Inventing Niagra | Ginger Strand | Talks at Google

So welcome again to another Authors at Google program here in New York. We're really excited. We have Ginger Strand here with us today. She grew up in Texas, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan simultaneously. That's very difficult. I'm excited to hear how that happened. Her fiction essays have appeared in many places, including Harper's, the Believer, the Iowa Review, the Gettysburg Review, Raritan, and Orion, where she's a contributing editor. A former fellow in the Berman center for Humanities at Princeton, she has received residency grants from the McDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Virginia center for the Creative Arts, and the American Antiquarian Society.

Very cool.

She is a local here in New York City and today she'll be talking about Inventing Niagara, this awesome book that you guys should all have. This book basically combines history, reportage, personal narrative and traces Niagara's journey from the sublime icon to engineering marvel to camp spectacle. It's an awesome book. I've just recently started it and I'm definitely sharing all my fun facts about Niagara with all my friends, as you will as well. But I am not the expert. I will turn it over to Ginger. Shan, please help us welcome her.

Thanks for the executives in the room. They turn it off and on, so.

You'Re free to go.

That's the sort of summary of what I'm going to read today. I thought I would read from the.

Most kind of techie chapter in the book, which is called King of Power.

Queen of Beauty, which is a nickname for Niagara Falls.

And this is about the power development at the falls and some of my thoughts about it.

So I will just dive right in.

And I have slides to accompany it.

Because I just think that's more fun.

In the spring of 2006, I go.

See Niagara Falls get turned on for the tourist season. I drive for seven hours and get.

There a day early.

On March 31, I head straight for the Three Sisters to get close to the river.

I want to see what it looks.

Like before they crank it up. The best thing in New York's Niagara Falls State park. The three sisters form a mini archipelago off the side of Goat Island. Sitting in the rapids above the horseshoe fall, the three little islands are linked by picturesque stone bridges.

I put an arrow in so you could see where they were. Here in this Army Corps photo, I.

Stop on the bridge to the first Sister and look upstream at the Hermit's Cascade, a river ledge depicted on the island's interpretive marker as a surging mini Niagara. Today it's a few freshets splashing over a flaky slice of Rock. And there it is. Today, that's the same spot as the previous slide.

Things perk up on the second sister.

And by the third, the river's in a frenzy. Even at low water, the third sister.

Feels like what it is, a rocky outcropping in the middle of some of.

The world's roughest rapids.

Water rushes and swirls furiously around its edges.

It's loud. Just downstream, the river surges over the Horseshoe Fall and disappears. A misty abyss marks the spot.

I'm not alone. A middle aged couple, sneakered and stout.

Pick their way along the path. They regard the rapids with the dull.

Resignation of people beaten into subjection by miles of throughway.

Dutifully, they take turns posing for snapshots before the man approaches me.

Do you know where the really big waterfall is? He asks. See that mist over there? I say, pointing.

His face falls. The Horseshoe Fall. We saw that. His eyes go to the Canadian skyline. I thought there was a bigger waterfall. Come back tomorrow, I say.

Of course, it's an exaggeration to say that Niagara Falls is turned off and on for the tourists.

It's actually turned up for the tourists.

In the Niagara diversion treaty of 1950, the US and Canada agree to go halfsies on one of the world's largest.

Natural sources of hydroelectric power. They promised never to let fewer than.

50,000 cubic feet of water per second.

Go over the falls. And they double that minimum to 100,000.

Cubic feet per second, about half the.

Natural volume between 8am and 10pm April 1 to Sept. 15.

That's so that the 20 million or so tourists who flock to Niagara annually.

Most in the summer, don't all walk away wondering where the big fall went.

But that's unlikely. The man I meet on the third sister is unusual.

Most people are surprised to learn that.

Half to three quarters of Niagara's water.

Never goes over the falls.

Water diversions for hydropower are enormous, but.

Their effect on the scenery is limited by massive engineering projects that keep everything looking the same.

Even as most of the Niagara river is drawn off into four hydro tunnels and one canal. The waterfall spreads across basically the same crest line, looks the same depth and.

Shimmers with the same emerald green. The end result is an environment that.

Elides any conflict between landscape enjoyment and resource expenditure.

You see? It cheerfully declares, we can have our.

Lake and use it too.

I imagine the spring increase of water as a kind of local festival. They're turning the falls back up. I call the New York Power Authority.

With visions of electro geeks dialing up the water and watching it rip in a celebratory mood.

I found this picture online that represents sort of what I thought it might look like. Maybe champagne would be involved. Or pizza doughnuts, at the very least. On the phone, however, Joanne Wilmot, regional manager for community relations, assures me there's little fanfare around treaty implementation. What if I buy the pizza?

I ask. Joanne and I have arranged to meet at the Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant, a monster dam built into the face.

Of the Niagara Gorge, four and a.

Half miles downstream from the falls. The Moses plant produces, at top capacity, 2.4 million kilowatts of non stop electricity, 2.4 gigawatts.

The power vista, the authority's visitor center, is a huge sunny room suspended over the river.

