Buffalo Rising Online

Mar 9th 2008, 11:31am By Sandra Williams Gordon

This is the third post in a series about the Buffalo Niagara Riverkeeper organization, and an interview with Executive Director, Julie O'Neill.

SWG: The water, the river, the lakes are resources that we seem to finally have a chance to reclaim. Big industry is not the driving force of that system anymore, but there is an important history and heritage here in Western New York. Do you think that not enough people recognize that? Or they think that it is beyond our capacity?

JO: I think that over time because we stopped working on our waterfront, as we stopped being a shipping port, that kind of work, and because we demolished the fishing shacks to put in a highway, we lost a lot of our maritime culture. And also because we really let our waters become polluted and we caused a lot of major fish species to go extinct, we lost the culture of being a water-based community.

So our big challenge over the next couple of years is re-connecting people with water. Last year we started doing some waterfront tours. Actually putting people in canoes and kayaks and taking them out to the rivers and parks, because there are a lot of really good assets that good people in City Hall, in Erie County, up in Niagara County have all been putting in some really wonderful park and trail systems but not enough people know about them.

SWG: RK did some great canoe trips up the Scajaquada last summer. I think that we, as a city, forget that we have this great natural and historic resource right in our own back yard.

JO: It is a wonderful and interesting area; even the mouth of the Scajauada is so amazing! It was one of the important Naval yards in the history of the war of 1812, the place of our last stand before Buffalo was burned to the ground. Here. And here. It is one of the last historical sites of the Seneca Indian Nation. It is a rich creek and used to be such a more beautiful place

There are so many rich, globally ecological resources in the Niagara River, and most of us are totally oblivious of that fact. And so most of us don't treat this place as special, we don't realize that we live next to the ecological equivalent of the Grand Canyon, or the Great Barrier Reef. It is that important, it is that significant. When you look at the Earth from outer space you can find us in a second because these two lakes come together and kiss right at that beautiful Grand Island. That is where we live, and yet we don't think of ourselves at being at a hugely uniquely place. It is really that remarkable.

SWG: One of the things that attracted me to Black Rock and that I still love is watching kids take their fishing poles and tackle boxes down to the river, or canal or maybe even Squaw Island to fish. You just don't get a chance to see that in many places anymore. I know from experience, in going with other friends and families to the Adirondacks and going fishing, that the Dads don't know how to teach their kids how to fish, and so my husband has to show them. Where to find worms, how to bait a hook, how to cast.

JO: But a lot of people have never done it before, they don't know how to put a worm on a hook, or they haven't done it in a long time, so you don't know where to get your bait, or how to do it, so there is a cultural thing there about how we literally teach this community to fish, in a proverbial sense.

There's that saying if you give a person a fish, you feed them for a meal. But if you teach a person to fish, you feed them for a lifetime, but no one knows how to fish anymore!!! There are some wonderful angling organizations that we partner with that help to maintain that connection but they are an increasingly small group. So part of this is really connecting people with the water. We've missed that. We've lost that.

SWG: What can the community do to help protect and take care of our water?

JO: As River keepers, we can stop telling our leadership to Just Do Something with the waterfront. Not that we don't want to do something with our waterfront, but we need to tell them to do the right thing for our waterfront. We need to tell them to take care of our water, to conserve the water. They should place cleaning up our sewer system and planting native plants and protecting habitat high on the list, because that is how we are going to keep our water.

It is not just about building waterfront condos, which would be great, and is part of the equation but it is also about taking care of the water itself, which too often we give this blanket mandate to our leaders and then they just do whatever is the first proposal because they want to make us happy. I believe that the elected officials want to make their constituents happy; I think that we have just given them an incomplete mandate of what that means. So both providing access, doing economical development and doing the Greenway is important, but taking care of the water as one of the absolute thresholds of things that we need to do.

We can do a lot more to minimize the amount of water that we are losing through the system. A lot of the way that we are developing right now is causing the water to run out of the great lake system much faster than it would historically, so keeping pavement to a minimum means that more water is making its way into the ground so that it can really benefit the system and be around a long time. And, of course, interacting with the whole climate change piece. Protecting our water is vitally important.

It is a really exciting time right now between doing the water conservation which is connected with the Greenway, which means that when you do a Greenway you don't just pave the waterfront so that people can drive their cars as quickly as possible so that they get a water's edge view. You have to make sure that you manage the water's edge so that it takes care of the lake and the water itself.

Bass Pro- it has taken a long time to find the right location for Bass Pro, and every single mention that we do is directly related with people actually using the water, touching it, fishing it, getting in it, swimming it, boating, canoeing, kayaking, that should be our highest priority. So that we claim our water.

The second thing is to just get out and come down to the river. And if you don't know how to do that, contact us a call, we'll have a tour, we'll connect you with someone who can actually get you using the river, because the more that people use the river, the more our own connection as a city to this river will be repaired we don't need to develop a single other park for people to be connected. We have good bones in place now we just have to use them.

If we really believe that our waterfront is one of our most important resources, then we should all be investing along Niagara Street, because that is the waterfront! And it has trails and it has parks and it has biking and it has parking and it has highway access, and we don't have to do any major changes to enjoy that! We just have to invest along Niagara Street. So if someone wants to invest in the waterfront, this is the easiest place to do it, right now!

