Western New York has its areas that resemble the Great Lakes Region (it is on the east side of Lake Erie) and all of the dilapidated buildings that once represented the enormous steel industry in the area. For many decades the rust has accumulated all over the area, leaving many jobless and spurning the depopulation of the entire region. But now something is different on the horizon of one town upstate named Lackwanna.
From The New York Times:
LACKAWANNA, N.Y., May 21 — Empty grain elevators and dormant railroad tracks line the Buffalo River to the east and Lake Erie to the west, interspersed with empty fields overgrown with gnarled shrubbery. Test wells that monitor decades of buried industrial waste dot the landscape. A passenger ship, rust overtaking its aqua paint, sits beside a decaying mill.The road from Buffalo to this city to the south offers a stark reminder of the region’s faded past as a hub of industry and shipping.
Yet in the past few months, a different sight has emerged on the 2.2-mile shoreline above a labyrinth of pipes, blackened buildings and crumbling coke ovens that was once home to a behemoth Bethlehem Steel plant: eight gleaming white windmills with 153-foot blades slowly turning in the wind off Lake Erie, on a former Superfund site where iron and steel slag and other industrial waste were dumped during 80 years of production.
“It’s changing the image of the city of Lackawanna,” said Norman L. Polanski Jr., the city’s mayor and a former Bethlehem worker who lost his job when the company stopped making steel here in 1983. “We were the old Rust Belt, with all the negatives. Right now, we are progressive and we are leading the way on the waterfront.”
That type of leadership is exactly what the Great Lakes region needs, along with any other part of the country that has suffered economic depression due to the changing of the times. Building clean energy sources such as wind turbines and large solar panel systems is the way to go for the future. Forget about the high tech ideas like hydrogen and use what the Earth gives us naturally and is easy to use.
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