At one end of the looming plant.

Kids scramble around its maze of displays while their parents try to explain electrons. The there's an outside deck, and when.

You go out onto it, the deep, low whir of turbines fills your ears. The air seems to buzz with voltage. Huge flocks of gulls wheel and scream.

Over the churning water at the dam's.

Base, where fish alive, dead or stunned from their trip through the turbines are pushed to the surface on outgoing currents. Across the river, the Canadian dam hulks like an opposing giant. It's impossible not to be odd.

Joanne has the friendly but cautious disposition.

Of a public relations person.

She seems especially eager to relieve me of my handbag.

She deposits it somewhere mysterious in the.

Back offices, then walks me to the.

Power Vista centerpiece, a vast miniature replica.

Of the region highlighting the authority's intakes.

Tunnels, generating stations, and reservoir. The falls in one corner are represented by an inch high clear plastic mold. Tiny white lights behind the plastic are meant to produce the illusion of frothy.

Water at the side of the miniature landscape.

Joanne introduces me to Norm Stessing, supervisor of Operations, the man in my mind who can dial up Niagara's deluge. He doesn't look like a power king. He looks like a Norm.

He's medium height, stocky but trim and.

Tanned, with even teeth and a quick, easy smile. His crisp shirt is tucked in perfectly.

Norm dives into explaining how his power plant works with the vigor of a high school physics teacher who really believes in those kids. Our generator capacity is 100,000 cubic feet.

Per second, he tells me, explaining the.

Treaty implementation that starts tomorrow, but during.

The day our stream share is about 50,000. Before I know it, we've launched into.

A heady conversation about turbine efficiency, pump.

Storage, voltage step ups, and price differentials.

Luckily, I've Read enough to have a basic understanding.

Because Norm pointing to the model switchyard.

And explaining how voltage gets there through.

A mile of underground tunnels is like a 12 year old boy who's been.

Given a really, really cool toy.

When Westinghouse and Tesla wired Niagara to Buffalo with alternating current in 1895, skeptics.

Were convinced it would fail. The switch was thrown in Buffalo in.

The dead of night in order to avoid public humiliation.

To almost everyone's surprise, it worked.

After that breakthrough, the electrification of America happened quickly. In 1910, 10% of American homes were wired for electricity. By 1930, 70% were.

It's easy to forget how radical a change electrification was. But if there's a main difference between our lives and those lived in Edith Wharton novels, it has less to do.

With carriages and corsets than it does with turbines and megawatts. Electrification automated industry, deskilled labor, industrialized agriculture.

Depopulated rural areas, invented suburbs and enabled.

A non literate mass media. Our fabulous modern lifestyle Chicken McNuggets to America's top model all began with electricity. The change was more than infrastructure.

It was a nationwide behavioral modification.

And it required re education. Americans had to be trained to stop fearing electricity and instead consume it, preferably.

At least to the companies who generated and sold kilowatts in large quantities. Major players, General Electric and Westinghouse quickly.

Decided to manufacture demand by inventing a.

Lot of nifty electric appliances.

Irons, refrigerators, toasters.

Just about anything done by hand or.

With gas, it turned out, could be.

Made electric and sold to consumers as easier. But first they had to get average Americans to adopt what they called the.

Wedge product, electric light, because it opened households to everything else. They had to sell the idea of electricity. And in this, Niagara was key.

The falls helped electricity get what marketing.

Consultants today call mind share.

Average folks had only a vague notion.

Of what electricity was, but they knew it was deadly. Thomas Edison had proven that in the 1880s. Striving to promote direct current over Tesla's.

Competing technology, Edison had famously staged roadshows meant to discredit alternating current by using.

It to electrocute dogs.

This can't have made people eager to.

Wire up their homes, especially those with pets.

Nor did it help that New York.

State quickly saw a great new use.

For high voltage, switching the murder penalty from hanging to electrocution.

In 1888, electricity really needed a spokes model.

And with Niagara's power push, the PR.

Campaign had its mascot. In the 1890s, as the falls were.

Being harnessed, a flood of articles About Niagara power hit newsstands. Harper's, Nature, Colliers, McCarthy, Kluwers, Blackwoods, Cassiers, all printed articles describing falls power projects and promoting the image of Niagara as unending bounty. Popular Science Monthly was typical.

People in general have the idea that.

Niagara water power is inexhaustible, they said, and so it probably is so far.

As human requirements go.

Niagara, promoters declared, would even free us from dirty coal, already understood to be non renewable. Compared with coal, hydroelectric turbines were cleaner.

Safer and easier to understand.

Constable water wheels writ large. A Buffalo real estate booklet bragged that.

Niagara created limitless power without consuming an.

Atom of the world's store of fuel, without destroying in the slightest degree the grandeur of the cataract. Go ahead and buy that toaster, the message ran.

We've discovered a source of endless clean energy. Or in this case, typewriter. You see a lot of these ads from this period. It's some sort of electric appliance with.

Niagara in the background.

Brown Niagara launched for real at the.