SWG: Do you feel like citizens of Buffalo have become complacent in handing over blanket power to those officials we elected instead of being involved in grassroots organizations or keeping the elected officials informed of what we want to do, to choose, because that requires that we are aware and responsible ourselves?

JO: I think that a couple of things have happened. First, people have just gotten busy with work, family, responsibilities, etc., so that people don't have as much time to do community activism work as they have in the past, but that doesn't mean that we don't still need that work to continue. If that is your situation I really encourage people to support or help out a non-profit even if it is just to say that "I support your work" because those numbers are important when we go and talk to elected officials. They need to know that we are not just a handful of 20 people who believe in this work, they need to know that this is a sentiment of the community. So even if someone joined an organization, made a donation of even $5, that makes a difference, which gives them a voice.

Our role is changing. Our ability to accept volunteers and get them involved and have the good work for them to do is changing because we are much younger than the American Red Cross, or the YMCA or any of those other groups and we are just getting better at helping people to help us. I think it is exciting because we are growing in a way that we can involve more people who want to help the river, such as the River Watch program, where we train people to monitor the water ways.

That is hugely important because it allows you to watch one section of the waterway and how it changes over a year, or over time so that you really understand what is happening in that place. Doing those projects, building rain gardens, doing all of those things are ways that people can be involved.

SWG: What is a Rain Garden?

JO: Part of a solution that we see as a WNY water conservation is a Rain Garden. Instead of sending our rainwater into the sewers as if it is trash, you can create a space in your yard or in a parking lot or roadway to hold the water, and use it for a garden or to provide water for vegetation. That means that we are taking that water out of the sewer system and we are not paying to pipe and convey and treat all of this water, so it is simple enough. During a rain event, over a 12 hour period, the water will soak into the soil, that will also help clear it of pollutants and replenish our waterways. And not only does it take water out of the sewer system, it can actually stifle mosquito populations. The mosquitoes will lay their eggs, the water will drain through, and the eggs will not mature. It is a really interesting technology.

Did you know that 30% of household water usage is used in watering your garden!! Using Rain gardens, and or rain barrels, you are using FREE water. Those of us with $700 base rate water fees, which is a $210 Savings/ ROI in the first year! And then there is our water barrel project. We hope to make available 1000 water barrels this year. You can't find or buy a water barrel in Buffalo. But with some help from some foundations, we are working on that as an important community project.

And then to do things around our homes that minimize our impact on the water.

SWG: What would that be?

JO: Little things like if you have downspouts that run into the city sewer system, you can disconnect those and put in a rain barrel. If enough of us will do that, we can really reduce the amount of sewage running into the river on a rainy day. You can use that water for watering your plants, washing the windows, and it will actually go into the ground where it will recharge the lakes. When water goes through the sewers, it does nothing but pollute the waters.

Using Low water efficient appliances and fixture in your house, like efficient toilets and showerheads. Fixing water leaks, not watering your lawn so that it runs off into the street.

Going to the car wash instead of washing your car at home, where all of your oil, all of the muck runs off into the sewer system.

Big things, associated with how we develop, such as instead of repaving our streets, uncovering our brick streets because brick streets allow all of the water to go into the ground. Or having permeable pavement.

Building burms, for all of our mini malls. We should be developing depressed areas where the rainwater can collect and drain into the ground, instead of swishing it off to the sewers. Really simple stuff, but dramatically different from what we've been doing.

Some people may think that this is beyond us, but there are 3 or 4 major infrastructure things that went in over the past year. Niagara University did a Green Roof. That holds the water, doesn't send it into the sewer system and provides a lot of insulation value. We've also helped with a residential Green roof for a landscape architect up in Tonawanda, Fox Tires put in a green roof this past year. Erie county and the WNY Storm Water Coalition did several rain garden demonstration projects. Buff State, the new Burchfield Penny and Nichols are planning parking lots that either have underground storage for their rainwater instead of sending off into the sewers system, or are planning pervious pavers that allow the rainwater to soak into the ground.

And so we have a very big mission and we need to build an organization that is able to deal with these myriads of issues. We continue to grow to fill the need, because there is a lot that is needed.

So we are ready. It is just a different way of thinking, a different technology of taking care of our water. One of the benefits of not having taken care of this earlier is that now we can learn from all of the other places in the country that have done this and see what has worked and what has failed. We can do things so much more efficiently now that other people were able to do in the past. And at much much less cost.

Part of the opportunity of having so much disinvestment in this community is that we can now put in systems to take care of the water. We can use vacant land to hold water instead of running it through the storm drains. We could turn part of our brown fields into wetland restoration, there are so many options for us at this point in time, that if we were a high property value city, we wouldn't be able to do these things, it would be cost prohibitive. So we get to do really innovative things to take care of our water. It is an exciting time.

A rich source to find out more about the Buffalo Niagara Riverkeeper and the many other projects that they are involved in, visit Riverkeeper.

Buffalo Niagara Riverkeeper 1250 Niagara Street, Buffalo, NY 14213

716-852-7843