Activists in Buffalo poured their hearts into resuscitating the Buffalo River, which was declared dead in 1967, willing it back to life. When they began their work more than 30 years ago, the river was thick with waste, depleted of oxygen, with sediments that tested positive for 100 chemical constituents.
The revitalization of the river took countless hours of sweat equity—and more than $100 million in public and private investments. Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper initiated an herculean clean-up effort, working with the Army Corps of Engineers, EPA, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and Honeywell to remove over a million cubic yards of toxic sediment laden with lead, mercury, and PCBs. The project also restored over two miles of shoreline. Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper also worked with hundreds of volunteers to remove invasive plants from the river’s banks, planting native shrubs and trees in their place.
Now, the once-dead river is on its way back, home to turtles, bass, perch — and people. Summer weekends bring eco-tourists, kayakers, and paddle boarders. This once abandoned riverfront is now thriving with new development and economic activity, estimated at nearly $200 million and growing.
But the river’s guardians are worried.
Like a person recovering from a grave disease, the Buffalo River remains fragile. The dedicated activists who labored to revive it know their decades of work could be undone by the Trump administration’s proposal to gut the Clean Water Act.
The administration’s proposal could strip federal protections from precipitation-fed ephemeral streams that flow into the river’s tributaries. The Buffalo River is fed by 312 miles of smaller waterways, some so small, they’re nameless.
When a waterway is contaminated, it’s essentially contagious — whether or not it’s big enough to name. Removing the Clean Water Act’s pollution prohibitions from these precipitation-fed waterways would leave polluters free to dump waste in them, waste that could travel to the Buffalo River. Upstream pollution, on a tributary of any size, will infect the healing river.
Just as the tributaries that flow to its small feeder streams are significant to the Buffalo River, the river itself, once forgotten and left for dead, is significant to the nation. Western New York, including the Buffalo and Niagara River watersheds, is a gateway to the Great Lakes, and 80 percent of North America’s fresh surface water flows through the region.
“The proposed rule is a threat to the health of our regional waterways and local economic recovery,” said Jill Jedlicka, Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper’s Executive Director and Waterkeeper. “Waterways in Western New York have struggled to recover from over a century’s worth of pollution and mismanagement. After 30 years of progress and hundreds of millions of dollars in restoration efforts of the Buffalo River, nearly 35 percent of its tributary source waters could lose federal protection. The rule that is being pushed will directly impact our community’s drinking water source areas. Even more concerning, the rule is not based on the accepted science or ecology of the very waters the Clean Water Act is supposed to protect.”
Thousands of people worked together to revive the Buffalo River. You can join them in working to protect it by submitting comments about the Trump administration’s proposal to gut the Clean Water Act below and by telling EPA to maintain vital stewardship of the Buffalo River and other vulnerable rivers that crisscross our nation, rivers that are the lifeblood of the places we call home. Raise your voice to defend our waters. #SaveTheCleanAct.