1901 World's Fair, the Pan American Exposition at Buffalo. The theme was Better living through Electrification. Visitors were ushered into an electric utopia featuring electric trolleys, rides, fountains and appliances. A working miniature power plant and row upon row of electric incubators holding live premature babies.

All of it lit by 200,000 incandescent bulbs. @ the center, and this is what you're seeing in this very early film.

Made by Thomas Edison was the Electric.

Tower, a skyscraper featuring a 74 foot.

Artificial waterfall lit by 94 searchlights. On top of the tower was.

Another searchlight trained on the real Niagara.

Falls. Lord Kelvin was quoted in the Literary Digest gleefully predicting the day when.

Men would turn Niagara off and on at.

Will. Here's what.

Happens. Gravity constantly draws water into hydraulic tunnel intakes located in the river above.

The falls in the.

Tunnels. And that would be here. This is the.

Falls. Right here. In the tunnels, the water travels underneath the city of Niagara Falls, paralleling the river's course for four and a half.

Miles. But the river drops not only in the 176 foot falls, but in the rapids above and below.

Them. By the time the diverted water.

Reaches the power plant's holding pool or forebay, it is about 300ft above the lower river. The higher head means the water spins the turbines with more pressure, generating more power than it would at the brink of the.

Falls. The process is duplicated on the Canadian.

Side. Not a great.

Slide. But this is the American power plant and.

Reservoir. Behind it, at the Moses plant's.

Forebay the water can flow down through the main penstocks where it spins the.

13 turbines and passes out into the lower Niagara.

River. Or it can be pumped 120ft.

Up through 12 two way pump generator turbines into the 1900 acre Lewiston.

Reservoir. The reservoir lets the power authority.

Collect water at night when tourists are sleeping and stream share is greater, and then use it for generation during daytime.

When power demand is up since electricity.

Deregulation. The reservoir also creates an opportunity.

To optimize financials as prices vary throughout the.

Day. The Lewiston plant can pump water into its reservoir during periods of low demand, then release water through the generator when demand is high. It's a perfect example of buy low, sell high. The authority spends cheap power to make expensive.

Power. All this is regulated by the.

Niagara River Control center, an arm of.

The International Joint Commission that manages the falls. Because rainfall, temperature and even wind.

Direction influence the water level in Lake.

Erie and thus how much water is.

Coming into Niagara Strait, River Control measures the river.

Hourly. As its volume varies. They calculate the amount each nation.

Can draw down and call the power facilities in the US the NYPA Energy Control center in Utica every hour to dictate their stream shares. So on April 1, Norm explains.

River Control will call Utica at 7am.

With a new stream share reduced by.

The amount required to let 100,000 cubic.

Feet per second go over the.

Falls. By 8, Utica will call Niagara.

And the workers in Norm's control room will sit down at their computers and.

Begin turning off reservoir.

Pumps. We had this long conversation I had in mind like a big switch. I wanted it to be a red switch and I wanted him to show me the switch. And he kept saying, no, no, it's just.

Computers. It's not that.

Interesting. So it doesn't sound as.

Good. Each.

Shutdown. This is impressive, though. Decreases the flow of water out.

Of the Fore Bay, thus decreasing the flow of water into the tunnels upstream.

From the river by 4,000 cubic feet per.

Second. That's about the flow of the Colorado.

River. When the water coming into the forebay equals the authority's stream share, the water going over the fall should be.

The amount required by.

Treaty. And the tourists should be oohing.

And ahhing at the sublime power of nature. You couldn't really turn off all of Niagara Falls, could you? I asked Norm, my enthusiasm for.

The brute strength getting the best of.

Me. If you and the Canadian plant both just sucked as much water as possible out of the river and ran it through your generators at top speed, we don't like to talk about it that way, he said, cracking an involuntary grin. But in fact, yes, we.

Could. The earliest power plants at Niagara quickly became tourist attractions to rival the falls.

Themselves. Designed by McKim, Mead & White.

Architects of the original Penn Station, the first two powerhouses and matching transformer building on the New York side were architecturally splendid. Once open, they offered guided.

Tours where visitors could observe the cleanliness.

Order and relative quiet of the plan. This is.

A postcard. People sent many, many postcards.

Of the interiors of the.

Power plants. The production of hydroelectricity wasn't like the noisy, dirty factories of the.

Industrial Revolution. Far from William Blake's dark, satanic mills, this was a sparkling industry for a gleaming.

New Age. Guidebooks declared the tour a.

Must see. Some visitors like the power plant more than.

The waterfall. After a 1906.

Visit, H.G. wells wrote, the dynamos and.

Turbines of the Niagara Falls Power Company impressed me far more than the Cave of.

The Winds. Wells was in agreement with Lord Kelvin. Niagara Falls would be better.

Turned off. It seems altogether well. He reported that all the.

Froth and hurry of Niagara at last, all of it dying into hungry canals of intakes, should rise again in light and power. Not.

Everyone agreed. Toward the end of Mack's Sennett's 1926 silent slapstick comedy Wandering Willies, this is a Keystone.

