prince William Sound and spilled hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil into the Pacific Ocean. This was the largest oil spill in American waters until the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The Exxon Valdez spill was extraordinarily difficult to respond to and clean up due to its remote location. Eventually, 1,300 miles of coastline and 11,000 square miles of ocean were covered by the spill. The accident was caused by an insufficiently rested crew and a malfunction...