Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the Buffalo River was an industrial wasteland. Up and down its banks were plants owned by companies like Allied Chemical and Republic Steel. These pumped out pollutants without much hindrance, setting the river\u2019s course toward disaster.<\/p>\n
The effects of all the industrial waste and the apathy that let it course through the currents of the meandering Buffalo River were substantial. Thermal pollution was rampant and waters in the river were near 100 degrees Fahrenheit year round. Add to this the oil slicks and all the cancer-causing guck that was amassing in the river\u2019s sediments and it\u2019s easy to see why wildlife didn\u2019t want to make a home there.<\/p>\n
But given the right actions and regulations, along with precise research into what the river needed, the Buffalo River has made a rebound. This is the story of its redemption, with a focus on the turning point that began the slow march to bringing the river back from its catastrophic environmental state.<\/p>\n
It begins with the realization that the river really was in a poor condition, that something needed to be done about it and a look at some of the first steps taken to help turn around its health. It goes on to highlight a more recent investigation that reveals how the river is doing in the present day.<\/p>\n
Well before the famous Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969, the Buffalo River had burned something fierce. But there wasn\u2019t the same amount of media coverage for the event — why?<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was the original industrial river that caught on fire, but the Cuyahoga (River) gets more press. It was because the oil slicks caught on fire,\u201d said Bob Baier, executive director of the Industry\/University Center for Biosurfaces at the University at Buffalo. \u201cI had the interesting eye of being a young environmental scientist those days, sampling the oil slicks and (occasionally) pulling up dead bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n
The river that exists today is far different than the one Baier encountered when he was just starting out as a researcher. And so is the technology that is used to monitor the river. Back in the late \u201860s and early \u201870s, many of the devices that environmental scientists depend on today simply didn\u2019t exist yet. This meant that Baier, who was working at the Cornell Aeronautical Lab at the time, had to invent tools to get the job done.<\/p>\n
The big problem was all the oil. Slick after slick everywhere along the river, and it just kept coming. Baier told us stories of children who would go swimming in the water only to come back with rings of oil clinging to their skin. And another detailing how the currents carried oil downstream to a local yacht club where it adhered to all the rich people\u2019s boats. <\/p>\n
That may or may not have been one of the reasons that then-Congressman Jack Kemp would begin working with federal agencies to get funding for cleaning up the waterway. But his efforts and those of others amidst the growth of the environmental movement would draw more attention to polluted waterways like the Buffalo River along the way toward important milestones like the Federal Water Pollution Control Act and the formation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. <\/p>\n
It was amidst this growing support for environmentalism that Baier and others set out to study the usefulness of oil skimmers that could help to clean up the river, or at very least keep the quantities of oil flowing in from becoming too burdensome.<\/p>\n
Back then, there were no oil dispersants, like the kind used after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. And so the invention of compounds that could whip the stuff up into collectable globs would become a milestone discovery of the period, something Baier had a personal hand in. Getting there would take the tech of the day, with some finagling by determined scientists, and a little luck.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we were doing predominantly was sampling oil slicks. There were browns and greens floating downstream past Michigan Street,\u201d said Baier. \u201cWe\u2019d collect the oil, analyze it and try to pinpoint its origins. The City of Buffalo had a huge problem with merged stormwater, so diesel fuel, gas station dumping — after a big rain, that would come into the Buffalo River, which augmented what industry was putting in. The fact that it burned brought a turning point.\u201d<\/p>\n
Throughout the late 1960s, scientists at the Cornell Aeronautical Lab tested oil skimmers with the hope that they could collect the oil for removal. These were carried out at a number of locations along the river and executed using stainless steel, chrome-plated drums that could float. Each buoy-mounted skimmer was just shy of 10 inches in diameter and 2 feet long and equipped with windshield wiper motors that had been rigged to spin in one direction instead of the typical back-and-forth motion.<\/p>\n
But when attempts were made to analyze the samples collected to figure out the oil-to-water recovery ratio, Baier and others found that all the oil had just congealed to the skimmer blades. This pointed to a need for some type of chemical agent that could concentrate the oil so that it could be easily collected by the skimmer. <\/p>\n
The solution was to use piston films. One that Baier invented, called Surface Magic, was marketed elsewhere in the nation as a way to clean up oil slicks. Though it\u2019s not used as widely today, it can be found around Florida swimming pools where it is used to concentrate leaves and other debris that falls in so that it can be filtered out by the pool\u2019s system.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou would spray it onto the surface and it would take over and compress it into a sludge to collect it more efficiently,\u201d said Baier. \u201cThere was a great urgency in the city at the time because gas stations were leaking into the sewer system. What we were able to do was take Surface Magic, add it to the gas station line and then it took hold and drove it out to the Buffalo River where we would hold it in an air barrier. Then we\u2019d hire a cleanup service to remove it.\u201d A chemical constituent of Surface Magic, he says, was used to treat waters after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.<\/p>\n