August 17, 2017
By Larry Beahan, Niagara Group Conservation Chair
Last spring, newspapers in Western NY and all along the southern shore of Lake Ontario screamed about storms, floods and eroding waterfronts. The Lake Ontario water level was three feet above normal. Lake-front homes were falling off bluffs. Sewage systems backed up. Emergency crews distributed sand bags. Marinas and restaurants closed for the season.
The reflex response from much of the public was to look to the International Joint Commission, the IJC, charged with managing Lake Ontario’s waters, and blame it for the disaster. The IJC was particularly vulnerable. It had implemented a new Lake Ontario water management system, Plan 2014, which was advertised for its benefit to wetlands by allowing wider fluctuation in water level.
With newspapers and television news awash in photos of docks under water, boats in the streets and sandbagged homes, a battle began between scientists and politicians. Scientists saw the tremendous amount of precipitation in the Lake Ontario watershed as the cause of the flooding. Politicians rode the wave of popular blame and accused the IJC and Plan 2014 of causing the disaster.
In fact, no plan could have protected Lake Ontario from this year’s disastrous flooding. Neither the villainized Plan 2014, which was developed by the IJC after years of careful deliberation and consultation, nor its 1958 predecessor could have prevented it.
Weather was freakish on the Saint Lawrence and around Lake Ontario. Unexpected warm spells interrupted ice formation on the river five times. The IJC is mandated, by the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty between Canada and the United States, to control the flow of the river equitably for all its users.
If the IJC had increased the flow before a solid ice cover formed, that would have created massive ice jams that would have dramatically slowed drainage and made lake flooding much worse.
Downstream, the Saint Lawrence valley had strange weather and very heavy precipitation. Communities around Montreal were under water. Thousands were homeless.
The real source of the disastrous Lake Ontario flooding was upstream around Lake Ontario itself. From February 19 to April 19, 2017, the lake’s watershed received more than twice its average precipitation. Then April and May set an all-time record for precipitation there. Add to that Lake Erie, which supplies 75% of the inflow, poured 15% more water than it usually does into Lake Ontario.
There is no reliable way to have predicted this bizarre weather streak. Yet, the IJC is charged with this precarious balancing act of controlling water levels — in both flood and drought — for US and Canadian residents, boaters, shipping, power plants and natural habitats.
Neither the 1958 nor the 2014 plan would have prevented the disaster. Their high and low emergency trigger points are identical.
Yet both the 1958 and the 2014 plans provided great advantages in reducing shoreline damage. The average yearly shoreline damage to Lake Ontario without either of these plans in effect would amount to $48 million. The 1958 plan cut that to $18 million. Plan 2014 kept it at $20 million. But for that $2 million difference, Plan 2014 buys us the largest wetland restoration project outside of the Florida Everglades, 64,000 acres of invaluable, healthy wetland.
Plan 2014 does this by allowing for a small increase in water level fluctuation. The more constant levels of the 1958 plan have severely restricted the variety of wetland vegetation and left these wetlands sterile. Native plants, beaver, fish, turtles and ducks, and a great variety of other reptiles, birds and mammals rely on healthy wetlands for sustenance and shelter.
As for the politicians, there is common agreement that the victims of this disaster deserve disaster relief funds.
But Governor Cuomo rushed to join the tsunami of blame, accusing the IJC of not acting quickly enough. He urged cashiering of its US commissioners. But he stopped short of recommending the abandonment of Plan 2014.
NYS DEC Commissioner, Basil Seggos, defended Plan 2014. “I see what’s going on here as being separate from Plan 2014,” he said, during an interview on WCNY-FM’s Capitol Pressroom. “These are record water levels, and we would see these conditions happen even under the old regime.”
Two outliers, New York Congressmembers Kakto of Camillus and Collins of Clarence, are paddling us up the wrong crick in search of a solution to this year’s Lake Ontario flooding disaster. Their call for US withdrawal from and defunding of IJC’s painstakingly prepared, scientific Plan 2014 threatens to maroon the users of Lake Ontario somewhere up that crick.
Disaster relief — not the sacking of Plan 2014 — is the answer to this natural disaster.