Cops comedy. The bad guy drops a piece of paper. The heroine picks it up, reads it and gasps in shock. She shows it to.

The hero. He too is appalled, and.

Together they race off after.

The villain. What did the.

Paper say? According to film lore, the.

Intertitle giving the paper's content was rewritten several times. One version had the heroine crying, he was stealing my diploma as winner of a.

Beauty contest. Another had her saying, this.

Proves he's president of the Kidnappers Corporation. The final intertitle was, look, a mortgage on Niagara Falls. We must stop it before he shuts off the water. Film critics used this to.

Illustrate the zany, nonsensical quality of Senate's Keystone.

Cop films. But in 1926, the notion of a land grabbing villain turning off.

The falls would not have read.

His nonsense. Controversy over water diversions raged throughout the late 19th and early 20th century and beginning almost immediately after the.

Niagara Reservation, America's first state park, was established.

In 1885. By 1889, four companies had been granted charters to take unlimited water.

From above the falls without compensating the state. The commissioners of the Niagara Reservation declared New York was pouring nature's splendor into the pockets of greedy robber Barons. A public outcry ensued. In Canada at this time, a grassroots movement had arisen demanding public takeover of the.

Power industry. June 1906 saw the birth.

Of the Hydroelectric Power Commission of Ontario, a publicly owned utility to manage province water resources. But in the US where.

Public utilities were seen as creeping communism.

The fight to save Niagara turned instead.

To limiting the rights of.

Private companies. Hearings.

Were held. General Electric declared that limiting.

Their water rights would deprive New Yorkers of jobs. They were just then undertaking.

A huge power and navigation project named.

After its originator, Love Canal, all to little avail. The public rallied to Niagara's cause and the 1909 International Boundary Waters.

Treaty granted power plants on the American side 20,000 cubic feet per second and.

Those on the Canadian side 36,000, little.

More than was already.

Being diverted. At some point in the 20th century, we convinced Canada to go havesies with us. And I don't know when that happened. I couldn't find.

That fact. The outcry had made it.

Clear that the public valued beauty. Understanding this, the power companies.

Got right to work before the ink was dry on the treaty. They wanted.

More water. And to get it, industry spin doctors hatched a sophisticated PR campaign. If they couldn't change people's.

Minds about the importance of scenic grandeur, they would reinterpret what that meant. And so they set out to convince the public that keeping Niagara pretty meant taking more water away. In 1918, John Lyell Harper, vice president and chief engineer of the.

Niagara Falls Power Company, wrote the Suicide.

Of the Horseshoe Fall, a little book arguing that because of heavy water flow, the falls were wearing themselves away into a string of.

Poultry rapids. In 1923, he built an.

Operating scale model of the falls and.

Used it to demonstrate how natural recession would inevitably ruin.

The cataract. The Army Corps of engineers agreed. In 1926, Secretary of Commerce.

Herbert Hoover reported that Army Corps surveys proved the falls were soon to become merely a turbulent rapids. The following year, the Buffalo Niagara and Eastern Power Corporation put out.

A pamphlet asking why is the Horseshoe Fall eating itself.

To ruin? The answer, according to the power company.

Was clear. There was too.

Much water.

Silly nature. Only bigger drawdowns could save.

The falls. Preservation now meant less water.

Exactly the opposite of what it meant 20.

Years earlier. Furthermore, the pamphlet declared, niagara benefited everyone by providing the cheap, dependable power needed for the many electrochemical products which are being manufactured at or near Niagara and bestowed upon mankind. This host of goodies was.

Also bestowing something else.

Upon mankind. A cataract of.

Toxic waste. The American Power Plant's first.

Customer was the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, later the aluminum.

Giant Alcoa. They were soon joined by dozens of other companies that were beginning.

To use electricity to catalyze chemical reactions, including Carborundum, Matheson, Alkali, Atchison, Graphite, Hooker Electrochemical and Union Carbide and carbon. By 1925, this was downtown.

Niagara Falls. It was a leading center for the production of abrasives, graphite and.

Graphite derivatives such as electrodes and anodes.

Dry cell batteries and a rang.

Of ferroalloys. It was also a major producer of sodium hydroxide, a caustic used.

In everything from soap making to petroleum refining. Sodium hydroxide production produces vast amounts of the byproduct chlorine, so Niagara Falls became the first municipality in the nation to chlorinate.

Its water. The region also led the.

Way in the invention of chlorinated chemicals, pesticides, plasticizers, fire retardants, chlorinated solvents, and.

Chlorinated organics like PCBs and Myrex, a.

Highly toxic flame retardant.

And insecticide. As industry ramped up and jobs multiplied, public distaste for water.

Diversions abated. During the Depression, in particular, interest in the area's natural beauty waned. The preservationists responded by focusing.

More and more narrowly on.

The waterfall. A 1931 report of the special International Niagara Board anatomized its aesthetic.

Value in painstaking detail, calculating how much.

Of its beauty depended on volume, width.

Height, clarity and color, going so far.

As to point out that the actual.

Volume of the waterfall was not critical.

