Unfortunately, much of this early development was haphazard at best. Housing, commerce and industry all co-existed alongside one another. There were no sewers, much less sewage treatment. Rather, early settlers made use of backyard latrines and cesspools, open pits of sewage that would be periodically cleaned out by “night soil men.” Drinking water was obtained either from the open waterways or from wells. When rain or snow melt runoff struck the early city, sewage from latrines and cesspools was flushed into the drinking water sources, causing waves of cholera and typhoid.

As the city developed from mostly open marshlands to buildings connected by brick, stone and hardpacked earthen streets, the need for sewers was recognized.  But in these early years, sewers were primarily for stormwater control and only incidentally for sewage management. They were laid by private citizens to protect their own assets. As such, the sewers were installed simply to take flows from local streets into the nearest waterway. At the same time, the canal system was expanded to provide direct water access for industry and power for early mills.

These earliest sewers were generally badly made, and many began to collapse within a few years of their construction, though at least one survives to this day. By the late 1840s, it had become apparent that if Buffalo was going to continue to expand, the city would need to take public ownership of the sewer system. A series of large sewers were planned to drain the major roads, which had suffered from flooding, deep mud and putrid, standing water. Unfortunately, construction was delayed due to expense and in 1849 another cholera epidemic hit the port city.

The 1849 cholera epidemic was responsible for 877 deaths and 3,555 nonfatal cases. Seventeen percent of these deaths were confined to just three small neighborhoods: the Hydraulics, the Flats and the French Block. The Hydraulics was a neighborhood surrounded by the fetid Hydraulic and Hamburg canals and the Mill Race to the north of the Buffalo River in the area around what is now Larkinville. The population of the Hydraulics neighborhood worked in the mills driven by the Mill Race and would dispose of refuse in the same stagnant canals that fed the wells from which they drew their drinking water.

The Flats was a neighborhood on the banks of the Buffalo River where it spilled into Lake Erie in the area that is now Canalside. Similar to the Hydraulics, it was surrounded by fetid canals and the heavily polluted Buffalo River and Erie Harbor. Residents of the Flats drew their water from wells which were connected to these polluted waterways.

The French Block was a small neighborhood located half a mile inland from the Erie Canal, near what is now Lafayette Park. As a low spot, stormwater, sewage from overflowing cesspools and pollution littering higher streets would collect there after storms. This pollution, in turn, would leach into the drinking water wells. 

While it would be several decades before germ theory would be accepted as the cause of cholera, the prevailing miasma theory—that stenches caused illnesses—provided an impetus to embark on public sewer projects despite the 1848 financial objections.  A new municipal sewer system was therefore built using state-of-the-art technologies to provide wastewater disposal for the entire city. This in turn meant that, by the time of the Civil War, “outhouses … which become so great a nuisance as population becomes dense, have nearly disappeared from the center of the city.” The system, however, was less than perfect. By 1866, it was already becoming clear that it would need to be upgraded and expanded due to a lack of catch basins, manholes and traps between the public mains and homes and within homes themselves.

Following the Civil War, Buffalo expanded dramatically, showing no signs of stopping. By 1880, city government was committed to a plan to vastly expand its system to ensure that the entire city would have sewer service. As part of this expansion, wastewater treatment was considered, but rejected on the basis that if most of the wastewater could be conveyed to the Niagara River, then “… there is an end of it. Nature will provide that it never appears again to trouble your neighbors.” 

At this time, separation of the storm and sanitary sewer systems was considered, but also rejected. It was argued that to construct a combined system, which could carry both storm and sanitary flows, would require “no appreciable increase in their dimensions” as compared to a strictly stormwater system. To create a “double system” would require duplication of efforts, which was deemed impractical for a city the size of Buffalo.

Having decided against treatment and separated sewer systems, Buffalo embarked on a major installation project throughout much of the modern limits of the city over the next two decades. Smaller sewers were connected by large trunk sewers, which also drained the many creeks that once crisscrossed the city. These trunk sewers discharged into the large waterways—the Niagara and Buffalo rivers, Scajaquada Creek and the Black Rock Canal. 

The largest of the trunk sewers, the Swan Trunk, only incidentally carried sewage to the Niagara River from inland sewers; its primary purpose was to flush out the Hamburg Canal and Wilkenson Slip through a system of automatic flushing gates. During wet weather these gates would close and the Swan Trunk would be used for carrying combined sewage to the Niagara River. During dry weather, the gates would open to allow Lake Erie to flush the Hamburg Canal and Wilkeson Slip through the Swan Trunk into the Niagara River.

During this period, the former Mill Race, having lost its purpose as an energy source for the Hydraulics, was converted into a sewer.  This was the first of several similar projects that would mark much of the sewer construction between 1900 and 1929. Over this period, several heavily polluted waterways, including the Ohio and Hamburg canals and Scajaquada Creek between the Cheektowaga border and Forest Lawn cemetery, were converted into sewers. While these efforts did much to eliminate the hazard posed to the city by untreated wastewater, they did nothing for communities downstream.

While the 1880 report had assured city leaders that the Niagara River could absorb and eliminate any hazards posed by the sewage from the City of Buffalo, by 1918 it had become clear that Buffalo’s wastewater was harming downstream communities. Despite the treaty to protect boundary waters signed a decade before, the International Joint Commission of the United States and Canada found that “in the Detroit and Niagara Rivers conditions exist which imperil the health and welfare of the citizens of both countries in direct contravention of the treaty.” Further, the report concluded definitively that, “the sewage of Buffalo is polluting to a serious extent the available water supplies of the two Tonawandas and the city of Niagara Falls, New York.”

