Ontario Lowlands

The discharge permit for the Metropolitan Syracuse wastewater treatment plant, the single largest pipe into Onondaga Lake, is up for renewal and modification, and the state is taking public comment on the draft through October 2.The plant sits at 650 Hiawatha Boulevard West on the lake's south shore and treats the sewage of Syracuse and most of the county. On September 2 the DEC published a draft permit and a tentative decision to approve Onondaga County's application, with a finding that the changes will have no significant environmental impact. That decision is provisional until the comment window closes.Onondaga Lake's recent history runs through this plant. In the 1990s the treated effluent carried about 90 percent of the ammonia and somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the phosphorus entering the lake from outside, on roughly a fifth of the water. Ammonia is toxic to fish and the phosphorus fed the algae that stripped the deep water of oxygen every summer. Fewer than ten fish species were holding on in the lake. The county then rebuilt the plant: a biological filter that converts ammonia to nitrate came online in 2004 and a high-rate settling stage for phosphorus followed in 2005. Ammonia loading from the plant fell 98 percent and phosphorus loading fell 86 percent. In 2008 the state took the lake off its impaired-waters list for ammonia, and DEC biologists now count about 60 fish species using it. Walleye, yellow perch, freshwater drum, longnose gar and channel catfish have all been recorded in the lake over the past two years, and a common logperch, a small bottom-hugging darter, turned up there today. The introduced round goby and European carp are in the same records.The lake is not clean. Both the north and south basins remain on the state's impaired-waters list for other pollutants, each under a pollution budget, and the lake bottom is a federal Superfund site listed in 1994 for industrial contamination that predates any sewage upgrade. What the plant controls is the part of the problem that has actually been turned around, which is why the terms of its permit matter more here than they would on most lakes.They matter a little more this month. The plant normally sends about 130 cubic feet per second of treated water into the lake, roughly 20 percent of everything that flows in over a year. Onondaga Creek at the Spencer Street gauge, just before it reaches the lake, is running at 52.9 cubic feet per second. The plant is currently putting in about two and a half times as much water as the creek. Two weeks ago the creek's collapse upstream at Dorwin Avenue was the subject here; since then the abnormally dry area of Onondaga County has grown from 85 percent to essentially the whole county, and the natural inflow to the lake has kept shrinking while the plant's contribution holds steady. In a dry fall the lake's chemistry is more a function of what comes out of that pipe than in a wet one.The plant is not on EPA's current list of facilities in significant noncompliance. The published notice does not spell out what the modification changes, and that is the first thing anyone reading the draft should look for: whether the effluent limits for ammonia and phosphorus stay where they are, tighten, or loosen, and what the permit requires when heavy rain pushes the plant toward its wet-weather capacity of about 371 cubic feet per second.Comments go to Trendon Choe at DEC Region 7 in Syracuse (dep.r7@dec.ny.gov, 315-426-7438) through October 2.

Onondaga Creek has fallen fast over the past two weeks. At the Dorwin Avenue gage, flow dropped from 43.6 to 18.8 cubic feet per second and gage height slid from 2.43 to 1.57 feet, tracking a week in which the county's abnormally-dry footprint jumped from a quarter to 85 percent of its land area. Syracuse Hancock Airport, eight kilometers off, has logged only 1.5 inches of rain this month against a normal of just over three, with highs running a couple of degrees warm. The watershed above the gage covers only 88.5 square miles, small and quick to respond, which is exactly why a rain deficit that a larger river would barely notice can knock this creek down by more than half in fourteen days.The timing is unfortunate. The creek's upper and middle reaches are already listed as impaired and are still waiting on a federal pollution budget. Less water moving through the same channel means whatever nutrient and organic load it carries has less flow to dilute it, and less turbulence to keep it oxygenated, though the actual dissolved-oxygen and water-quality readings needed to confirm that effect here aren't in hand.The local insect records can't fill that gap. A handful of mayfly observations came in across Onondaga County this summer, but they sit apart from the story: Giant Mayfly and its close relatives were all logged on a single day in late June near Cicero, well off Onondaga Creek, while scattered single records of Red Speckled Dun and Common Square-gills came from Skaneateles, Oswego, Fabius and Moravia. All are community-science sightings still awaiting identification review, and each one marks a species being present at a spot on a date — not abundance, not condition, not a trend. The clean-water reputation mayflies carry as a group doesn't transfer neatly to this particular mix either: Caenis tolerates silt and low oxygen, and Callibaetis is a still-water genus. None of these records fall on the impaired reach, so none of them can speak to what a falling, warming creek is doing to it.What does change the calculus is the Syracuse Hancock International Airport discharge, which entered this month already flagged for a biochemical oxygen demand violation that has tripled twice in three quarters, a trajectory covered in an earlier report on the airport's oxygen-demand violation. Less water in the receiving creek means the same permitted discharge has less flow to dilute into, a concern worth watching even without direct downstream water-quality measurements yet in hand. The airport is also the subject of a SEQR determination notice tied to its 2040 expansion, which puts a facility with an active, worsening water-quality violation at the center of a live development decision on a waterway that is currently running at less than half its normal flow.