To beauty, though the impression of.

Volume was. The report estimated how much water could be removed while maintaining the.

Emerald green. The seeming depth and velocity.

Charts, graphs and a special set of color chips were adduced. The theoretical transformation of Niagara.

From sublime natural wonder to engineering feat had begun. At the same time, the.

Dark undercurrents of cheap power were beginning to make.

Themselves known. The American riverbank was lined with.

Ugly factories. Disposing of electrochemical byproducts was an increasing problem, and in 1935, 20 workers filed suit against Alcoa. They were dying of the lung disease silicosis. At the power authority, I asked Norm Stessing how much electricity an average household.

Uses today. About 1,000 watts, he said. I asked if that number was on the rise. Norm and Joanne.

Nodded vigorously. I remember when it was 500 watts.

Joanne said. The US gets about 7% of its electricity.

From hydropower. Most people are surprised by that because hydro is still the smiling public face of electricity. The Power Authority has visitor centers at several hydro plants. There are no visitor centers at nuclear or coal burning plants. The largest nuclear power plants.

Today surpass Niagara's 4 1/2.

Gigawatt rating. That's combining the American and.

Canadian plants, and the largest coal fired plants are drawing near that. Yet in the northeast blackout.

Of 2003, a widely circulated rumor held that the massive loss of power resulted from a lightning strike at Niagara. When he told me this, Norm bristled as if personally offended. He did not, he declared, lose power for a single second. How much that helped was pretty clear. Even in.

The dark, it's easy.

To forget. It's easy for residential consumers.

To forget that electricity, 70% of which.

In this country comes from burning fossil.

Fuels, takes an environmental toll because we don't see the plants that make it. Our power arrives in the.

Socket clean and odorless, and even with recent price hikes, it's still relatively cheap. We may be turning down.

The heat and buying hybrid cars faster.

Than Toyota can make them, but conserving.

Electricity seems to have gone the way of macrame and.

Free love. Offices today are air conditioned to a meat locker chill. The Watt hungry tech sector.

Is building data centers that push local grids to the limit. I think this is maybe a Microsoft data center. And home use.

Is skyrocketing. The Wall Street Journal recently.

Ran an article on the super sizing.

Of home appliances with a picture of a fridge six.

Feet wide. What if we had to look at a waterless Niagara as a testament to our greed.

For Watts? Toward the end of the interview, I asked Norm if there are people who say we should turn off the falls completely. After all, compared to burning coal, hydro is relatively benign. If we can't conserve, shouldn't we maximize power's.

Cleanest sources? Norm and Joanne glanced at each other, and I sensed I had crossed the line into things the Power Authority didn't like.

To discuss. There are some people who say that, he said, but they're.

Not serious. With the coming of the Second World War, Niagara's booming factory district went into overdrive. From 1941-45, Hooker, Dupont, Union Carbide, Olin, Matheson and other local industries focused on war production. They added new products to.

Their output. Dodecyl mercaptan for making rubber, hexachloroethane used in smoke screens. Arsenic trichloride to make the war.

Gas Lewisite. Hooker opened the Niagara Falls.

Chemical Warfare plant, and several local industries.

Secretly contracted with the government to refine.

And roll uranium for the.

Manhattan Project. They kept this secret from.

Everyone, even the workers who were doing it. And that's a.

Separate chapter. Disposing of waste became an almost.

Intractable problem. Landfills popped.

Up everywhere. Some factories paid workers $50.

A drum to take waste home.

With them. Three chemical companies bought tracts of land along the Niagara river above.

The falls and began dumping waste along.

The riverbank. Fly.

By night. Haulers were hired to get rid of barrels as best they could. Every old timer will tell.

You the same stories, Local history librarian.

Maureen Fenney tells me at the Niagara Falls.

Public Library. Unmarked trucks coming in the middle of the night, dumping things in.

Empty lots. Far from being seen as.

A problem, waste was a sign.

Of prosperity. An article in the Saturday.

Evening post in October 1948 described the.

Chemical saturated haze which settles over the.

City when the air is heavy at Niagara. This toxic smog, the magazine assured us, is sniffed happily by the.

Industrially minded. Rather than trying to cut.

Back on waste, industry sought to ramp up production. For this, they needed more power. They got their wish in 1950 when the new diversion treaty.

Was signed. With the new treaty in place, Canada moved quickly to utilize its.

New water allowances, starting work on a new plant in the U.S. progress stalled.

With a bitter public debate over who would control.

Niagara power. Private power companies or Robert Moses. New York.

Power Authority. And I'm going to skip.

Over a big section about Robert Moses.

But the top line is he won, and it's not surprising. He then began building the.

Power plant that now exists at Niagara Falls and has.

His name. According.

To engineers. Whoops, that's a.

Little premature. According to engineers, once all.

The new power plants were up and running under the new treaty, the river.

Above the falls would drop by 4ft, the flow over the American falls would shrink to next to nothing, and even the great horseshoe would dwindle, its flanks going completely dry.

At times. And you see a little.

Bit of this starting even in this.

1950S postcard, where the left side of.