Further, this pollution was not just a hypothetical danger or nuisance, but a very real threat to the health and well-being of downstream communities. While cholera had faded from the scene, typhoid was still rampant during this period. The discharge of Buffalo’s raw sewage into the Niagara River was contributing to illnesses and deaths from this disease in downstream communities. “In 1907 the City of Niagara Falls, New York, had a typhoid death rate of 222.4 per 100,000 population, and the average for the last 10 years is 130. This is the heaviest typhoid death toll recorded anywhere in the civilized world, and does not include the death rate among visitors who contract the disease there.” Not only was there a very real threat to human health, there was also an aesthetic concern, due to the fact that “1/100,000 of the water of the east channel of Niagara River consist[ed] of actual excrementitious matter from the human and animal population of Buffalo.”

By April 1929, the City of Buffalo was well on its way to designing a new system for the treatment of wastewater and the transportation of wastewater to those proposed treatment facilities. These efforts culminated in a May 1930 report for the construction of facilities, including treatment plants in South Buffalo and on Squaw Island (today known as Unity Island) to alleviate the issue. Unfortunately, in the aftermath of the stock market crash of October 1929, more and more people found themselves out of work. With its finances ravaged by the loss of its tax base and a spike in unemployed citizens looking to the government for support, the city put any further plans for sewage treatment on hold.

With the city’s efforts stalled, in March 1935 the New York State Health Department stepped in.  It issued a mandate to fix the public health disaster resulting from the discharge of raw sewage to the Niagara River. The city’s government lacked the ability to absorb the enormous cost of this undertaking, however, so on April 8, 1935, the New York State Legislature founded the Buffalo Sewer Authority as a separate legal entity. This new institution was mandated to “provide an effectual and advantageous means for relieving the Niagara river, Buffalo River and Lake Erie from pollution by the sewage and waste of the city and relieving the city from inadequate sanitary and stormwater drainage and for the sanitary disposal or treatment of the sewage thereof.”

The new authority commissioned a new design report.  This report determined that a single treatment facility on Squaw Island could provide comprehensive treatment for the city.  It also determined that sewer separation “was impractical from a financial standpoint and, in any event, the scope of the project.”  Instead, interceptor sewers were designed that could carry up to three times the dry weather flow of a city of 1,100,000 people—a population that Buffalo has never come close to achieving.

By June 1938, the $15,000,000 treatment facility project and the vast network of intercepting sewers had been substantially completed. During dry weather, the wastewater from the city was carried in its entirety to the new—and oddly named—Bird Island Treatment Facility, which was actually located on the southern end of Squaw Island in the Niagara River. During wet weather, however, this system allowed excess flows to discharge over a system of weirs, through the preexisting combined sewage outfalls to creeks and rivers.

Ostensibly, the provision of combined sewer overflows should have prevented flooding, even during extreme wet weather events. As soon as the original project was completed, however, the Authority commissioned the consulting engineers who had designed the Bird Island Treatment Facility and interceptor sewer system, to “establish the locations in the city where existing sewers are inadequate, and to determine the degree of inadequacy, and the proper means for filling the deficiencies, including preliminary designs and cost estimates for all feasible alternative arrangements of relief sewers.” A summary report of findings was submitted to the Authority in February 1941. Some preliminary progress was made in the ensuing months, but the necessary funding, materials and labor for this project quickly dried up following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7.

Once World War II ended, the Authority again embarked on the mission of eliminating flooding within the city, which had become an ever evolving and worsening situation on several fronts. As the returning veterans moved into new suburban developments in the surrounding communities, the population of the city began the slow and steady decline that has persisted for decades, destabilizing the tax base. In addition, several of the suburban communities were built on higher ground than the city itself. As agricultural and forested land was turned into suburban developments, the stormwater that had once been absorbed into the groundwater table or consumed by plants was drained into the city across streets and through sewers and waterways. At the same time, new highways were being constructed in and through the City of Buffalo. One of these highways, the Kensington Expressway (NY-33), was constructed as a below-grade highway along what was previously the tree-lined Humboldt Parkway. To accommodate this new highway, the Bird-Ferry trunk was severed, and flows were rerouted from the east side of Buffalo through downtown. Overall, these changes resulted in the construction of many new storm relief sewers (oversized combined sewers constructed with additional holding capacity for stormwater) and separate storm sewers.

In consultation with the State of New York, in 1966 the Authority expanded the Bird Island Treatment Facility to add more extensive treatment. At the same time, a tunnel was bored across the city to intercept combined sewer overflows that had formerly been discharged into the Scajaquada Drain upstream from Forest Lawn Cemetery.  The sewage from this tunnel was then carried into the interceptor sewers for treatment at the Bird Island Treatment Facility. This tunnel also serves as a conduit for wastewater from the Town of Cheektowaga to the treatment facility.

From 1981 to 2014, the Authority embarked on a continuous project of constructing separate storm sewers, raising and altering weirs, installing backwater gates and capping combined sewer overflows with the purpose of reducing the number of combined sewer outfalls. On March 18, 2014, the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation approved the Authority’s Combined Sewer Overflow Long Term Control Plan. Since then, the Authority has made major progress in implementing this plan. In the first five years, the Authority has concentrated its efforts on installing green infrastructure to restore the ability of natural systems to absorb rainwater. Using Smart Sewer technology, the goal is to use the full capacity of a collection system sized for 1,100,000 people—four times the city’s current population—and thus optimizing the existing system.

Eventually, the Authority will also need to construct more traditional gray infrastructure projects, but with these innovative technologies, the Buffalo Sewer Authority has been able to reduce the size, cost and need for these facilities.