I used to live in Rochester, NY, so I looked in on its news this morning and received a shock. Lake Ontario has risen to its highest level since 1973 (and within half a foot of its historic high from 1952) and caused massive flooding along the lakefront in both New York and Canada. This has apparently been going on for about three months, and Cuomo declared a state of emergency. In what I assume is related news, even communities not on the Lake, but on the Barge Canal – Like Palmyra – are getting flooded, too.
I don’t recall seeing or hearing about this at all on the national news or in the papers. In part, because it’s been a slow and ongoing process, unlike the sudden flooding afflicting the seacoast in the wake of Sandy, for instance. But it’s still a massive occurrence, and deserves more attention outside the region.
Can anyone from the region tell more about what’s going on there? Is everyone alright?
Some pix:
We’ve had rather sudden floods here in Montreal. Areas are flooded that you would’ve never thought would get flooded.
My family’s house is near a flooded zone. My family is okay, but just a 10-minute walk from the house is flooded really badly. Many people’s houses are flooded, as well as many local stores and restaurants.
Get used to it. Fluctuating weather patterns exceeding historical estimates are going to become the norm, and will continue to impact people in flood zones (and on unprotected hurricane-prone locations, and “tornado alleys” and so forth) with progressively greater intensity.
Whomever still thinks that the fiscal costs of trying to reduce carbon emissions and move to a low-carbon footprint and sustainable renewable energy is “too expensive” needs to consider both the long term economic and human costs of climate change-related disasters and effects. We’re already facing the fact that we are going to have to relocate large populations and build massive dike and flooding abatement structures around major seaside metropolitan areas, and if you think that is trivial just ask the Dutch, or the US Army Corps of Engineers and their efforts to control the path of the Mississippi River.
I’ve tried to avoid bringing climate change into this, because my point was the largely unreported (at least to the rest of the country) flooding due to the rise in Lake Ontario. I don’t doubt that you’re right about that. I feel the same way, and could bring in the flooding due to Sandy and the flooding in Binghamton a few years ago as other examples. (I have to admit that I’m surprised at the flooding away from the coasts. There’s so much talk about sealevel rise with climate change that it eclipses flooding due to other causes).
As for Atchafalaya, although their problems are no doubt made more difficult by climate change, that was a huge piece of hubris even without that factor – the Mississippi has a history of large-scale wandering that’s obvious from its geography, and trying to tame that is an enormous undertaking. Read the third part of John McPhee’s book The Control of Nature for an idea of what’s involved. as his book implies, the effort involved in trying to control the waters and paths of the Mississippi are on a par with trying to control lava flows in Hawaii and Iceland.
I heard on the radio that the floods, at least in this area, are caused by a combination of greater-than-normal rainfall coupled with the fact that the winter’s snow melted very quickly and pretty much all at once.
I have read McPhee’s The Control of Nature (the second link in my previous post was to an article in the New Yorker that essentially led to the book) and while the problems in trying to maintain the Old River Control Structure and keep the Atchafalaya Basin in statis is not specifically a problem of climate change but rather the natural evolution of river basins, it (and the other examples of control of rock and mud slides on the San Gabriel front range watershed and lava flows in Iceland) it illustrates that human control of even relatively small scale natural phenomena is massively challenging and often results in unexpected problems which may pose even greater threats. McPhee’s later statement that he believes that “Nature will win” in any conflict is telling, and particularly worrisome in the light of the belief by some that we’ll come up with some kind of technological pixie dust that will offset global warming effects without considering the extent and energy required, and the potential for even more dire impacts from unexpected reactions.
I have 3 sets of inlaws with lake front property in the Long Pond area north of Rochester. One of them has had their house sandbagged, the second is likely to lose their dock and concrete lake wall which has waves coming over it regularly (fortunately no basement to flood in this case), and the third is nervously watching the water creep up their massive back yard towards the house. So far so good for the third family.
Cuomo has asked the international joint commission that controls it to allow more water out of Lake Ontario and into the St. Lawrence. Canada is resisting since it would only exacerbate the flooding in Montreal. My daughter in NY certainly heard about the Montreal flooding since she called to see if we were all right. We are nowhere near the flood zone.
Stranger is right of course, but no Republican will credit it.
This is almost certainly the explanation. Of course, people who choose to live on the lakefront don’t want to hear about natural causes. Instead they are insisting upon a conspiracy theory, that the International Joint Commission’s New Water Leveling Plan is the blame. (That article is just an easily findable example of a widely spread belief.) Actual experts keep insisting that the Plan couldn’t have raised levels more than an inch, but they’re obviously in the pay of Big Sandbag.
There’s minor flooding along the Otonabee River here in Peterborough, Ontario. Across the road from my work, Little Lake has overflowed the marina and is slowly covering the park. My boss said that the river is expected to rise a few more centimetres. This means that Lake Ontario has not yet received the peak of its waters…
It’s been a local story for a couple of weeks now. The biggest problem, from what I’ve heard, are places where the shoreline is eroding because the ground is not normally exposed to this much water. So people whose houses were twenty feet from the lake might look out one morning and see that their houses are now only ten feet from the lake because the intervening ground collapsed and washed away.