Hurry Up And Wait

Whitehall, New York
43 33.26 N 073 24.14 W


We are in the canal, but we can't go further south yet.  The limiting factor is the debris around the federal lock in Troy.   Maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after -- rumors about about when things will reopen.


The lockmaster here in Whitehall said that the dam at Erie Lock 9 in Rotterdam, NY is gone.  Not damaged but gone.  The river there has carved itself a new river bed.  


Up in Vermont, the next phase of recovery is to send an army of real estate laywers.  Huh?  How does that figure?  The story I read says that for 200 years the people of Vermont have been straightening the river beds for convenience.  For one thing that makes floods worse.  For another, after this event the rivers have reverted to their natural course.  That means that some homeowners not only lost their houses, but their land is now riverbed.  Right next door to them is dry land that was riverbed until Irene but who owns that land?  Modern concepts of real property are based on surveys and fixed coordinates, not variables like river frontage.


If they leave the rivers where they are today, there will be many losers and some winners in the real estate shuffle.  If they try to force the river straight again (probably unwise) the population of winners and losers will be shuffled.  Hence the army of lawyers.  It is enough to make one's head ache.


Today a flotilla of power boats arrived in Whitehall.  Those boats had all been on the Erie near Oswego when Irene hit.  They were thus able to detour around the damaged part of the Erie Canal, up to Oswego, on Lake Ontario, to The Saint Lawrence River, to The Richelieu River, to the Chambly Canal, to Lake Champlain, to the Champlain canal.  That means the detour path took 15 days to get here, probably 17 days to Waterford.  That compares to 2-3 days on the normal Erie Canal path.   So I say to all you Great Lakes boaters, "You can still get to the Atlantic but the detour will take two weeks longer than you planned on, sightseeing not inlcluded."