Forty years ago, when the news cameras arrived to Niagara Falls to film the pollution crisis happening in my neighborhood, I had no clue a group of women in upstate New York eventually would spark a national movement. As a young mother, I discovered my family was living next to a former Hooker Chemical waste site — shocked my child’s school’s playground was atop the toxic waste and that my family was breathing contaminated air.

As we began noticing trends of unexplained birth defects in our children and clusters of cancer, our story became an internationally-cited pollution tragedy. Love Canal was the perfect storm of corporate irresponsibility and government negligence. Yet, eventually, we won our case. The Environmental Protection Agency was pressured to step in and relocate our community.

EPA eventually established the Superfund program to clean up contaminated, abandoned toxic dumps.

We’ve made progress, but we are still fighting. Our government still lets industries who are mass producing poorly studied chemicals off easy. Corporations coat cooking pans, clothing, carpets and wrappers with “nonstick” Teflon chemicals to make products stain-proof and waterproof. The same per- and poly-fluoroalkyl chemicals (PFAS) smother high temperature fires and are used at every military base and airport across the country. This continues despite the health and environmental consequences.

PFAS never break down in the environment. They migrate through air and groundwater and accumulate in our bodies, where they increase the risk of cancer and harm our immune and reproductive systems. Nearly every American has measurable amounts of PFAS in them.

However, the problem is much worse for people living downstream from military bases and industrial sites. Millions of mothers have the same fear I did — that they’ve passed these chemicals to their children, during pregnancy, nursing or mixing bottles with contaminated tap water. They need Congress to step in to put an end to this reckless pattern because the Trump administration and corporations won’t.

Now, because of this massive toxic buildup, the military is sending PFAS foams to waste incinerators across the country, especially in low-income communities. While it once was Love Canal, it is now places like East Liverpool, Ohio, that keep me awake.

After Love Canal, I started an organization — the Center for Health, Environment & Justice — to advocate with communities living in the boundaries of corporate pollution and environmental injustice. I fought the construction of the East Liverpool incinerator to be built in the center of town on the banks of the Ohio River, steps from an elementary school. I met local activists and heard familiar sentiments from families who worried about their kids' safety. Unfortunately, the incinerator was approved and the East Liverpool community has become ground zero for dumping toxic waste.

As we feared, the incinerator is a disaster. In 2013 it exploded, covering the community in toxic ash. University of Cincinnati scientists partnered with the community to study impacts of the incinerator on children. They traced high levels of manganese from the smokestack to the bodies of neighborhood children and found that those with the highest levels did poorly in school and had lower IQ measurements.

Last year, Heritage Environmental Services, which runs the incinerator, settled with the EPA for nearly $600,000 for the explosion. Still, it hasn’t been held fully accountable for the 150 permit violations we tallied between 2000 and 2005. Instead, the company was rewarded with lucrative contracts with the Department of Defense to burn thousands of gallons of PFAS wastes.

Right now, we have a key moment to stop this pollution crisis. Ohio’s governor is mandating more water testing to measure the extent of contamination here. Congress is voting on the military appropriations bill that includes a dozen measures that will begin to safeguard Americans from toxic PFAS exposure. The rules will end the use of PFAS in military firefighting, bring PFAS chemicals into the Superfund program and halt the incineration of PFAS in places like East Liverpool.

Forty years after Love Canal, I’ve come to learn I am just one of the concerned parents in the thousands of similarly polluted American communities. I’ve recognized the terrible irony we faced: Living close to a documented waste site and having children with visible birth defects helped prompt a national outcry and move us to safety. Due to systemic racism or geographic isolation, many communities don’t get the national attention that prompts these actions.

It’s past time we demand our elected officials protect us from these environmental and health disasters. Congress must pass the PFAS protections in the military spending bill for communities, military families, firefighters and children.

Lois Gibbs of Falls Church, Virginia, founded the Love Canal Homeowners’ Association in 1978 and the Center for Health, Environment & Justice in 1981.