High winds, high water, lots of hot air: Facts and fiction about Lake Ontario's Plan 2014

Show Caption Hide Caption Lake level fact check Why did the water rise so high on Lake Ontario this spring. We examine a few of the explanations that are floating about.

From the time the first big waves started slamming the Lake Ontario shoreline in March, south shore residents have been shouting the same refrain across the water:

The lake is too damned high, and it's the International Joint Commission's damned fault, or at the very least it's somebody's fault.

It's difficult to find someone who lives along the Lake Ontario shoreline here who doesn't espouse some form of this belief — from those dealing with the day-to-day of putting out sandbags and pumping out their basements, first floors and yards, to local government officials who vent their anger in press releases and well-publicized public appearances.

More: Residents on edge over Lake Ontario shore damage

U.S. Rep. Christopher Collins, R-Clarence, blamed the flooding on "environmentalists who care more about cattails and beavers than about western New York homeowners."

He's called for the joint U.S./Canada agency that oversees the lake levels — the IJC —to ditch Plan 2014, a regulatory guide that went into effect in January 2017, scant months before the lake rose to its highest level in recorded history. With the plan allowing for marginally higher and lower lake levels than its predecessor plan, it was immediately suspect.

More: U.S. Rep. Chris Collins wants to nix Plan 2014

Politicians have turned the IJC into a political football, punting it from one end of the lake to the other. Shoreline interest groups have churned out one claim after another intended to prove the regulators' ineptitude and to refute the experts' contention that we should just blame it on the rain.

Their persistent attempts to place blame for the high water on the international body have, for some, an underlying purpose — if the IJC is at fault, they can be made to pay damages.

The village of Sodus in Wayne County and the town of Greece and Monroe County have threatened a lawsuit against the treaty organization. There's an online petition (It has about 8,000 signatures, far short of the 100,000 that would trigger a response of some kind from the White House) asking President Donald Trump to take action against the IJC.

Even Gov. Andrew Cuomo chimed in, stridently calling out the IJC for not taking moving quickly enough to prevent the flood waters.

And that was the last straw in one senatorial office in Ottawa where Senator Bob Runciman, a Conservative member of the upper house of the Canadian Parliament, said Cuomo and others were “fear-mongering,” and singled New York's governor out for what he called “playing the blame game and spreading falsehoods.”

More: Cross-border skirmish: Canadian senator knocks Cuomo for lake-level rhetoric

One person's falsehood, though, is another person's pet peeve. Cut off one head of the ever-shifting explanations for why the waters are seeping into yards, gouging away the shoreline and smashing the boulders designed to hold the lake back, and two more wild theories sprout.

Plan 2014 was designed to hurt us. The IJC should have lowered the lake last fall to make room for a rainy spring. They should have lowered it in March. They should have shut down Niagara Falls. We've had years with more rain and no flooding, so it must be the IJC.

But repeating these assertions don't make them so. The Democrat and Chronicle has looked in every collection of data, every claim, every theory and wild accusation it could find — and none of them seem to hold much if any water.

In fact, three months after high water on the lake first began to bedevil property owners, there still is no proof whatsoever that the fault lies anywhere other than with nature.

More: High water on Lake Ontario: Who's to blame?

How nature? First, record-setting rainfall through the region this spring. Underlying that, though, was high water in the other Great Lakes, especially Lake Erie, which flows unimpeded into Lake Ontario.

The two combined to fill our Great Lake with more water than it could handle.

Editorial: Editorial: Stop blaming the International Joint Commission

But wasn’t there something that could have been done to prevent it, or blunt the impact? Politicians and shoreline residents say yes. They’ve advanced numerous explanations how.

You can decide if they’re right.

Claim: The water level in Lake Ontario was unusually high last summer and the IJC didn’t release extra water to account for it. That set the stage for this spring’s floods.

Fact: This was the claim that Gov. Cuomo made in what he called “one of the nastiest letters I’ve ever sent.” He got a lot of applause when he mentioned it during a visit to Greece.

