Kingston waterfront news: June 2006

The Friends of Lake Ontario Park have a website. Therein you can see PDFs of Concept 1, Concept 2, and Concept 3 proposals from the Lake Ontario Park Revitalization Study prepared by Corush Sunderland Wright Ltd.

The city's sewer bypass log reports 5,400 cubic meters (1.2 million gallons) were dumped into our waterways on June 27th. For a sense of perspective, a typical tank truck, the sort used to make fuel deliveries on highways and around town, can contain 5,000 gallons. Imagine a line of 240 such trucks, lined up to pump sewage into the water at the causeway. The equivalent of that happened this week in Kingston.

Tuesday we dumped the contents of 240 of these.

Here's another local waterfront blog, called A Sailor's Log, maintained by Nathan Baron, and billed as News, Events, and Stories from the Kingston Yacht Club.

Here's a link to a Globe and Mail article titled Ontario tightens penalties for impaired boat operators.

As we approach July, Lake Ontario water levels are still about six inches below average, and about four inches below last year's level at this time. The forecast calls for levels to rise through July, when historically levels fall.

Abbott Boats of Sarnia, Canada's premier manufacturer of racing sailboats, is completely destroyed by fire. See also here.

Here's a very cool Google Earth File of Lake Ontario Windsurf Spots compiled by Evan Wamsley. If you haven't yet installed Google Earth, you're in for a treat. Download it here.

CNN reports Green goo globs up Great Lakes. It appears that algae blooms have been on the rise since the mid-1990s in parts of all of the Great Lakes. Here's the text of the report referenced in the CNN story. It's Lake Michigan-centric, but it applies also to Lake Ontario. Interesting how zebra mussles play a part in all this.

Waterkeeper is right: Lafarge's application for a landfill in Bath and it's recent application for burning waste in its kilns should be examined in context together.

Trillium Energy Power Corp apparently plans to build a 140-turbine, 710-megawatt wind farm off Main Duck Island.

To give a sense of the scale of this, only 122 megawatts of wind-generated power exists in the province of Ontario today. 710 megawatts would be sufficient to meet the needs of 200,000 homes. This would be the biggest offshore wind farm outside of northern Europe.

The notable difference in Lake Ontario water levels between this year and 2005 is narrowing.