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The Rising Waters

(photo: Joe Verrastro, Jr.)

If you live in Buffalo’s Inner Harbor community, you had to be real nervous on the first Friday of December 2006. During the early to late evening, the eastern end of Lake Erie experienced a lake seiche in which the water rose nine feet, seven inches over a period of hours. On top of that there were high winds (a peak gust at the airport of 67 miles per hour) and waves exceeding 15 feet. On top of that, a precipitous drop of temperature.

At midnight that Friday, I toured the Lakeshore Commons and made my way to LaSalle Park. I have never seen the water so high and the lake so unbridled. Water spilled over the breakwalls, filled up the inner harbor nearly to the top of the wall edging the Buffalo River and spilled into the streets. The river was running backwards, the water pushed rapidly and violently in by the seiche. At the foot of Porter Avenue, next to the Buffalo Yacht Club, I found myself staring up at cresting angry waves. I got wet. And I got the heck out of there. I drove out towards the outer harbor, out along Fuhrmann Boulevard. There was a lot of lake water in the road. Gallagher Beach was gone as the waves crested the roadway.

A Lake Erie seiche is a somewhat unusual but hardly unprecedented event. This happens when winds run up the lake from the west, pushing the water ahead in kind of a sloshing bathtub effect. At the eastern end, at Buffalo, the water piles up. One of Buffalo’s most historic disasters occurred in 1844 when a seiche hit in October and the low-lying commercial and residential districts along the waterfront were flooded in a few hours. Seventy-eight people lost their lives in Buffalo that day.

This seiche flooded portions the Erie Basin marina, and threatened the condos and homes built along the flats surrounding the downtown harbor and LaSalle Park to a degree that is rarely witnessed. This December storm, and the potential consequences of climate change on both lake levels and extreme weather events that are predicted for this area in the coming years, might give one pause as we ponder the development of our low-lying outer harbor areas. The potential consequences of property damage and placing lives at risk based on poor planning decisions beg that we try to learn the lessons from Hurricane Katrina and the development and subsequent destruction of major portions of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

This is just the latest in a series of unusual storms that have visited our region in recent years and months. According to climate researchers, instability in lake levels and climate uncertainty could increase the frequency and strength of these storms.

The next day I traveled to Rochester to interview Peter Annin, author of the recently published The Great Lakes Water Wars (Island Press). He was the keynote speaker at Restoring the Gateway to the Great Lakes, the New York State Healing our Waters Conference, held at the Rochester’s Seneca Park Zoo. The event was characterized by New York State Audubon associate conservation director and event organizer Sean Mahar as “an opportunity to bring interested groups together to help to implement a restoration strategy for the Great Lakes.”

The central focus of the conference was the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact, which is a protection strategy signed by the governors of all eight Great Lakes states. The compact is designed to preserve Great Lakes waters from diversions outside of the basin, and restricts certain uses of the water, including large-scale commodification. This plan, which was passed by the New York State Assembly in June of this year by a vote of 128-0, needs to be passed by the New York State Senate in the coming weeks or it will go back to the legislature to start from scratch.

Peter Annin is a veteran reporter who worked for over a decade for Newsweek specializing in domestic terrorism and the radical right, including the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas, and the bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City. He has also extensively covered the environment and currently serves as associate director of the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources.

He has a distinct ecological perspective despite his claim that he is a “journalist covering the environment” and not an “environmentalist working as a journalist.”

His book chronicles the human history of using Great Lakes water. These lakes, inland sweetwater seas, contain almost one fifth of the earth’s fresh surface water. They are the basis of commerce, culture and environment. We have built a civilization based on this resource.

An undercurrent of his book, including one entire chapter, focuses the “Aral experiment.” This is a sad episode in recent human history in which educated planners and engineers diverted water from the Aral Sea, what was once the fourth largest inland water body on the planet. The “out of basin” diversions have gone to agriculture, primarily the industrial production of cotton. Someone made and makes money. Many have and will suffer. Since 1960, the Aral Sea has lost 90 percent of its volume and 75 percent of its surface area. Water levels have dropped an average of 80 vertical feet. Today rusted boat hulls lie in the new desert; former seaside towns and villages full of chronically sick and displaced people are dusty miles from the shoreline and the regional climate has grown more inhospitable. The area is characterized by contamination. The Aral experiment in diversion has created a wasteland, and is a modern ecological crime.

Today, in America, we face increasing water stresses from arid areas including the US Southwest, Africa and Asia, and increasing agricultural stress such as the demand for increased corn yields in the Midwest. Corn has everything to do with expanding demand for ethanol, an important Buffalo issue. Fresh waters including both surface waters and aquifers are threatened. The corn industry is blamed for tremendous environmental degradation throughout the Mississippi basin and into the Gulf of Mexico. As we enter into this stunning new century of uncertainty, we do know that our Great Lakes are threatened. Fresh surface water is becoming increasingly valuable. We all have a lot at stake.

And that is precisely why the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact, and the upcoming vote by the New York State Senate, is so important.

I asked Annin about the compact and its impact on New Yorkers and those that live in the Great Lakes basin.

“The compact is an historic document that provides the basin with the opportunity to definitively and authoritatively ban large-scale, long-range diversions of Great Lakes water, hopefully forever,” he said.

“It is particularly important to New Yorkers—and Buffalonians, because you all are at the tail end of the watershed. That means you are directly affected by everything we all do with Great Lakes water upstream. Arguably, because you are at the tail end of the system, you have the most to lose.”

I told Peter that we have economic stress here. We engage in heated arguments to get anything done and always to get it done in a hurry. Economic development at all costs, no matter how it is defined, and no matter who is the beneficiary, no matter who is harmed, or how, is always considered a good thing by the decisionmakers. I told him that I was afraid that we are continuing to make the same shortsighted mistakes that we have made for generations: industrializing the waterfront, polluting for profit, harming generations of citizens defined by a degraded environment, touting quick fixes and avoiding long-term consequences, and above all abandoning a future that works by an inability to think through the value of the natural resources that we may permanently harm.

Annin’s advice is to try to get perspective. “Buffalo’s economy is in the same place a lot of Great Lakes economies are in or have been in the past,” he said. “In the past we used and abused the lakes for economic gain in an ecologically unsustainable way, and we are still living with the toxic legacies of that. The key to the economic future in places like Buffalo is to socially and economically embrace and celebrate the lakes in an ecologically sustainable manner so that we can capitalize on this unique freshwater resource without damaging it at the same time. So Buffalo should be cleaning up its waterfront and restoring degraded regional ecosystems.”

Annin’s book serves as a well-researched warning. I was thinking about that as I adventure-toured the seiche on Friday night. Meeting him put a fine point on the thoughts. There are consequences to making wrong political and economic decisions. Sometimes Buffalo feels too much like New Orleans, and I do not mean in a good way. Myopic thinking dipped in the elixir of short-term profit can and will turn into long-term pain. Just look at our industrialized waterfront, take a deep breath and pray that you don’t get cancer, or get swept away.