The horseshoe fall here, which is the.

American side of the Horseshoe, is thin.

Streams of water instead of a big.

Unbroken curtain. There were other problems as well. Ugly stretches of dewatered flats above Goat island and riverbanks exposed by.

Lowered water. Something had to be done. The U.S. army Corps of.

Engineers and the Hydroelectric Power Commission of Ontario got.

To work. Two working models of the falls were built, one by each nation.

And plans were drawn up for a massive engineering project to guarantee.

Niagara's splendor. The remediations done by the.

Corps of Engineers in Ontario Hydro are still.

In place. Today, unfortunately, this model is gone, but I just.

Love it. The most visible is the International Control Works in the river just.

Above the falls, a partial dam with.

18 sluice gates that open and close to enable precise changes in water flow.

Over the brink, directing more water to thinning areas and less to those that.

Look good. People looking at this dam often think that it must have to.

Do with power generation, but it's about nothing other than making the waterfall.

Look better. It can even control the.

Amount of spray, which the Canadians felt.

Was scaring tourists away from the scenic.

Tunnels at their Table Rock.

Visitor Center. So if there's a day.

When the spray is too heavy, they're.

Like, turn it down on.

That side. The Corps also built weirs, submerged dams upstream to raise the river.

Level above the falls and at the.

Edges of the horseshoe so that the water would spread out to the edges and create an unbroken curtain. Shore to shore, they excavated 94,000 cubic yards of rock from the flanks of the horseshoe, lowering the riverbed.

Four feet to encourage an unbroken.

Crest line. While they were at it, they blasted off overhangs, sealed and graded the earth at Prospect Point to make.

A natural feeling slope, and added the.

280 foot high prospect point.

Observation tower. They reshaped the American Riverbank.

With excavated earth and added eight and a half acres of land to Goat Island's eastern end, enough for a helicopter pad, parking lot, concession stand and roadway. By the time Robert Moses.

Cracked a bottle of champagne on his new power plant in 1961, engineers had.

Completely rebuilt Niagara Falls and it looked better.

Than ever. In 1958, as these remediations.

Were getting underway, it was reported that some local children who used the ditch near their school as a playground had been burned by a mysterious substances in what was called Hooker's Dump, or.

Love Canal. The never finished canal had.

Been used for years as an.

Unofficial landfill. Throughout the 40s and 50s.

Residents had seen trucks, sometimes dozens in a single day, pull up to the canal and dump mysterious barrels into the ditch. Neighborhood residents watched army personnel with sidearms and gas masks unloading drums into the canal. Caustic gases sometimes filled the air after dumping, and at night, spontaneous.

Explosions in the canal.

Were common. During this time, locals continued to use Love Canal as a swimming and fishing hole, at least until the fish died and the water began to burn their skin. After the war, Hooker sold this land to the city of Niagara Falls for $1. The city built a school.

On it. In November of 1964, Niagara.

Falls fire Chief Edwin Foster wrote a.

Letter to the city manager, he'd seen someone using construction equipment to cover something.

Fuming and noxious in the old Love.

Canal dump. Upon my arrival, he wrote, the area was permeated by the odor.

Of chemicals and fumes emitting from a pile of.

Chemical wastes. Foster was convinced it could.

Be a detriment to the health and well being of the residents. He suggested that the proper authorities be notified and remedial action be taken. The city declined to take remedial action. The state, when notified, also refused. But in 1966, more remedial action began on.

The waterfall. The army Corps engineers reduced.

The flow over the American Falls by.

3/4 to find ways to preserve the scenic splendor of the falls against the.

Ravages of erosion and rock slides. They drilled core samples and.

Inserted miniature cameras into the rock face.

And used sand blasting and water jets to.

Map fractures. In 1969, what you see.

Here, they turned the American Falls off completely to continue the work. With a coffer dam blocking.

The water, they installed sensors to detect.

Rock slippage and an alarm system to alert.

Park police. To impair impending rock falls.

They drove bolts into cracks in the.

Rock and braced up Goat and Luna.

Islands with dowels, cable tendons and drains to reduce.

Water pressure. In 1973, as more and.

More residents at Love Canal were fruitlessly.

Complaining about noxious odors and oily sludge leaking into their basements, the International Joint.

Commission distributed thousands of surveys to tourists asking how their viewing experiences of the falls might.

Be enhanced. They were offering the options of having the rocky talus, these rocks.

You see at the left here, removed.

From the base of the American Falls. Having the flow increased over.

The American Falls or having the water raised in the Maid of the Mist pool to hide the rubble. The fourth option, chosen by only 30% of respondents, was to.

Do nothing. Nothing is what they did.

At Love Canal until the situation.

Was desperate. Pesticides, chlorobenzenes and dioxin, among 82 identified chemicals, were leaking into nearby.

Basements and surfacing to contaminate playgrounds. Residents developed nervous and blood disorders and miscarriage and birth defect rates in the neighborhood rose to appalling levels. A baby was born with two rows of teeth. Another was born with.

Three ears. Finally, in 1978, a housewife.

