Niagara: A History of the Falls (52 page)

An instantaneous drop in power generation at the big Niagara plants was followed by a rapid buildup that threw the generators out of phase. That caused the breakdown of the New York State transmission system. In effect, the grid had ceased to operate as a pool and was cut into sections. Within minutes, even seconds, the domino effect had forced other hydro plants as well as steam plants to shut down.

In New York City the following morning, weary transit workers walked every foot of the 720-mile subway system to make sure that no one had fallen on the tracks or been incapacitated by injuries. For many New Yorkers, walking was a new experience. Some had trudged thirty blocks or more to get home the night before or descended an equal number of flights of stairs to escape the darkened skyscrapers.

For the first time many people began to realize the extent of the electrical revolution. It was only sixty-nine years since Niagara Falls power had begun to propel the Buffalo streetcars. Since that day, every house had become an electrical machine, and when the power went off, the machine ran down; as the Robins family discovered, everything from TV sets to food mixers stopped functioning.

In spite of the $100-million damage bill for business, the great blackout was no more than a minor glitch in a world attuned to and dazzled by scientific progress. Its chief legacy, and a sobering one, was its demonstration, in the most graphic manner possible, of the utter vulnerability of the modern urban human animal.

3
Drying up the Falls

By the early sixties, the mayor of Niagara Falls, New York, had become seriously concerned about the condition of the American cataract. His city was losing tourists to the Canadian side because not only were the Horseshoe Falls more spectacular but they had also undergone a series of improvements that made them more accessible for viewing.

In 1954, an international control structure had been built out from the Canadian shore one mile above the Horseshoe to replace an earlier underwater weir. Its chief purpose was to hold back the flow of the river so that enough water could be diverted into the upstream tunnels on both sides to feed the Beck and Moses generating stations. But it also controlled the crest of the Horseshoe, allowing the water to spread out to an evener and more picturesque line than in the past.

The following year a great deal of remedial work had been undertaken on both flanks of the Horseshoe by U.S. and Canadian engineers. The riverbed below the old site of Table Rock was cleared of debris and filled in to provide better space for viewing the great Falls. Directly opposite, on the eastern flank of the Horseshoe, an area at Terrapin Point had been drained and back-filled to create another large viewing space.

While the enhanced Horseshoe Falls became an even greater attraction, the smaller cataract on the American side was further diminished by nature itself. Since the big rock slide of 1931, a series of lesser slides had dumped tens of thousands of tons of talus below the American Falls as the cataract continued its slow but relentless movement upriver. The rocks that tumbled from the Horseshoe, producing its notch-shape, dropped into the 200-foot-deep plunge pool below and vanished. But the smaller cataract did not have the force required to remove the talus or the depth of water below to hide it.

The greatest rock fall of all, in 1954, had virtually obliterated Prospect Point and also torn a wedge-shaped section out of the cataract. Prospect Point had lost its glamour, and the view of the Horseshoe from Terrapin Point had been diminished, too. By equalizing the outflow of water over the Horseshoe’s crest, the engineers had reduced the amount gushing over the flanks, especially on the American side near the site of the old Terrapin Tower.

The original Cave of the Winds, where tourists in waterproof clothing had ventured behind the sheet of the Luna Falls, was no more. With constant erosion threatening another disaster, the famous site had been blasted away. The name remained, and visitors continued to go down by the elevator that led to the base of the Luna, or Bridal Veil, Falls. There they threaded their way along the catwalks, drenched by a furious blast of spray. It was still an exciting adventure, but not as thrilling as it had once been.

The worst problem was the talus, a mountain of debris growing higher with every rock-fall and blocking off the view of the American cataract. Everything from baseball-sized stones to huge boulders the size of a house lay in heaps outward for fifty feet from the precipice over which the water flowed.