Wastewater discharged from outfall 004 at Syracuse Hancock International Airport has exceeded its permitted biochemical oxygen demand limit for three consecutive quarters, and each reading has been worse than the last: 213% over limit in December, 980% over by March, and 4,600% over limit in a sample logged this month. Biochemical oxygen demand is a measure of how much organic material in a discharge will consume dissolved oxygen as it decomposes; violations at this scale, and on this trajectory, point to a treatment process that has broken down rather than a lab anomaly or a single bad reading. The airport is now one of seven facilities listed in significant non-compliance among 80 permitted dischargers tracked in this watershed.No instream water-quality data has yet confirmed what this is doing to dissolved oxygen levels downstream of the outfall, so at this point it remains a regulatory trend rather than a documented fish kill or oxygen crash. But it is arriving in a watershed with little margin left to absorb it. Eleven of the nineteen water bodies assessed within five miles of the airport are already impaired, including both basins of Onondaga Lake, which remain under active remediation for decades of industrial and municipal pollution.An oxygen-demand violation escalating this fast and going unaddressed is exactly the kind of stress that hits gill-breathing and oxygen-sensitive aquatic life first, and it tends to stay invisible until it surfaces as a fish kill or an algal bloom. In a watershed already carrying this much impairment, there is little buffer left before a treatment failure like this one starts showing up in the water itself, rather than just in the compliance record.

Monarch butterflies have made three appearances along the corridor since early July, with the most recent sighting on Westcott Street on July 23rd. On the same week, iNaturalist flagged a Black-and-gold Bumble Bee on the Eastside — both threatened species that depend on milkweed, though in different ways. Monarchs lay their eggs exclusively on milkweed, and their caterpillars eat nothing else. Bumble bees work the flowers for nectar and are among milkweed's most effective pollinators.The two sightings falling in the same week is a reminder that July is when both species are typically active and ranging widely. Three sightings on their own is just three sightings — neither observation signals alarm or remarkable success — but the fact that the corridor is supporting both species at the same moment speaks to the quality of the weedy edge habitat that threads through it.

Dogbane Leaf Beetle (Chrysochus auratus) are at peak activity along the Eastside corridor this week — their metallic green-and-copper shells catching the July light in a way that stops people mid-step. Two observations turned up on the 25th, both clustered where dogbane clings to the rough margins near Onondaga Creek, with a third sighting recorded earlier in the month at Gateway Center.The beetles feed almost exclusively on dogbane, a native plant toxic enough to deter most insects. That specialization means they track wherever the plant holds on, which tells us something about both the dogbane and the ground it roots in. Right now the creek is running at 21 cubic feet per second at the ONONDAGA CREEK AT SPENCER STREET, SYRACUSE NY gauge — the kind of slow summer flow that concentrates whatever enters it. The beetles' presence at the dogbane margins is not a health clearance for the water, but it does say the plant is present and holding on, which suggests the ground beneath it retains some ecological resilience even as the water flows thin and stressed.

Hermit Flower Beetles (Osmoderma) made a rare appearance above ground in July — a fleeting two-beetle emergence marking the culmination of years spent hidden inside the heartwood of ancient trees. These saproxylic specialists spend nearly their entire lives in the larval galleries of decaying oak and maple, where they feed on the rich fungal breakdown of wood rotted through multiple human lifetimes.Their sudden arrival in open air is a courtship measured in days. Males locate females by releasing a scent faintly reminiscent of ripe cherries — one of summer's most subtle signals, audible only to other Hermit Flower Beetles. The presence of even two individuals is a reliable marker that somewhere nearby stand veteran trees with centuries of accumulated rot: the kind of standing dead wood increasingly rare in a landscape of salvage logging and tidy forest management. Where they appear, an old oak is still standing; where they vanish, something essential in the forest's buried history has been lost.