Posted on March 23, 2021
A project to improve an artificial pond in a Town of Niagara park is expected to reduce algae in Hyde Park Lake in Niagara Falls and improve the quality of water reaching the Niagara River.
Elmer’s Pond, located in the town’s Veterans Memorial Park off Lockport Road, is to be enlarged and deepened as part of a $3.36 million improvement project. Funding was approved Tuesday by the Host Communities Standing Committee, which controls Niagara River Greenway money in Niagara County.
Although the park project includes a new concession and restroom building, a clock tower, a dog park and bocce courts, Greenway Executive Director Gregory Stevens considers the work at Elmer’s Pond far more important.
The Greenway Commission wants “meaningful ecological restoration along the Niagara River and its tributaries. This Elmer’s Pond goes a long way toward balancing this project out as being a better Greenway project,” Stevens said.
“This is a really important ecological asset for the Greenway,” said Kerrie Gallo, deputy executive director of Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper.
The pond flows into Gill Creek, which proceeds underground beneath a Town of Niagara railway yard, through a concrete spillway in Niagara Falls’ Hyde Park Golf Course and Hyde Park Lake on its way to the upper Niagara River.
“The whole creek has a legacy of toxic sediment contamination, as well as stormwater runoff,” Gallo said. “Other water bodies in Gill Creek have experienced harmful algal blooms since 2018. That’s often caused by stormwater runoff.”
“All of a sudden, there’s toxic bacteria,” recalled Paul A. Dyster, former Niagara Falls mayor and Greenway commissioner. “We had to print up signs that told people, ‘Keep your pets away. Don’t let them drink the water in that portion of the lake, because they could get sick or even die. Don’t touch the stuff.’ ”
The algae was blamed on flows from outside the city limits, Dyster said.
“Part of the way you manage this is to naturalize as much of the upper reaches of the creek as you can to prevent stormwater runoff from carrying contaminants that are on the ground miles away into this stream,” Dyster said. “Elmer’s Pond, just like Hyde Park Lake, is an impoundment of Gill Creek.”
The plan calls for enlarging and dredging Elmer’s Pond to make it wider and deeper, as well as building gardens and wetlands around its shores.
“The fish die off in the winter because it’s so shallow,” Town of Niagara Supervisor Lee S. Wallace said. “Because it’s so shallow and so narrow, we have an algae problem.”
“If you intercept that stormwater runoff coming across the lawn area and you provide a transitional area of planting on the upland pieces and some wetland habitat, that’s where you really get the filtration,” Gallo said. “If you just take the pond and make it bigger, that doesn’t do anything. The plants provide the filtration. They take some of the pollutants out of that stormwater.”
Dyster said this work will improve the water quality downstream, in Hyde Park Lake and farther south.
“Mother Nature restores herself if you give her the opportunity,” Dyster said.
