Earlier this week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed spending $300 million over the next five years to improve the historic Erie Canal. Some $135 million of this amount was earmarked to research recommendations made by the Reimagine Task Force, which dealt with mitigating floods, preventing invasive species, and restoring the canal’s ecosystem. Some of these recommendations could affect anyone cruising on the canal, including the great majority of people who are cruising on the Great Loop.
Completed in 1825, the Erie Canal connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, an enormous boon to economic growth at the time. It’s 363 miles long, running from Buffalo, on Lake Erie, to Albany, on the Hudson. It was 40 feet wide and four feet deep at the time, and it had a towpath, where mules and horses pulled barges, along the side; now, more than 1.5 million people now use the towpath every year.
The good news is that the state wants to improve the canal. The (potential) bad news is that some members of the Reimagine Task Force raised issues in their Report (see below) that could close the canal at spots or make water depth a problem for deep-draft cruising boats, forcing them to take the Champlain Canal to reach the St. Lawrence to get to the Great Lakes or complete the Loop. The Champlain Canal has lower overhead clearance than the Erie Canal; indeed, Champlain bridge C-28, a railroad bridge at mile 60, has only 17 feet of clearance at normal pool depth. These issues are not final; the Task Force Report says they are up for more research.
Specially, to prevent the migration of invasive species, some members of the task force proposed creating physical barriers in the canal in Rome, New York, which is east of the start of the Oswego Canal that many cruisers take to Lake Ontario. The Report said that the task force “came to the general consensus that ways of combatting invasive species merit further evaluation…including analysis of potential navigational impacts and associated costs and benefits.”
Some members also proposed changes in the Erie Canal’s infrastructure that would lower water levels to prevent flooding; this could result in navigation problems for deep-draft boats. The Report said that “how to best balance the goals of maximizing flood mitigation and maintain navigability for deep-draft (long-distance) boaters” would require further study.
All this will take a while to work itself out. Stay tuned.
http://www.canals.ny.gov/reimagine/TaskForceReport.pdf
