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The toxic plume in the lower river from earlier this week includes untreated sewage as well as chemicals draining from Buffalo Avenue's chemical row
My vision of Echota was that it was a special place, built as a planned community for workers at the Adams Power Plant, with quaint, small homes built by plan, simple, elegant designs.
Edward Dean Adams, who built the plant for Tesla and Westinghouse, hired renowned architect Stanford White to build housing for plant workers on an adjacent plot along Hyde Park Boulevard. White lettered the streets and built quirky, nearly identical housing.
I remember touring Echota while training to become a docent for the Niagara Falls Historical Society. I was struck by the beauty of the homes. It was an actual model community, not Mr. Love’s idyllic place in Lewiston that never happened, but an actual place built in Niagara Falls so workers could walk to work while living in a well-designed home that matched the well-designed home where their neighbors lived,
The person leading our walk when I was training even pointed out the sycamore trees, planted because the developer believed they absorb pollution from the groundwater and process it harmlessly.
On Hyde Park Boulevard, they showed me a house that was abandoned, left for dead and rescued. As cool as the neighborhood was, when we shopped for a home, the proximity to the Buffalo Avenue chemical row made me cautious.
That was before Christen Civiletto’s “Thundering Waters” which I just finished reading.
Civiletto posits a giant sink, a toxic, underground lake, rests under that part of the city, another impact of Robert Moses, horrible human being.
We could have a spirited discussion about whom was more lecherous, Moses or Occidental capo di tutti Armand Hammer, the philanthropist and Russian spy.
Anyway, after Moses stole land from the Tuscarora so he could help New York build a massive reservoir for the new power plant in Lewiston.
That plant replaced the Schoellkopf power station. Never stop appreciating how New York screws Niagara Falls. Consider the Schoellkop plant, before it slid into the river in 1956, represented 25% of the non-homestead tax base.
The State replaced it with the new power plant and gave the city nothing in return because it was economically healthy at the time thanks to the chemical industry that was giving good jobs and immeasurable disease to the community.
As Civiletto writes, the chemical industry had no legal responsibility to behave better – it obeyed the rules of the time. Executives did have a moral responsibility and they admitted it, which could be the basis of litigation.
In the courts, in order for an expert to be allowed to testify, a special hearing is required to determine admissibility of the underlying evidence, to wit that the expert will be testifying that the chemical company knew its actions were harmful when acting. It is a complicated legal concept I don’t fully understand but consider it as the codification of the court accepting the excuse: “Oops my bad. Sorry. Too late to make good now.”
Anyway, back to Moses. Workers had to dig conduits to carry water to the Tuscarora land. To do so, they needed to tunnel under, and perpendicular to the Falls Street tunnel, which had been dug for the Adams’ power station.
When they did so, the natural flow of groundwater from under chemical row on Buffalo Avenue was blocked and shifted to create that sink and flow into the city. It rests under Echota and that whole end of the city.
After periods of heavy rain, when the storm sewers get overwhelmed, contaminated groundwater infiltrates storm sewers, where the Niagara Falls Waterboard uses pumps to clear water directly to its sewer system.
Groundwater also flows directly into the compromised Falls Street tunnel as well as cycling from overwhelmed sanitary sewers in LaSalle into storm sewers via lift pumps. That means when we get heavy rain, and the water board releases a statement about an untreated release into the river, and the plume in the lower river below the Rainbow Bridge flows dark and nasty, it is likely not just human waste but a toxic melange of the worst chemicals ever created. That toxic emission is shown in the above photo.
Civiletto calls for reparations to families from the still-existing chemical companies like DuPont, Occidental and Goodyear, they are profiting by hundreds of billions annually and so far have escaped accountability.
Meanwhile, the city of Niagara Falls hosts the state park and has no representation in Albany. While every dime spent at the new taxpayer-funded NFL stadium includes a 6% charge that goes back to Erie County (think of it as a tariff, if we use the term popularized for a tax paid by consumers under our current President, it’s a 6% tariff on every good purchased made by the NFL).
We have no such tariff in place for State Park visitors to benefit the host city but we should.
We also, because of politics, have gerrymandered Senate and Assembly districts that guarantee in a state bound to be controlled by Democrats in perpetuity, we have no seat at the table in Albany because we keep sending Republicand to represent us. Even when we find a credible candidate like Nate McMurray running for Assembly, as smart as he is, he comes across as smarmy or icky or just not likable. As I say that, I hold my nose and, for the betterment of Niagara, will vote for him because we don’t have an alternative.
His opponent Becky Wydysh served more than a decade in the Niagara County Legislature which does jack for the 3 cities in Niagara County. It funds the Sheriff, the roads, the jail and Monday night barbecues at the Salvation Army but Becky never worked to change that, she just smiled, laughed and said yes to her bosses.
That’s how Buffalo gets $2 billion, Rochester gets $500 million, so does Albany, Syracuse gets $300 million and Niagara Falls outside the core tourist area gets little in state money.
Meanwhile in Washington, Tim Kennedy represents our weak little sister Buffalo and gets immeasurable funding for the arts but nada for Niagara.
Even worse, when the Infrastructure and Jobs Act passed under the Biden administration, there was not a peep from Kennedy, Higgins, his predecessor, Assemblyman Angelo Morinello or Senator Rob Ortt or Mayor Robert Restaino or the Niagara County Legislature saying “ubi est mia?” over our toxic mess. We needed $1 billion to clean up the chemical mess and fix the wastewater treatment plan but Higgins didn’t ask. No one lobbied Senators Chuck Schumer or Kirsten Gillibrand. We got, literally, nothing.
We still need to get a 6% tariff on money spent in the state park. Gov. Hochul can just enact it the way our President does, whether she has the authority or not. As our President has shown, authority doesn’t matter. Chutzpah does.
We also need to line up our elected officials so they don’t pass on the next big spending bill that comes under the Democrat elected in 2028 to straighten out the mess left by Trump.
We are the Niagara Region. Hear us roar and forget about that shitty little city up the river toward Lake Erie.