The Falls here were 182 feet high, but in certain spots the mound of talus had accumulated to a height of 100 feet. Every time a prominent feature collapsed, the cataract was further obscured. Photographs taken at the turn of the century show it in all its glory. By the mid-sixties, at least half of it was hidden by the rubble. If the process were allowed to continue, nature would eventually transform the American Falls into a series of tumbling rapids threading their way through a labyrinth of broken rock. Although that calamity belonged to the distant future, the city fathers and the business community could see the Falls already diminishing before their eyes, and they didn’t like what they saw.

They were convinced that something must be done. Mankind had already “conquered” the Falls, stolen half the water for power, improved the crest-line of the Horseshoe; now, once again, nature would have to do mankind’s bidding. With the help of the Niagara Falls
Gazette
, the mayor launched a campaign to involve both state and federal governments in a gigantic project to clear away the debris. Specifically, the city council asked for “remedial action to prevent further erosion and rock slides, which are endangering tourists and sending them to Canada to view the already stabilized Horseshoe Falls.”

With the approval of the International Joint Commission and with partial funding from Ontario Hydro and the New York State Power Authority, U.S. army engineers carried out, in the summer of 1969, “the most exciting challenge in the history of Niagara Falls.” They drained the American Falls dry. Half a mile above the cataract, in the channel between Goat Island and the American shore, the engineers built a massive cofferdam of earth and rock fill. It wasn’t an easy job. The channel at this point was 600 feet wide, and the current raced through at more than thirty miles an hour. When the dam was about three-quarters finished and the channel narrowed to a width of 140 feet, the pressure became so powerful that a six-foot section of the dam was torn out overnight. To circumvent the current, the engineers brought in huge quarter-ton boulders and dumped them in the gap. Then they added truckloads of earth taken from the great excavations that had accompanied the building of the Robert Moses powerplant.

By June 10, the curtain of water over the precipice had thinned from a flow of 6,000 cubic feet a second to 500. The roar of the cataract was muffled; bare spots appeared in the channel above the Falls. The next day, all the water was diverted around Goat Island to the Horseshoe. By the following morning, the American channel would be dry.

What lay behind that silver sheet of water, foam, and spray? Thousands waited up all night to find out. Dawn broke to reveal a withered escarpment in all its nakedness – a brown and jagged cliff, riven with cracks and fissures and scarred by two vast wounds made when the rock falls of 1931 and 1954 were ripped from the precipice. Three hundred thousand tons of debris lay heaped at the base.

Halfway up that great rock-fall lay the broken body of a young man; at its base, where a few rivulets still trickled, was the corpse of a young woman – both apparently suicides. Gulls in great clouds, shrieking like banshees, swirled and dived over the dead channel, feasting on the fish that lay flopping in small pools beneath the cliff. Coins flung into the seething waters for good luck glittered among the pebbles in the damp sand of the riverbed. The engineers collected twelve quarts of these.

To the crowds gawking at the unaccustomed spectacle, the sandwich of sedimentary rocks was clearly visible: eighty feet of hard Lockport dolostone surmounting sixty-one feet of softer Rochester shale and below that more layers of other shales and sandstone. The softer shales were already drying out in the hot June sunlight; they would have to be kept wet to prevent their flaking off. A temporary network of pipes drew water from the river above the dam to keep the strata wet until the engineers could install a system of powerful sprays in the rock face itself. On the islands that dotted the dried channel, the poplar trees, too, had to be regularly watered.

The purpose of this expensive and unwieldy operation was to try to find a solution to the problem of the mountain of talus obscuring the view. How much was there? Could it be moved? How deep did it go before it reached the floor of the river? And what, exactly, was causing the harder dolostone caps to break off in dangerous and spectacular rock slides?

The army and its geologists had just five months in which to study the area by drilling into the rock. Once the freeze-up began in late November, the cataract would have to be turned on again. Until that time there would be no American Falls, only the great pock-marked cliff, its rim edged by saw-toothed indentations. Some merchants had worried that the experiment would harm the tourist business. On the contrary, it provided a much-needed boost. That summer, local business almost doubled as people poured in to view one of the great wonders of the world tamed by the hand of man. To accommodate these spectators, the army built flights of wooden steps that led down from Prospect Point to link up with an eighty-foot boardwalk, five feet wide, out on the dry riverbed.

