What About Safety?
First, we want to be clear that those of us involved in Stop the Canal ClearCut live in the communities that are around the raised embankments of the Canal. We absolutely do NOT want to put our friends, neighbors, and community at risk. We also want to protect the value of the Canal to our communities, and for many Canal trail users and Canal-reliant businesses, that means preserving the natural values of the canal -- natural scenery, the presence of birds and other animals that use the wooded corridors as habitat, the cool, quiet sanctuary that the path provides in highly human-impacted environments. So why do we think the natural vegetation can and should be preserved when the Canal Corporation is adamant that it should be removed?
The Guidance for Earthen Dams is Based on a Lack of Understanding of Plant Ecology
The primary document that the Canal Corporation bases its assertion that "trees do not belong on earthen dams" is the FEMA publication "Technical Manual for Dam Owners" The entire publication can be found on the Scientific References page of this site, but we insert a few key screenshots here.
The first clue that this document lacked input from plant biologists and ecologists is this eye-popping statement, that the well-established fact that tree roots do, in fact stabilize soil, is a "myth" and that roots in fact "destabilize soil". Where did this statement come from?
This is also from the FEMA manual and is very similar -- included here to show similarity to the Canal Corporation's EIS document.
The list of references for this statement is surprisingly short, consisting of a textbook on plant anatomy and a few University of Georgia Cooperative Extension publications that are no longer available in print. This is in contrast to the literally hundreds of peer-reviewed, easily available papers that have established the value of roots -- especially larger tree roots -- in maintaining the stability of earthen slopes. It is very puzzling why the key recommendation of this important manual relies on a very poorly supported assertion like this.
We of course pointed out to the Canal Corporation that this assertion in the FEMA manual was highly questionable and deserved further investigation -- especially when the stakes of removing trees from the Canal embankments for the surrounding communities are so high. But instead of consulting other experts, the Environmental Impact Statement (screenshot above) simply repeats the assertion from FEMA without question.
The earthen Canal Embankments are not engineered dams
The first 12 pages of the Embankment Maintenance Manual are essentially a long argument that yes, they are. We disagree for a number of reasons -- the primary being that a dam is build perpendicular to flowing water; these embankments are built parallel to the "flow" of the canal. But regardless, even if you accept this premise, it is clear from the the structure of the embankments and the engineering documents of the time that they are not made of compacted earth the way a dam that creates a reservoir is. They are piles of dirt, whose stability may, in fact, depend on the roots that form a dense network within them.
We think it is more accurate to consider the Canal embankments as part of a unique, historic, linear park system and make decisions about how to maintain these embankments with that understanding.
In one of the first sections of the EIS, the Canal Corporation -- now administered by the New York Power Authority -- refers to the embankments as a "capital asset." Not a park, not a recreation site, not a historic structure. This is a useful illustration of why the NYPA might be the wrong organization to manage this unique system. But also note in the second paragraph that the EIS authors state that the canal embankments were not built to modern engineering standards. The fact that these embankments have maintained their integrity for 200 years (well, really 100, if we date it from the widening of the canal in the early 20th century) is an indication that TREES ON THE EMBANKMENTS HAVE NOT BEEN A PROBLEM. Rather than preserve and study these unique structures, the Canal Corporation seeks to destroy a functional structure to (sort of) recreate an engineered structure that never existed.
Dam and canal breaches in the past have occurred almost exclusively because of engineered structures, NOT vegetation; and the fact that the Canal Corporation misleads on this point is meant to stop public discussion and debate.
The screenshot above also warns us about individual dam failure histories written about by various authors. We argue that this is simply fear-mongering at this point. The first author cited, Sharpe, wrote about the Mill River Flood of 1874 -- a dam failure caused by cutting corners when the dam was built in 1864, risks that surveyors and construction workers working on the project protested at the time. The second author, McCullough, wrote about the famous Johnstown Flood, which was caused when members of the local Fish and Game club lowered the dam level and interfered with the discharge pipes. And the report by Foster et al. is a review of all known dam failures -- of which very few are known to be even associated with vegetation (this report is available on our Scientific References page).
In the 100 year history of the Barge Canal there is no documented case of a breach caused by vegetation. The breaches that have occurred were caused by failures of human built structures or direct human activity. Removing all of the woody vegetation to prevent something that has never happened in the history of the Canal, and which is nearly undocumented and seemingly extremely rare in the history of earthen dams, is a huge overreaction to a tiny risk -- an overreaction that will significantly degrade the quality of the canal.
Here, the EIS cites a series of costly emergency repairs as evidence that all of the trees along the raised embankments should be cut. We note that the first listed is a failure of built infrastructure. The second is two emergency repairs made at the height of the initial controversy over tree cutting, repairs on sections that were not identified in their own report as emergencies and ones we suspected at the time would later be used as evidence of the need for this project. Hmmmmmm.
Anyway, the repair in Perinton was on a section that did not have tree cover, abuts a wetland, and which is STILL ACTIVELY SEEPING (see video at right) -- indicating that the Canal Corporation cannot explain how the embankments work currently. (We don't know anything about the case in Booneville, along a feeder canal)
Closures in 2021 include a breach at a man-made aqueduct in Macedon that delayed Canal opening, and an "emergency leak repair" in Brockport on a section without woody vegetation.
Video from the site of the spring 2018 emergency seepage repair in Perinton, NY, recorded July 11, 2021. Water is still flowing from the seep and the light color is soil eroding from inside the embankment, despite a $1 million sheet pile installation "repair."
We note that there is NO indication that there is ongoing monitoring of this issue. No water collection devices, not even a safe path to inspect the site. Just a few faded tape flags, probably from the initial survey in 2017, mark the site.
Perinton seep 7.11.21.mp4The EIS is embarrassingly unscientific
This statement is on page 3-64 of the Environmental Impact Statement. The idea that if habitat is destroyed "animals will just move elsewhere" is just... incredibly silly. That this nonsensical statement is memorialized in a supposedly serious scientific document about the environmental impacts of an action, produced for the NYS government, is really shocking That the reference for this statement is a study about how degraded habitat is not something that wild species can successfully use is just embarrassing.