PERINTON, N.Y. – If you lived locally through the 1970s, you surely remember when a portion of the Erie Canal collapsed flooding parts of Bushnell’s Basin. As part of our canal bicentennial coverage, we asked News10NBC Investigative Reporter Jennifer Lewke to look back at that and other breaks along the canal in our area and what’s been done over the years to try and ensure they don’t keep happening.
It’s what lies beneath parts of the Erie Canal in our area that make it more vulnerable to breaks. “The great embankment which stands as much as 65 feet above the lay of the land has had problems many times and has broken for many different reasons,” explains Bill Poray, the Town of Perinton historian.
In 1911, there was a major break in the canal in Perinton when it was still reinforced with soil and clay. As the story goes, a local man was first to notice some small cracks. “When he saw that break, he raced to get some hand tools, shovels and so forth to try to stop it himself, well he quickly learned in a matter of seconds it would grow and grow and grow and become catastrophic,” explains Poray.
A year later, in 1912 after crews installed concrete, another break that scattered the new concrete like Legos.
But it’s what happened in late October of 1974 that many eastside folks likely still remember. A construction company installing sewer lines under the canal saw seepage. “They realized there was big trouble, there was phone calls made, the guard gates were shut pretty quickly to the east and to the west,” Poray says. But within minutes, “things went south real fast, a portion of the bottom of the canal dropped right out.” Newspaper stories from that time indicate the canal was losing 8,000-10,000 gallons of water per second were lost.
Film taken by a News10NBC crew shows water gushing out of the bottom of the canal which completely flooded a small creek that winds through the edge of Perinton toward Pittsford. It moved fast, taking cars and campers with it, even sweeping Fran Cramer out of her home.
At the time, Cramer told our crew, “as I was tumbling and somersaulting and so forth and I could get a breath and then I went under again, a couple times when I came up there was debris over me and I couldn’t get a breath and I thought I was going to be trapped under the water, under the debris…. and I just don’t know how I made it.”
No one was seriously injured but more than a dozen homes and businesses were either badly damaged or destroyed. “It took years but property owners received settlements as did many other entities that had suffered as a result of this,” Poray says.
So, what’s done nowadays to try and prevent any future disasters? Every two years engineers perform detailed structural inspections to assess the safety and integrity of all canal structures. They also have underwater inspections that check for issues like deterioration, corrosion and material defects.
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