But Cuomo’s nastygram to the IJC was at least partly off-base. It cited a 2016 IJC news release that predicted the lake level would be above normal in the latter half of the year. The governor's letter argued the IJC committed a "blunder" by failing to lower the lake level in response. But his letter betrays a lack of understanding of how lake levels are regulated and, furthermore, reveals a lack of research: Cuomo's staff failed to check readily available data that would have shown the lake level was at or below average all summer long.

Claim: The water level in Lake Ontario was unusually high last fall. That set the stage for this spring’s floods.

Fact: This persistent argument is wrong, for the same reason as the one above.

The lake level was a bit low last fall, not high — one to two inches lower than the long-term average. If you rank the last 99 autumns from highest water to lowest, the autumn of 2016 was 65th.

As the IJC politely pointed out to Cuomo in a rebuttal sent to him last week, there’s a relatively simple explanation for the state of the lake last summer and fall: One of the worst droughts in upstate New York history. The lake level was above-average in the spring but fell steadily when the rain spigot was turned off in June.

Claim: They should have paid attention to the long-term weather forecasts for a wet spring and let extra water out of the lake.

Fact: We could find no record of any reputable group forecasting heavy rain this spring well in advance. Not even the Old Farmer's Almanac made such a prediction.

But even if there had been one, the IJC’s experts would have ignored it. “Almost all long-range (2-3 month) forecasts are so inaccurate that the Board has found taking even small actions in advance ends up causing more harm than good. This is especially true for predicting late winter/spring conditions,” said Frank Sciremammano, a Brighton engineer who is a long-time member of the appointed IJC board that implements the lake-level rules. “And if we get it wrong, someone else complains, either that the water is too low (boaters), the water is too high (riparians), or we are hurting the environment by moderating extremes.

“So, in simple terms, it is impossible to anticipate levels with enough accuracy, well enough in advance, to take action, especially in fall. We have found through experience that we harm other interests when we try and rarely achieve what was intended.”

Claim: Forecast or not, they should have let more water out last fall. The lake level should always be lowered in the autumn to leave extra room in case heavy rain occurs the following spring.

Fact: As the IJC told Cuomo, this is a gamble regulators cannot and will not take. “The board must consider the risk of future conditions being extremely dry as well as the risk that they will be extremely wet.”

To take this gamble annually would require managing the lake almost exclusively for the benefit of a select group — people and businesses that own property on the lake shoreline. Other users of the lake and river — boaters, anglers, commercial shippers, hydropower producers and the hundreds of thousands of people who live and work along the St. Lawrence — would be disadvantaged if the lake went super-low each fall. Such a move would require renegotiating the long-standing agreement between the United States and Canada that requires regulators to balance the interests of all groups under most circumstances.

But even if it were done, it wouldn’t make all that much difference. An IJC study in 2006 found that regulating the lake for the sole benefit of shoreline property owners would reduce their expected annual damages by about $500,000, while socking recreational boating with a $5.5 million annual loss and the hydropower industry with a $4 million annual loss.

“There wasn’t much additional benefit … if you just looked at the one interest group,” IJC Spokesman Frank Bevacqua said. “The bottom line is because of the vagaries of nature, even trying to regulate the lake for one single interest, you could not avoid major flooding events.”

Claim: Once Plan 2014 went into effect in January, the lake level shot right up. They did it on purpose. They should have let out more water then.

Fact: The lake level was above normal in January and February. But the IJC says there were good reasons why the lake rose about 1 ½ feet in January and February and another 6 inches in March. Those reasons had nothing to do with Plan 2014 or with any intent to keep the lake higher than usual for this time of year, they say.

First and foremost, the lake rose this past winter for a most basic and unavoidable reason — Lake Erie had a lot of water. Remember your geography: All the water from the three largest Great Lakes — Superior, Michigan and Huron — winds up in Lake Erie. And all the water in Lake Erie goes down the Niagara River and into Lake Ontario.

And Lake Erie had been above-normal since the summer of 2015.

