Buffalo’s Ice Boom Is Back for the Winter Season

No matter how much we want to delay this, winter is coming, and when the cold temperatures arrive in Western New York, another thing begins to appear in the region. It seems that no matter how much we wish it wouldn't happen, the time of the year has arrived for the Ice Boom to come out and play, and it's in the waters of Lake Erie as we speak.

Celebrating its sixtieth birthday, the Ice Boom has been installed in Lake Erie, at the mouth of the Niagara River, every winter since 1964, and chances are that it's going to continue for the foreseeable future.

Do You Know What The Ice Boom Is?

The Lake Erie-Niagara River Ice Boom is a 2-mile-long metal barrier installed in the water to help reduce the amount of lake ice that enters the Niagara River from Lake Erie. Lake ice chunks, if left alone, can flow upriver and seriously damage the hydroelectric power plants that are along the New York and Ontario shores.

According to the International Joint Commission, the ice boom has 22 pieces, or spans. The first four spans are placed at Buffalo Harbor's inside and outside, using sixteen 15-foot-long mini pontoons pieces. The rest of the ice boom is made up of using a series of steel pontoons, each one of the pontoons are 30 feet long and 30 inches in diameter... Each span of the ice boom is built using up to 10 pontoons and they are then anchored to the bottom of the lake every 400-foot intervals with steel cables.

The ice boom itself is operated and owned jointly by The New York Power Authority (NYPA) and Ontario Power Generation (OPG) under rules set by the International Joint Commission's International Niagara Board of Control. The two organizations are responsible for its' annual installation, removal, and maintenance.

Since 1999, the International Joint Commission’s (IJC) will install the ice boom in Lake Erie when the temperature of the water gets down to 39 degrees Fahrenheit (or 4 degrees Celsius), or by on December 16th, whichever comes first. On December 12th, Lake Erie's temperature reached 43 degrees Fahrenheit, and ICJ officials announced that they would start to install the Ice Boom on Monday, December 16, 2024. Since the boom is just about two miles long and is anchored at several points along the floor of Lake Erie, the installation takes a while.