Over the five-month period, the army engineers removed dozens of drill cores taken from borings made in the face of the precipice and in the dry riverbed behind the Falls. Two cages were suspended over the cliff on cables hung from a fifty-foot crane. Workmen in one cage used crowbars to remove any scale or loose rocks that might fall on the drillers. In the second cage, a group of geologists oversaw a meticulous foot-by-foot examination of the rock. Workmen sprayed and sandblasted the ancient riverbed upstream from the cliff, scouring out sand and silt to expose the entire 1,100-foot crest for a distance of 400 feet upriver.

The drilling crews arrived after them and faced the delicate task of boring three-inch test holes in the riverbed and in the cliff face. The cores – totalling a mile in length – had to be in mint condition when they were withdrawn. Special miniature cameras were then dropped down these test holes to gain a better idea of the rock structure.

It soon became apparent from the drilling that this friable cliff was a labyrinth of passageways through which the waters of the river constantly seeped, freezing and thawing over the seasons, expanding the cracks and weakening the shales. The seepage extended under Goat Island and, indeed, was visible to the workers, who could see small jets of water shooting from the cliff face.

In one place, near Prospect Point, the drillers lost both their drill and their rock core in a vast cavity at the forty-foot level. They poured black dye into the hole and waited. Ten minutes and thirty seconds later, the dye emerged in three places thirty feet farther down the cliff. This was added proof that water was percolating through the hard cap of dolostone and into the softer shales.

The entire area was honeycombed with these vertical clefts. Small wonder that so much of Prospect Point had fallen into the river! A wide fissure, one hundred feet deep, had already partially detached a chunk of what was left of the point from the main mass. The crack in the cliff grew appreciably wider as the work progressed, indicating that this would be the site of the next major rock-fall. But when it would be, nobody could tell. It might come at any moment. It might not come for decades. The engineers were taking no chances. An elaborate system of warning sensors had been installed at the outset to give the workmen time to escape, and no workman was allowed to operate below any of the overhangs. Fortunately, nothing untoward occurred.

The geologists made another surprising discovery. The great heap of broken rock that was blocking the view of the Falls was actually acting as a buffer, propping up the crumbling cliff. If it were removed, there was no knowing what would happen.

By fall, nature had begun to blur the edges of the dry riverbed. A tomato plant was discovered growing out of one of the cracks, bearing ten green tomatoes. Carp continued to flop about in the shallow ponds caused by the inexorable seepage. Small poplar seedlings had sprouted in some of the holes.

All this was swept away on November 25, 1969, when the work ended. At 10:43 that morning, a huge crane on top of the cofferdam gnawed a cavity in the wall of earth and rock. Water began to trickle through the gap and pour over the grey, misshapen rocks, to plunge into the gorge below. Within a day the American Falls were back in business.

When the American Falls International Board studying the results of the survey finally delivered its report in February 1972, it was clear that the new conservation movement that had begun in the sixties had affected its decisions. “It is better to allow the process of natural change to continue uninterrupted rather than to give permanence to a particular condition and appearance,” the commissioners wrote.

The cycle of erosion and recession should not be interrupted, the report said. The mountain of rubble at the base – 280,000 cubic yards – was “a dynamic part of the natural condition of the Falls.” It would be wrong, the commissioners declared, “to make the Falls static and unnatural, like an artificial waterfall in a garden or a park, however grand the scale.”

The report admitted that the enormous forces of nature might “eventually convert the waterfall into a steeply sloping cascade.” But the board added that it had another aspect to consider: “that the visibility of the immense forces at work on the Falls … is an important part of the dramatic effect, and that any attempt to conceal and interrupt these forces might remove from the scene some element of aesthetic appreciation.”