David Andreatta

@david_andreatta

Lest you doubt that we live in a post-truth world, try talking to people who live along the southern shore of Lake Ontario about the flood water.

Many of them blame Plan 2014, which regulates water levels in the lake and the St. Lawrence River and was designed to mimic fluctuations that would occur naturally had man never manipulated the waterways to suit himself.

Approved under the Obama administration, the plan allows water to rise a bit higher and a bit lower than what shoreline inhabitants are used to and stay that way longer.

Countless journalists on both sides of the lake have gone to great lengths to convey the best information about the cause of the rising water, which every expert agrees is the unusually high degree of precipitation and the early snow melt.

But lakeside dwellers around here don't want to hear it. They'd rather live in their own post-truth reality, where facts shape opinion less than emotion and personal beliefs.

No pencil-pushing expert in ecosystems and coastal health and hydropower production at some ivory tower university or some government agency is going to tell them anything other than what living on the water has taught them about the tides.

These lakeshore residents think their opinion carries as much or more weight than those of experts. Some of them have written to me, imploring me to report "the truth." They can't handle the truth. To them, someone or something must be to blame for the flooding.

If they want to lay blame, they should blame God, or Mother Nature, or The Force, or whatever they call the thing that makes it rain and hit 60 degrees in February.

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Neither Plan 2014 nor the agency that came up with it, the International Joint Commission, controls the weather. All the commission controls is a giant dam on the St. Lawrence that, if opened, could mitigate flooding on the lake.

But the water has to go somewhere and that somewhere is the river, where 2.5 million people live on islands — namely the cities of Montreal and Laval.

They're in a whole other country called Canada that nobody around here thinks about much. Hence the "international" in International Joint Commission.

It's rained a foot — 12.8 inches — in the Rochester region since March 1. That's a lot of rain. But consider that 13.8 inches fell on Montreal and Laval in that time.

What should the International Joint Commission do? Wash out a couple of major Canadian cities so Edgemere Drive residents can breathe easier? Get real.

Tens of thousands of people have already been evacuated in and around Montreal, and the news coverage out of there suggests few of them, if any, are pointing a finger at Plan 2014.

Feeding the post-truth reality of lakeside dwellers here are a handful of local politicians, from town supervisors to congress members, who find political theater in indulging their constituents' hysteria that the high water is man-made.

Local officials deserve credit for working hard to alleviate the flooding and making residents more comfortable by pumping water from streets and supplying sandbags.

But instead of joining the chorus of complaints about a plan devised and revised for years by people devoted to studying water systems, officials ought to seize on the frustration to turn the discussion toward making property and infrastructure more resilient to storms.

Many water-logged homes and streets were built too close to the shore for Mother Nature's comfort. Now who's uncomfortable?

Flooding has been a fact of lake living forever, and that's not going to change. In fact, with the world getting warmer flooding will only worsen.

Lakeshore residents should take the opportunity to better prepare for high water. They chose to live on the lake. They have only themselves to blame for that.

David Andreatta is a Democrat and Chronicle columnist. He can be reached at dandreatta@gannett.com.