The impact on Lake Ontario wasn’t noticeable during the last half of 2016 because the drought in upstate New York disguised it, according to Keith Koralewski, a hydrologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Buffalo who advises the IJC. When the drought ended in the fall, the effects of the extra Erie water became evident. This abundance of water from Lake Erie accounted for 1 ½ feet of the two-foot rise early this year, he said.

The other six inches were due to problems forming ice cover on the upper St. Lawrence. The lake outflow is reduced early each winter to slow the velocity of the water, which promotes formation of a solid ice cover and helps prevent ice damming and floods. Once ice cover is established, outflow can ramp up again. But the IJC said warm spells kept melting the ice cover last winter, forcing them to reduce flow five times to establish the cover. Two of these occasions were in March.

Koralewski said the issues with ice-cover formation was a function of warm winter weather and had nothing to do with the introduction of Plan 2014.

Even still, the two-foot rise in the latter part of winter was not unduly alarming to the folks who oversee lake-level regulation. At the end of February it was 10 ½ inches above the long-term average for that date, and at the end of March it was closer to 11 inches above average.

But those levels were almost exactly the same as they’d been a year earlier. Old Plan 1958DD, new Plan 2014 — same levels.

Claim: There was a period in March, after this ice-cover business was over and before the spring rains started, when more water could have been discharged.

Fact: There appears to be a grain of truth here, though it had very little impact on the lake level.

Cuomo and others have asserted the IJC failed to release enough water when they had a chance to after the ice-cover reductions had ended.

It's worth remembering that the lake levels in March 2016 were almost identical to the levels this March, and a comparison is instructive. Indeed, data show that over the last two weeks of March, the total outflow from the lake this year was about 8 percent less than it was last year.

Koralewski said the regulatory plans dictated the outflow changes, with the old plan calling the shots last year and Plan 2014 governing outflows this year. Sciremammano, the IJC board member, said the levels weren't alarming enough that the board intervened to release more water last year, and likely would have been hands-off this year as well.

And that 8 percent decline sounds worse than it was. Short-term changes in outflow don't have much impact. The lake rose 1.1 inches in those two weeks last year. It rose 1.2 inches in that period this year.

That’s a difference equal to the thickness of a nickel.

Claim: Why didn’t they just close the dam on the Niagara River and hold back some of that Erie water?

Fact: Ain’t no such thing. There is a dam that extends halfway across the Niagara upstream of the eponymous falls, but it serves to control the amount of water that’s diverted to the huge hydroelectric plants there. All that hydro water is deposited back in the river and winds up in Lake Ontario, though.

Claim: The IJC board could have released more water during the spring as our flooding worsened. They still could be releasing more.

Fact: As the Democrat and Chronicle has reported, the same storms that dumped ultra-heavy rain on the Lake Ontario basin also hit along the St. Lawrence River. Flooding in and around Montreal was the worst in more than two decades. The IJC has insisted that it was unable to release more water from Lake Ontario in April and May because to do so would have exacerbated this dreadful flooding. Though shoreline residents here have complained about this, none of them have presented any data to contradict the IJC approach.

Claim: There have been other years in which just as much rain has fallen in the spring, such as 2011 and 1996, yet the lake didn’t flood then. This proves the IJC mismanaged the lake level this year.

Fact: It’s correct there were (slightly) rainier years but that doesn’t tell the whole tale.The newsletter of the Lake Ontario Riparian Alliance recently presented a cogent, detailed comparison of 2017 and 2011, so let’s use that as an example.

The group gathered March 20 - May 30 rainfall data for six cities in the region in 2011 and this year. Rainfall was heavy in both springs, but averaged an inch more in 2011, LORA reported

Yet the lake rose 26 inches in 2011 and 33 ½ inches this year, LORA found. “Something is very wrong with IJC’s story …” the newsletter concluded.

Mismanagement? No. Incomplete data? Yes. The LORA analysis didn’t have a full set of precipitation numbers and didn't take into account the volume of water entering Lake Ontario from Lake Erie.

