Hey all. First, I don’t need help doing my homework. I can screw that up all by myself. 
What I WOULD like is an opinion - I’m working on a shortish essay about the hazards of contaminating ground water. I’d like to use The Love Canal incidents as an example of those hazards - what I would like your opinion on is if that is a reasonable jump or comparison. If that makes sense. Or, if you have any other examples that would be perhaps work better, if you can give me a name of the place, I can research them instead.
Thanks muchly! (in advance).
If you are looking strictly for titles, then I’d go ahead with the Love Canal Incidents. Example:
The Love Canal: Incidents of Ground Water Contamination and Human Reprocussion.
Or
Ground Water Contamination: The Love Canal Incident.
Love Canal really isn’t typical, is it? Maybe gasoline stations would be a more relevant topic for most people.
Love Canal wasn’t just about groundwater pollution.
It rather depends on what kind of class you are doing this paper for. Is it college or high school? Generic science or something in the environmental field? If it’s for an environmental college class, you will be rehashing the same topic the professor has seen a million times. He/she will also know that you really didn’t have to work very hard to do research, and that it’s not really showing any special knowledge of the field.
Anecdotal: I worked in a town that had some contamination throughout a residential section. Residents started calling it “The next Love Canal”. Anybody in the know realizes how stupid it was. Nobody had gotten sick, there were no dioxins found, and the contaminant levels were quite low. But everybody knows about Love Canal, so that’s what all environmental problems come down to for the layman.
As js_africanus mentioned above, gas stations might be a better topic. Also, many (almost all, actually) former military bases are quite contaminated. Road salting has been known to cause problems in nearby farms (my grad school research was on the effect road salt substitute had on cranberry bogs). Former mill buildings are also typically contaminated. I’m sure scholarly articles have been written about all these topics, and it might seem a little more academic to your professors if you pick something a little less mainstream.
If you want try something different, how about doing a little research on Arsenic groundwater contamination in Bangladesh. For extra credit compare it to the effects of not drilling deep wells and/or using pre-existing supplies (with the endemic Thyphoid/Cholera)