They Stopped Niagara Falls

@sandyra

Yes, it certainly would hurt… if you survived the fall.

@tubacca123 Mindless patriotism seems to have a lot to do with the decision. The concern was that the American Falls would quickly erode into mere rapids, thus leaving only the Horseshoe Falls – which are Canadian – as the only significant falls. Remember, it was 1969. The Vietnam War was still raging and Canada had just recently barred draft-age young men from crossing the border to avoid the draft.

To put their ‘horror’ into perspective geologically, the Niagara River had many ancient rapid erosion events (The river eating up hundreds or thousands of feet of river bed in days or weeks. If you ever go there, you’ll see how that can be possible.)

Looks cool as hell. I would have done it just to check it out. Glad they went back to letting it run though.

They really did it just to collect all the pennies and other small coins at the bottom of the falls.

Yes that does seem like the only possible explanattion, but nit knowing the layout of the falls I didn’t know if even that was possible. But having looked at the google maps image it seems like it would be a relatively simple thing to do.

I also looked up the amount of water involved, 90% of the water flows over the horseshoe side, since they did this in the winter and since the difference between summer time peak volume and winter time low volume is so huge, diverting the American side water would be negligible.

Here is an interesting link that describes the whole thing, pulled from the archives of the Niagara Falls Review: http://www.niagarafrontier.com/dewater.html

It seems that diversion of the water flowing through the American channel wasn’t terribly difficult.