New York’s Scajaquada Creek was the site of a more subdued, long-term environmental catastrophe compared to its infamous neighbor, the Love Canal. Instead of a chemical company burying thousands of tons of toxic waste over a couple decades, the suburban Buffalo stream was the site of industrial and municipal waste disposal. This went on for nearly a century before several miles of it were literally buried in a massive public works project in the 1920s. Only in recent decades has serious attention been given to transforming Scajaquada back into some version of a healthy stream.
“We like to say Scajaquada Creek encapsulates everything you could do wrong to a creek,” said Jill Spisiak Jedlicka, executive director at Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper. “It’s only 13 miles long with a small watershed. It’s really an example of what not to do to a creek.”
Since before the turn of the century the stream, which forms in Lancaster about 14 miles east of downtown Buffalo, had been mistreated. For decades its main function was to carry away raw sewage in addition to a steady flow of waste from the region’s industries. Scajaquada Creek has remained in such bad shape that in 2014 western New York artist and conservationist Alberto Rey included it in his Biological Regionalism series which includes waters in the greatest of distress…