The deadliest man-made disaster to strike Haverstraw was the the Great 1906 Landslide, which claimed the lives of 19 while they were sleeping on the night of January 8, 1906. The ground beneath their homes gave way and slid into the adjacent excavation pit as the Village’s brick making companies routinely undermined the Village of Haverstraw itself in order to retrieve the valuable blue clay on its Hudson River shore. Before government environmental regulations, private corporations repeatedly caused death and private property damage throughout the U.S. as they extracted natural resources and produced goods for immense profit. Haverstraw was not spared. Two blocks of Rockland and Partition Street slid into the pit, igniting fires and destroying dozens of homes and businesses. Haverstraw enthusiast and armchair historian Dmitri Salapoff created a compilation of headlines proclaiming the destruction experienced by the people of Haverstraw.
HaverstrawLife.com 
“Before government environmental regulations, private corporations repeatedly caused death and private property damage throughout the U.S. as they extracted natural resources and produced goods for immense profit.” How quickly this country forgets it’s history…
It’s so odd they’ve forgotten. The waterways were deadly polluted in their lifetimes.