Named Lois Gibbs began a door to door survey to prove that residents were sick and to insist the government take action. Her efforts made the plight.

Of the neighborhood's working class families a.

National issue, and the environmental justice movement was born. This is a house at.

Love Canal the story of Love Canal.

Is fairly well known and the struggle.

Is credited with creating Superfund, a federal.

Program organized to clean up the nation's worst toxic messes. EPA took Love Canal off the National Priorities List in 2004 and.

Now cites it as a positive example of regulatory driven cleanup. What isn't usually discussed is.

How throughout the 70s, as complaints about Love Canal reached higher and higher levels.

A government that was willing to spend.

Up to $10 million clearing away ugly rocks from the base of the falls fought tooth and nail against every dollar.

Spent evacuating a neighborhood that was killing.

Its residents. Love Canal was less than.

A mile from the.

Niagara River. The toxic brew was leaking into the river and going over the falls, but it couldn't be seen by the tourists. In 1979, as President Carter.

Finally declared Love Canal a federal disaster.

Area, the first man made federal disaster.

Area, and began evacuating the first of.

950 families. A psychic predicted that a rock slide at Terrapin Point, the American end of the Horseshoe seen here, would swamp the Maid of the Mist as it carried a boatload of deaf children. The area was closed, boreholes.

Were drilled and more meters were installed.

To give warning of imminent rock falls. Four years later, the Corps of Engineers blasted 25,000 tons of rock.

And removed 60 trees from the area.

Erecting a diversion dam to push water.

Away from the American end of.

The horseshoe. And this is their sketch. They filled in the sporadically watered flank with made land, carefully shaping and grading it into Terrapin Point. They built an 835 foot retaining wall to keep water off the point and create a new manufactured American edge for.

The waterfall. Combined with 100ft of fill on the Canadian side, these remedial works.

Eliminated 400ft of the horseshoe fall, including.

All of the waterfall that was in the United States. The iconic horseshoe now sits entirely.

In Canada. They stabilized what was left with rock bolts and re landscaped the spot. It all happened in less than half the time it took for.

Sick families to be moved from.

Love Canal. And there it is today, Terrapin Point. At the end of my visit for the spring treaty implementation, I drive out to.

Love Canal. I go east on Buffalo Avenue, where many of the chemical factories.

Once stood. I pass the massive complex of the Occidental Chemical Corporation, the folks who bought Hooker. I continue east. Street numbers go up and the houses.

Grow smaller. Eventually, I come to a.

Huge mesa raised in that telltale landfill form. Landscaped, fenced, barbed, wired and dotted with.

Exhaust pipes. Its fake mountain shape ominously.

Suggests a Landscape pregnant.

With monstrosity. How did we end up here? I think of Norm at his power plant proudly talking about turbine upgrades.

And H.G. wells rapturously describing Niagara dynamos as human will made visible. I think of my own.

Giddy thrill at the power vista hanging over the edge of the deck to admire the.

Massive penstocks. Who wouldn't be awed by.

The prospect of harnessing such a giant organic machine? Niagara full force is a fantastic.

Natural spectacle. Niagara turned off is another.

Kind of spectacle, just as fantastic and just as natural. Since we too are part of the natural world, somehow it's this in between Niagara, the harnessed waterfall pretending to be untouched. And that leads to this landscape.

Of disaster. Because if we don't admit that the things we do to make.

Our lifestyle possible even have a cost, how can we ever know when the price has become too high? At one end of Love.

Canal, the end they call Hooker, 102nd.

Street, there's a playground at the edge of the landfill. The jungle gym is shaped like a ship and topped by an.

American flag. I get out of my.

Car and walk over.

To it. A light rain is falling.

But the flag is flying high because.

It'S not an actual fabric flag. It's a fake flag made of stiff plastic. So it stands there, always.

Unfurled, always undulating in just the.

Right way. It's pointing in the direction of.

The falls. Thanks.

A lot. My question is what some of. Maybe if you came across sort of green initiatives that the, you know, that the falls are taking now, if that's, you know, consideration. I know I read an article several years ago in National Geographic about how all the dams have affected the Columbia river and the, you know, the salmon out there. Not that that's. I don't know, maybe it's a biological problem as well, but just some of those green initiatives, if you came across those sort.

Of issues. Yeah, there's a lot going.

On, actually. I mean, the New York.

Power Authority was recently relicensed by ferc, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. And they had to do a lot of environmental.

Impact studies. Particularly one of the biggest.

The biggest concerns are fish mortality and fish breeding upstream and downstream of.

The dams. And so they've done some things to try to mitigate those problems. But in the end, it's always going to be a trade off.

Because Niagara produces a lot of power and they're certainly not going to turn it off, you know, turn off the power plant. So they have to kind.

Of balance some of the environmental concerns.

Against some of the Power and electricity concerns because it is a relatively benign form.

Of power. There are also a lot.

Of things going on to clean up the toxic landscape of Niagara Falls. The Army Corps of Engineers is cleaning up there. They have 13 radioactively contaminated sites within the county that they're working on cleaning up. And there are a lot of super fun sites.

