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Saint Lawrence Seaway
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The St. Lawrence Seaway is the common name for a system of canals that permits ocean-going vessels to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the North American Great Lakes, as far as Lake Superior. Legally it extends from Montreal to Lake Erie, including the Welland Canal and the Great Lakes Waterway. The seaway is named after the Saint Lawrence River, which it follows from Lake Ontario to the Atlantic Ocean.
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Encyclopedia
The St. Lawrence Seaway is the common name for a system of canals that permits ocean-going vessels to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the North American Great Lakes, as far as Lake Superior. Legally it extends from Montreal to Lake Erie, including the Welland Canal and the Great Lakes Waterway. The seaway is named after the Saint Lawrence River, which it follows from Lake Ontario to the Atlantic Ocean. This section of the seaway is not a continuous canal, but rather a number of locks and short channels made to bypass difficulties in the natural waterway.
History
The Saint Lawrence Seaway was preceded by a number of other canals. In 1862, locks on the St Lawrence allowed transit of vessels long, wide, and deep. The Welland Canal at that time allowed transit of vessels long, wide, and deep, but was generally too small to allow passage of larger ocean-going ships.
Proposals for the seaway started in 1909, but were met with resistance from railway and port lobbyists in the US. In addition to replacing the canal system, generation of hydroelectricity also drove the project. After rejecting numerous agreements to construct a seaway, construction was approved in 1954 when Canada declared it was ready to proceed unilaterally. The seaway opened in 1959 and cost US$470 million, $336.2 million of which was paid by the Canadian government. Queen Elizabeth II and President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally opened the Seaway with a short cruise aboard Royal Yacht Britannia after addressing the crowds in St. Lambert, Quebec.
The seaway's opening is often credited with making the Erie Canal obsolete, thus setting off the severe economic decline of several cities in upstate New York.
Lock and channel dimensions
The size of vessels that can traverse the seaway is limited by the size of locks. Locks on the St Lawrence and on the Welland Canal are long, wide, and deep. The maximum allowed vessel size is slightly smaller: long, wide, and deep; many vessels designed for use on the Great Lakes following the opening of the seaway were built to the maximum size permissible by the locks, known informally as Seaway-Max. Large vessels of the lake freighter fleet are built on the Lakes and cannot travel down the seaway to the ocean. The only lock on the Great Lakes Waterway is long, wide and deep, but the channels are not kept that deep.
Water depth is another obstacle to vessels, particularly in connecting waterways such as the St Lawrence River. The depth in the channels of the seaway is (panamax depth) downstream of Quebec City, between Quebec City and Deschaillons, to Montreal, and upstream of Montreal. Channels in the Great Lakes Waterway are slightly shallower: . In the late 1990s the seaway has been deepened and widened increasing near panamax sized ship access upstream from the Atlantic ocean to Montreal.
Channel depths and limited lock sizes mean that only 10% of ocean-going ships can traverse the entire seaway. Proposals to expand the seaway, dating from as early as the 1960s, have been rejected as too costly, and environmentally and economically unsound. Lower water levels in the Great Lakes have also posed problems for some vessels in recent years.
While the seaway is currently (2008) mostly used for shipping bulk cargo, the possibility of its use for large-scale container shipping is under consideration as well. If the project goes ahead, feeder ships would take containers from the port of Oswego on Lake Ontario in upstate New York to Melford International Terminal in Nova Scotia for transfer to larger ocean-going ships.
Environmental effects
To create a navigable channel through the Long Sault rapids and to allow hydroelectric stations to be established immediately upriver from Cornwall, Ontario and Massena, New York, an artificial lake had to be created. Called Lake St. Lawrence, it required the flooding on July 1, 1958 of ten villages in Ontario, now collectively known as "The Lost Villages". There was also inundation on the New York side, but no communities were affected.
The creation of the seaway also led to the introduction of foreign species of aquatic animals, including the sea lamprey and the zebra mussel, into the Great Lakes Basin. These organisms were introduced via ballast water from oceanic vessels.
The seaway provides significant entertainment and recreation such as boating, camping, fishing, and scuba diving. Of particular note is that the seaway provides a number of divable wrecks within recreational scuba limits (shallower than ). Surprisingly, the water temperature can be as warm as with little or no thermocline during the mid to late summer months.
External links
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- Excerpt from the Illustrated London News, January 11, 1862 describing the
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- See Great Lakes; St. Lawrence River and Seaway. Peace Palace Libray
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