NFTA aims to fortify shore against lake’s ruinous surges
The Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority is learning that Lake Erie is a considerable force to be reckoned with.
After two vicious storms in late 2008 wiped out about half of its landscaping and trail work on the outer harbor’s $13.2 million Greenway Nature Trail, the NFTA is hoping to strengthen its defenses against the power of the lake.
The agency has applied for a $2.6 million grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to reinforce the shoreline around the Bell Slip, preserve it as a waterfront attraction and enhance its potential as a fish and wildlife refuge.
“Mother Nature has a habit of getting her way,” said NFTA spokesman C. Douglas Hartmayer. “And sometimes what she wants is not what we want.”
Two seiche events — in which powerful westerly winds pile up water at the lake’s eastern end — occurred in September and December of last year. They resulted in the freshwater “tidal waves” that have occasionally ravaged Lake Erie’s Buffalo shoreline over the centuries, even with the presence of the outer harbor’s breakwater.
Indeed, 78 people drowned Oct. 18, 1844, when a 14-foot-high seiche inundated the Buffalo waterfront.
Although a Lake Erie seiche is rare, the timing of two within three months could not have proved worse for outer harbor plans. Just months after a grand opening event of the trail last September, about 500 feet of the shoreline around the Bell Slip now is littered with debris and the steel mesh that held down compost and plantings — all ripped away by the powerful waves.
“In September, the water rose and literally pulled the mulch and compost off the plantings,” said Kim Minkel, the NFTA’s director of health, safety and environmental quality. “Then, in December, we had the perfect storm — another seiche.
“The concern is that if we don’t stop the erosion, we’re going to lose this bike path.”
It all sent authority planners, who hope that the Greenway Nature Trail will someday be a major waterfront attraction, back to the drawing board. They’re hoping that the oceanic and atmospheric agency will approve their grant application as early as this month, allowing installation of tons of reinforcing rock along 1,920 feet of the interior of the Bell Slip (an inlet named for the test hovercraft that Bell Aircraft Corp. once housed there) and around its mouth.
The NFTA hopes that the new rock will stabilize the shoreline, allowing it to plant more trees and aquatic plants along the shore, including 160 willow shoots in the slip itself. That is expected to encourage more fish breeding, including the monstrous muskellunge that are denizens of the area.
It ranks as a vast improvement from just a year ago, when old tires and other debris left over from decades of neglect littered the shoreline, Minkel said. Now workers must return for some “tweaking” against the power of the lake.
“The storms necessitated about $400,000 or $500,000 worth of work,” Minkel said. “The rest is all planned as part of Phase 2 of the project.”
The Greenway Nature Trail, also called the Greenbelt, stretches 6,400 feet along the outer harbor shoreline from the former Pier Restaurant to the Terminal B building of Buffalo’s old port. It then connects to the existing bike path along Fuhrmann Boulevard.
It’s all part of 120 acres of NFTA land that was artificially created with soil dredged from the outer harbor from the mid- 19th century until the mid- 1960s. But the soil was contaminated from heavy industry that once existed along the waterfront, along with municipal ash and construction debris.
In 2002, the state Department of Environmental Conservation provided $12.1 million to the NFTA for a cleanup project, with additional funding secured by Rep. Brian Higgins, D-Buffalo, through federal highway programs.
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