As well. So there's a lot.

Going on. And it was interesting to me how much of that was invisible.

To the tourists who came, because I find that a fascinating part of the.

Whole story. I grew up in the area, and there was always this rumor that Niagara Falls would change one day. I think they said once by the year 2000, it didn't happen. Now, I don't know, it's by 2050 that it would be converted to a cascading falls due to the erosion of.

The.

Crest. Right. And everyone in the community and in that region lamented that and said, oh, my God, a cascading falls. The Japanese tourists will.

Stop.

Coming. Right. That kind of thing. Is this, from what you've learned, is this a reality or. I know you touched on that. The erosion, the bolting. I didn't know they.

Did that. Yeah, they.

Did that. Does that prevent this or.

Is it still a possibility that it's hardly eroding.

At all? Okay. Yeah, I've heard a meter.

A year. It.

Used to. Now it erodes far less than that. And, you know, the water drawdowns are certainly helping that and also a lot of the bolting and shoring up that.

They'Ve done. That campaign that was originally begun by the power companies, it re emerged in the 1950s, headed up by.

This guy named Cliff Spieler, who was.

A reporter at the Niagara Gazette, which you're familiar with, if you grew up in the area. And he started this.

Whole campaign. We've got to save Niagara. We need to take out more water. And he later became the.

Head PR guy for the New York.

Power Authority. So there's a kind of.

A long history of the power company producing this anxiety and then assuaging it with.

Their.

Interventions. Yeah. And just seeing some of the slides you presented, I can see that if they really had to, if there was a catastrophic crumbling, it looks like they could rebuild it if.

They necessary. They probably.

Could. Yeah.

Thank you.

Sure. Thanks. What are some of the other waterfalls like, famous ones throughout the world that have you been able.

To visit? You know, I would love.

To go, and I'm going to mispronounce it embarrassingly, but I'd love to see.

The iguazu does anyone know how to say that in South America? Yeah, that's far bigger than.

Niagara and produces a lot more power. So that would be wonderful. There are taller waterfalls than Niagara in New York state. Catterskill Falls, 100 miles north of here is taller than Niagara, as is Tehanic Falls in Ithaca. But there are, you know, thin, shimmering waterfalls. Not big like giant powerful things.

Like Niagara. Something I've always been curious about, sort of a question about the falls in a totally different kind of power. Can you say something about how in the world the connection between Niagara Falls and honeymoons.

Get established?

Right, right. The connection that we now see in the naming of the drug.

Viagra, which is no mistake that it was named to rhyme with Niagara. You know, it's force, power.

You know. The honeymoon industry arose at.

The same time as the tourist trade in the U.S. the Americans began to travel around in the early 1800s when canals and things like that began to be built.

Later railroad. And they formed this version.

Of the European Grand Tour that was called the Northern Tour, where tourists went.

All around sites in Massachusetts and Canada.

And it culminated at.

Niagara Falls. And this was right about.

The same time that the so called bridal tour became a very popular thing for people to do. And so they just automatically went on what was then the most popular.

Tourist trip. And so that, then that connection was kind of kept being enforced because, you know, it makes us feel.

Like we have a unified national culture when we all do something together or when we all kind of have an experience together. And I think that's what kept people going to Niagara for their honeymoons. It's a way of kind of connecting to the.

American past. So the guy was saying that, you know, it'd become a cascading falls by 2050 or something like that, at least. I mean, what geologic event actually made this thing and how long ago was it, I mean, if it could in 50 years become a cascading falls. Is this a fairly.

Recent thing? You know, my geologic knowledge of the falls is not as good.

As it should be because it's a.

Part of, part of the story that.

Doesn'T fascinate me as much as the.

Cultural side. But I'll answer as best I can. It's a fairly.

Recent phenomenon. I think between 25 and 50,000 years ago the falls were formed.

And they were formed seven miles downstream.

At a place that's now called Lewiston on the American side and Queenston on the.

Canadian side. And they.

Moved up. But what, what contributed to this idea is that before any of the water.

Was diverted. And before people began to.

Change the hydrology, the falls actually did recess in a visible way. And it's partly because the layers of rocks at the top are.

Very hard, and then there are some.

Layers of rock underneath that.

Are soft. And so the pounding of.

The water kind of wears away this cave underneath the fall, and then eventually the.

Brink collapses. And so that kind of.

Made it swifter than just normal erosion would wear down rock. So there are interesting drawings.

That you can see where they show.

The crest line when they started mapping it in the early 1800s, and then up to the point where they more or less slowed almost to.

A halt. The erosion, it moves.

Back significantly. And there have been tragic rock falls at the.

Place periodically. Is it moving further toward the American side of the.

Canadian side? Well, the international border goes.

Right down the middle of the Niagara Strait, so it's moving towards Lake Erie, up from.

Lake Ontario, unfortunately, that is, we want to leave enough time for you to sign books, if you will. So, again, thank you very much for coming. That was awesome. And please, big round of applause.

For Ginger. Thanks.