Seaway of the San Lorenzo

Eisenhower channel locks.

The Saint Lawrence Seaway (in English, Saint Lawrence Seaway; in French, Voie maritime du Saint-Laurent), sometimes in Spanish canal del San Lorenzo, is the name given to the system of locks, conduits and canals that allows ocean-going vessels to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Superior, the head of the North American Great Lakes system. Legally, it is about 3,700 km long and stretches from Montreal to Lake Erie, including the Welland Canal that bridges Niagara Falls. The seaway is named after the St. Lawrence River, whose sources reach as far as Lake Ontario. This section of the seaway is not a continuous channel, but includes sections of navigable conduits within the river, a good number of locks and also channels made to circumvent the rapids areas and existing dams on the navigable route.

The St. Lawrence Seaway is under joint Canadian-US administration, with the Canadian locks controlled by the Saint Lawrence Seaway Management Corporation and the US locks by the Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation.

This waterway is complemented by the Great Lakes Waterway, which makes the St. Lawrence River navigable from Montreal to the city of Kingston (Ontario). The two waterways are often referred to together simply as the "St. Lawrence Seaway". The "Great Lakes Seaway" has larger and deeper locks than the "St. Lawrence Seaway" with the result that a number of Lake freighters or Lakers) are confined to lakes, being small enough to operate on the waterway, but too large to pass through the seaway.

Description

The first part of the seaway is a chain of canals along the St. Lawrence River comprising seven locks (five Canadian, two American). The route begins at the port of Montreal, where the South Shore channel (Saint-Lambert and Sainte-Catherine locks) allows you to cross the Lachine rapids. To the west of the island of Montreal and Lake St. Louis, the Beauharnois canal and two locks allow access beyond the Beauharnois hydroelectric power station.

The seaway leaves Quebec via Lake Saint-François and the Akwesasne Mohawk Council First Nation to pass between the province of Ontario and the state of New York to Lake Ontario. The Wiley-Dondero canal (Snell and Eisenhower locks) allows you to go beyond the Moses-Saunders hydroelectric power station. The Iroquois Short Lock also allows passage beyond the Iroquois Dam that controls the level of Lake Ontario.

Locks on the St. Lawrence River

There are seven locks on the St. Lawrence River portion of the seaway. From bottom to top they are:

1. St lock. Lambert - Saint Lambert, Quebec (QC)
2. It's even Côte Ste. Catherine - Sainte-Catherine, QC
3. Beauharnois locks (2 locks) - Melocheville, QC
4. Snell - Massena, New York State (NY)
5. Eisenhower - Massena, NY
6. Iroquois - Iroquois, Ontario

Locks on the Welland Canal

There are 8 locks on the Welland Canal:

1. St. Catharines (Ontario)
2. St. Catharines
3. St. Catharines
4. Thorold (Ontario)
5. Thorold
6. Thorold
7. Thorold
8. Port Colborne (Ontario)

History

The San Lorenzo seaway was preceded by a series of other canals. In 1862, the locks on the St. Lawrence River already allowed the transit of ships 57 m long, 13.56 m wide and 2.7 m deep. The Welland Canal, at that time, allowed the passage of ships 43 m long, 7.9 m wide and 3.0 m deep, but was generally too small to allow the passage of large high-speed ships. sea.

Proposals for the seaway began in 1909, but were met with resistance from US railroad and port lobbies. In addition to replacing the canal system, hydroelectricity generation also fueled the project. After rejecting numerous agreements for the construction of a sea canal, the construction was approved in 1954, when Canada declared that it was willing to proceed unilaterally.

In the United States, Dr. N.R. Danielian was the director of the 14 volume "St. Lawrence Seaway Survey" (St. Lawrence Seaway Survey ) conducted by the United States Department of Commerce (1939-43) in collaboration with with the Secretary of State for Canada-US Affairs on seaway issues, and worked for more than 15 years to pass the Seaway Act /i>). He later became President of the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Association ( Great Lakes St. Lawrence Association ) to promote development to benefit the American Heartland ( American Heartland ).

The seaway was opened to navigation on April 25, 1959, and cost US$470 million, of which US$336.2 million was paid for by the Canadian government. Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom Kingdom and US President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally inaugurated the seaway on June 26, 1959, with a short cruise aboard the royal yacht Britannia, after addressing the crowds in Saint-Lambert, Québec.

The opening of the seaway is often considered the reason for the decline of the Erie Canal, thus triggering the severe economic crisis of several cities in upstate New York.

Environmental effects

To create a navigable channel through the Long Sault rapids and allow hydroelectric power stations to be established immediately upstream of Cornwall, Ontario and Massena, New York, an artificial reservoir had to be created. Christened Lake St. Lawrence (Lake St. Lawrence), it required the flooding on July 1, 1958 of six cities and three towns in Ontario, now known as "Los pueblos perdidos" (" The Lost Villages"). There was also flooding on the New York state side, but no communities were affected.

The creation of the seaway also led to the introduction of invasive aquatic animal and plant species into the aquatic ecosystems of the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, especially the zebra mussel and sea lamprey.

The seaway provides important entertainment and recreation, allowing for activities such as boating, camping, fishing, and scuba diving. Of particular interest is that the seaway provides the possibility of observing a good number of wrecks within the limits of recreational diving (shallower than 40 m). The region also offers technical diving with some wrecks at a depth of more than 70m. Surprisingly, the water temperature can get very hot, reaching 24°C in mid to late summer. The top 3 m of Lake Ontario warms and enters the St. Lawrence River, and rapid movement of water masses does not produce thermocline-type circulation.