Niagara Falls without water in 1969 | Hacker News Reader

Niagara Falls without water in 1969

niagarafrontier.com

175 pointshowrude55 comments

Along the Niagara river are massive inlet towers that hold the gates that manage the flow of water over the falls. Agreements with Canada mandate that at least 50% of the water goes over the falls during touristy times then at night they can divert more through the underground tunnels to generate power.

http://clui.org/ludb/site/niagara-power-station-intake

If you stay at one of the Canadian hotels near the horseshoe falls, you can tell the moment at night when they divert more water through to the power stations. The roar of the falls drops off quite dramatically.

I'm curious how much unharnessed energy that costs...

Side note: I always wonder what a site like this - something that may have been carefully hand-crafted/designed in something like MS FrontPage in 1999 - thinks about their sudden traffic spike from HN after years of solitude save for the occasional history buff or research student.

Fascinating story.

You're assuming they actually look at their traffic stats after all this time!

The page says last updated November 22, 2016...they might

It's even better when it has one of those really old-school 3 or 4 digit only counters.

Honestly, this site is nicer to use then many I use on a daily basis.

You mean it doesn't try to redirect you to a crippled mobile version of itself? Or hijack your scrolling?

If you head to the home page there's a tiny link right near the bottom linking to an article about the webmaster.

It appears he was a career police officer in the region who retired just shy of ten years ago!

And the site was indeed begun in 1999. I also certainly created stuff that looked like this in 1999. Those buttons on the home page would have made me proud of myself.

http://www.niagarafrontier.com/netdetective.jpg

I find the home page of this site very nostalgic. I love stumbling across these old sites that look the way the entire web looked back in the nineties. Hell, there's even a marquee made with the 'marquee' tag!

Unless it goes down, and even then they may never know. A lot of people don't get hourly updates on their traffic, or even ever check their logs, or know they have logs.

    <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 6.0">

What I'm wondering is if the webmaster is paying 100$/month for a dedicated server he got some 15 years ago. A lookup on the IP shows it is hosted at http://www.inmotionhosting.com/.

Niagara Falls/Buffalo native here. They're planning to do this in the next few years, and it should be exciting.

My dad remembers when this happened, and they let people climb all over the rocks once the water was off. People would bring back buckets and buckets of change that was stuck inside of the rocks.

Update: US isn't planning to do this until 2019 at the earliest. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/news/niagara-falls-wa...

11 000 years ago, the falls were almost 11 river-kilometers downstream from where they are now, as the falls began where the gorge now ends: at the Niagara Escarpment.

However, in the last 200 years as the falls became both a societal tourist attraction and a site of hydroelectric power generation, humans have elected to try to make the falls frozen in time as much as it's feasible for them to do so. Due to the diversion of water and various anti-erosion projects, the rate of erosion is now less than a third of what it was before 1905.

Actually closer to 1%.

http://www.niagarafrontier.com/faq.html

There are pictures at http://themindcircle.com/niagara-falls-runs-dry/ but this is the better article.

From your article "However, it may not be the last time we ever see Niagara Falls dewatered – two bridges present above the falls require replacement sin the near future, in which case it might be time to drain the water once more."

That would be very neat to see in person.

I've always liked this story...

http://www.niagarafrontier.com/fallsstopped.html

"A number of people made their way into the gorge to the riverbed. Here they saw articles that had been laying on the river's bottom and had been hidden for hundreds of years. Souvenirs picked up included bayonets, guns barrels, muskets, tomahawks and other artifacts of the War of 1812."

(Even though 36 years isn't hundreds of years.)

Are you thinking of the War of 1912 instead? If not, then hundreds is kinda correct.

No, the link in the post you replied to is about March 29th 1848 when a naturally occurring ice dam blocked the flow from Lake Erie into the Niagara River, which caused the falls to go dry.

So in that case it had only been 38 years since the war of 1812.

There is a color photo from this period on Wikipedia as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niagara_Falls#/media/File:Dryn...

The 1969 photos are from the smaller American Falls.

What the world knows as the Niagara Falls, is the Horseshoe Falls. Horseshoe Falls, also known as Canadian Falls, is the largest of the three waterfalls which collectively form Niagara Falls on the Niagara River along the Canada-US Border. Approximately 90% of the Niagara River, after diversions for hydropower generation, flows over Horseshoe Falls. The remaining 10% flows over American Falls and Bridal Veil falls. It is located between Terrapin Point on Goat Island in the US state of New York, and Table Rock in the Canadian province of Ontario. [source Wikipedia page]

Non-MediaViewer link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dryniagara.jpg

It never occurred to me that this could even be possible for such a giant waterfall until I saw this article awhile back. It's really neat to see. And a little scary we can have that much control over nature sometimes.

Do we still engage in these big projects? For example, around 1900 the flow of the Chicago River was reversed. I can't imagine a project like that happening today.

It wasn't even supposed to happen back then. They basically just did it before anyone could tell them no.

They are actually planning to shut off the falls again, soon: https://www.wired.com/2016/01/new-york-is-going-to-turn-off-...

Yes, for example the Chunnel was likely opened in your lifetime.

Also, the three gorges dam hydroelectric project.

Without such control over nature the country where I live would not even exist.

It's also the title of a book by John McPhee collecting three journalistic accounts of different attempts to protect human settlements against particular environmental threats ("with varying success", as Wikipedia puts it). Highly recommended!