The Corps of Engineers provided figures on what they call the total net supply — water entering the lake via direct precipitation and flow from local rivers and creeks, which is analogous to rainfall. The total net supply captures rain and snowmelt in the entire Lake Ontario basin, not just a few cities. That basin is 24,720 square miles, with 13,500 square miles in New York, 11,200 square miles in the province of Ontario and 100 square miles in Pennsylvania.

The Corps figures show that total net supply was a bit higher in the spring of 2011, as LORA said. (That's because March 2011 was super-wet; the total net supply in April and May of this year were higher and were, in fact, the highest two-month total on record.)

Remember, though, it's not just rainfall. Roughly 75 percent of Lake Ontario's water comes from Lake Erie — and the amount of water flowing in from Erie was 15 percent greater this spring than in 2011. That explains why the lake rose more this year than six years hence.

Claim: Plan 2014 was deliberately designed to inflict financial pain on residents of Lake Ontario. Regulators knew the changes would make lakeshore property owners more susceptible to property damages, especially along the south shore.

Fact: There's a grain of truth here, but the answer is complicated.

Plan 2014 documentation says coastal damages along the lake would occur regardless of regulation plans, although “more often than not, Plan 2014 would increase damages compared” to the previous Plan 1958DD.

But, the complicated part is that any plan — even Plan 2014 — still provides substantial protection to property owners, as compared to purely natural conditions.

With Plan 2014 in place, lake property owners should expect an estimated $20 million in annual damages, according to IJC documents. But, Plan 1958DD estimated $18 million in annual damage along the 712-mile shore of Lake Ontario. That's a difference of about $2 million, with the bulk of that cost due to wear on shoreline protections like riprap, breakwalls and revetments.

The IJC does acknowledge that due to geology, land use and development patterns, the lake’s south shore is “uniquely vulnerable to occasional higher waters,” and will likely bear the brunt of the change in cost.

Still, without any plan at all, if the lake were in a natural state, estimated damages would be about $45.5 million annually.

Plan 2014 still provides about $25 million in annual protection.

Claim: The IJC worked a deal with the companies like the New York Power Authority that operate hydroelectric power plants on the St. Lawrence to keep the water high so they can make more money.

Fact: It's true the IJC estimated the power authority and its Canadian counterpart would average $4.3 million more a year in revenue from the slightly higher water expected under Plan 2014. But the plant operators certainly don’t like the water as high as it is now; it could damage their plants and they don't even have the capacity to use all of it. And is a couple of million dollars annually enough to persuade the $2.5 billion-a-year New York Power Authority to enter into an international conspiracy?

More: Flooding hits hundreds of properties along Lake Ontario

Claim: If the board still had its power to control the outflow, they would have fixed this.

Fact: Under the old rules, the board had the authority at times to deviate from the regulatory plan and release more water (or less) than the plan specified. This ability was scaled back, though not eliminated, under Plan 2014. However, IJC officials insist the old rules wouldn't have allowed the board to do anything different to stave off the flooding that's occurred this year. Sciremammano of Brighton, the longest-serving U.S. member of that board and no fan of Plan 2014, generally agrees that is the case.

Claim: The IJC released 1.3 trillion gallons less water from the lake from November through May than it did the previous year.

Fact: This assertion from Greece town supervisor Bill Reilich sounds powerful. That’s an awful lot of water. The figures he provided seem carefully compiled and the assertion is true as far as it goes. The reduction from one November-May period to the next was about 4 percent.

We’ve already touched on the explanations for this, though.

A run-through of Reilich's data shows the difference in outflow was in November, March and April. Remember, in November 2015 the lake level was above average due to the influence of surging Lake Erie, so releases into the St. Lawrence were greater than were needed a year later.

In March of this year, the outflow was lower than a year earlier due to the ice-cover formation and perhaps the impact of Plan 2014, as noted above. In April, of course, they were lower because of flooding in Montreal.

Note: Do you have a Plan 2014 claim you want us to fact check? Email: watchdog@democratandchronicle.com or comment on Facebook.

SORR@Gannett.com

MCDERMOT@Gannett.com