Nederlands?

To varying extents, any country.

Yep. Switch off the pumps and I'll have beach front property (on the 1st floor).

It always amuses me when I come across the occasional "stupid tourist" story on the internet about Niagara Falls and visitors asking if they turn the falls off at night. It's always presented as, ha ha, idiots don't realize this is a natural phenomenon, not something you can just turn on and off. In fact, they turn it down (but not off) every night so that more electricity can be generated.

Not quite. It's to refill the Lewiston Reservoir (on the American side).

The Robert Moses Niagara Power Project runs at a deficit of water during the day once the morning really picks up and through peak hours into the evening. On a slightly longer timescale it also runs at an overall deficit during the workweek, drawing down water throughout the week until electricity use drops on the weekend. At that point it relies significantly less on the reservoir (and more on the forebay) and fills back up.

There are also 13 turbine generating units in RMNPP, while Lewiston pumped storage (the reservoir) has 12 much smaller (~1/10th the size) turbines as well. This allows quite a bit of flexibility in terms of output from what is a much larger power plant overall.

EDIT: Oh, and the reservoir was built on Native American land, which resulted in a Supreme Court case related to the Federal Power Act (I believe since it was treaty-breaking, can't quite recall) in case anyone is interested in that sort of thing.

Well, I didn’t say when the extra electricity generation happened!

But seriously, thank you for all the additional info, that’s really interesting.

Haha, no worries, and sorry if that came off as overly pedantic, I work in the broader industry and was still winding down from aggressively-reading-things-about-energy-mode.

Glad you found it interesting! One additional tidbit is that they have to keep the water level at the pools downstream of the intakes within 1.5ft +/- the historical mean. There's a bit more leeway than that over time, but they do typically hit the mark. It's quite the operation.

Not at all! I just thought it was funny that I was accidentally still correct even though I totally didn't mean it that way.

Why does the water level have to be controlled so precisely in those pools? Is there some technical reason or is it another tourism related thing like turning up the waterfall's flow during the day?

Yup, mostly tourism/maintenance of flows, downstream concerns, etc. It's drawn up in a treaty between the US and Canada, I think the International Joint Commission[1] is in charge/involved. The International Control Dam is the key structure[2].

[1] http://www.ijc.org/en_/inbc [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Control_Dam

EDIT: Also, there's the St. Lawrence Power Project[1] at the Moses-Saunders Power Dam[2]. A similar cooperation with very different design. New York has the most hydropower in the eastern half of the united states by quite a lot.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Moses-Saunders+Power+Dam,+...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses-Saunders_Power_Dam

I learned something cool on my last trip there, something like at least 50% of the water is diverted for power usage before it reaches the falls, so you're not even seeing them at full power. Though iirc this changes depending on the time of day and season.

It's worth noting that this is not Horseshoe Falls that most people think of when someone says Niagara Falls. The one that ran dry is American Falls.

Interesting note though, the Horseshoe falls did run dry naturally during the winter of 1848 [1]. High winds on Lake Erie pushed ice into the mouth of the Niagara River, eventually resulting in an ice jam that blocked the flow of water into the river and stopped both falls.

[1] http://www.niagarafrontier.com/fallsstopped.html

For a complete history of the falls, including many more obscure stories and details of the de-watering and reconstruction, see Ginger Strand's book:

http://gingerstrand.com/niagara_book.htm

As a kid i recall seeing dump trucks on the American side.

I have to see if i have any 35mm slides.

Now everyone has a camera to document every little change. How times change.

Off-topic, but: is there a name for sites/finds like these?

I'm not quite sure what to call them, but these kinds of web 1.0 pages with primary or secondary sources tend to do really well on HN. Obviously because they have interesting information, but maybe because they give the impression of being a hidden gem? Like a weird-smelling laminated book in the corner of your library, or listening to your grandpa talk about something that happened before you.

The internet used to be a cool way to discover these kinds of pages, sorts of relics of history of all types of neato media.

"Web 1.0" is now synonymous with earnestness. Earnestness is the one thing that people are craving right now, and it's nearly impossible to find anymore, from friendships to politics to writing to business.

David Foster Wallace would be relieved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Sincerity

Also this good video essay on DFW, irony, and postmodernism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2doZROwdte4

I second this.

Perhaps, in a way, "saudade"?

"saudade" (Portuguese) - a deep, nostalgic, and melancholic longing for something or someone, often accompanied with a denied fact the what one longs for will never come back;

For some of us, it could also simply be homesickness.

The modern Internet is structured for the transmission and retransmission of constantly novel content. Even a site like HN which isn't necessarily optimized for content throughput is subordinate to this structure. It's just a content aggregator with a particular community huddled around the firehose.

The old Internet was connected so that people could move between content; now it's for content to move between people-- or from industrial-scale content generation to people.

I certainly wander far less on the web than I did in my childhood. Everything is bigger, faster, more impersonal, and constantly changing. It's different; not necessarily better or worse. Maybe the old Internet still exists and I've just forgotten how to get to it?

That's my hot take anyway.

A deep web for web 1.0 would be a cool project to work on!

This search engine was mentioned a few days ago on HN: https://wiby.me/

This is a fantastic site! I've already spent far more time than I should have clicking on "Surprise me..." and discovering something interesting.

If anyone knows of any other interesting Web 1.0 sites, please submit them to wiby.me

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