Lake Effects is a history of urban policy making in the large Midwestern industrial city of Cleveland, Ohio. Urban policy making requires goal setting in four critical areas: economic development, urban growth, services, and wealth redistribution. Ronald Weiner shows how urban policy was conceived and implemented by the local governing elites, or regimes, between 1825 and 1929. Each regime-Merchant, Populist, Corporate, and Realty-set policy goals in the four areas; set priorities among the goals; and used their power, public and private, to guide the city toward these ends. Each regime dominated policy making for at least twenty years, and the successes and failures of each regime contribute to our understanding of how Cleveland became the city that it is today. The successes of the Merchant Regime's economic development policy made Cleveland's industrialization possible. The urban growth policy of the Corporate Regime built the downtown civic center and University Circle. However, the Populist, Corporate, and Realty regimes' failures to plan for Cleveland's economic future helped set in motion the declining economic fortunes so harshly in evidence today, and the triumph of the expansionist Realty Regime's urban growth policy promoted heedless suburban development at the expense of the central business district and inner city. Book jacket.

On her deathbed, Sue asked her sister for one thing: to write about the connection between the industrial pollution in their hometown and the rare cancer that was killing her. Fulfilling that promise has been Nancy Nichols’ mission for more than a decade. Lake Effect is the story of her investigation. It reaches back to their childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, an industrial town on Lake Michigan once known for good factory jobs and great fishing. Now Waukegan is famous for its Superfund sites: as one resident put it, asbestos to the north, PCBs to the south. Drawing on her experience as a journalist, Nichols interviewed dozens of scientists, doctors, and environmentalists to determine if these pollutants could have played a role in her sister’s death. While researching Sue’s cancer, she discovered her own: a vicious though treatable form of pancreatic cancer. Doctors and even family urged her to forget causes and concentrate on cures, but Nichols knew that it was relentless questioning that had led to her diagnosis. And that it is questioning—by government as well as individuals—that could save other lives. Lake Effect challenges us to ask why. It is the fulfillment of a sister’s promise. And it is a call to stop the pollution that is endangering the health of all our families.

Droughts are a major hazard to both natural and human-dominated environments and those, especially of long duration and high intensity, can be highly damaging and leave long-lasting effects. This book describes the climatic conditions that give rise to droughts, and their various forms and chief attributes. Past droughts are described including those that had severe impacts on human societies. As a disturbance, droughts can be thought of as “ramps” in that they usually build slowly and take time to become evident. As precipitation is reduced, flows from catchments into aquatic systems decline. As water declines in water bodies, ecological processes are changed and the biota can be drastically reduced, though species and populations may survive by using refuges. Recovery from drought varies in both rates and in degrees of completeness and may be a function of both refuge availability and connectivity. For the first time, this book reviews the available rather scattered literature on the impacts of drought on the flora, fauna and ecological processes of aquatic ecosystems ranging from small ponds to lakes and from streams to estuaries. The effects of drought on the biota of standing waters and flowing waters and of temporary waters and perennial systems are described and compared. In addition, the ways in which human activity can exacerbate droughts are outlined. In many parts of the world especially in the mid latitudes, global warming may result in increases in the duration and intensity of droughts. Drought and Aquatic Ecosystems is essential reading for freshwater ecologists, water resource managers and advanced students.

Besides being the title of this book, Lake Effect is a term that everyone in Northeast Ohio knows. It happens when frigid air from Canada dips south, picks up water from Lake Erie, freezes it at high altitude, and then, to the delight of kids hoping for school cancellations, dumps it in the form of snow as soon as it reaches the shoreline in Ashtabula, Ohio. Lake Effect, the book, touches upon the psychological and emotional impact of growing up in Ashtabula, a blue-collar town with a huge port, major chemical and manufacturing plants, a culturally diverse population, and a spider web of railroad tracks feeding into ships in the harbor. Told in fifty-eight vignettes through the eyes of an Italian American girl and a Finnish American boy (at a time when weddings between people of those crosstown cultures were considered mixed marriages), the book offers a glimpse into small-town America in the 1950s and 1960s. As beneficiaries of the work ethic of their parents and immigrant grandparents, the authors pay tribute to family and friends who provided example and advice (sometimes unheeded) during their coming of age years.

The construction of a dam in the gap of Smith Mountain in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, had been considered as early as the 1920s. However, the dam's construction did not begin until 1960. Smith Mountain Dam closed the gap completely in 1963, and Smith Mountain Lake began to fill and form behind it. The hydroelectric dam consists of 175,000 cubic yards of concrete and has the capacity to generate 605 megawatts of electricity for up to 11 hours. Smith Mountain Dam is part of a two-dam system on the Roanoke River, and its companion dam, the Leesville Dam, is a smaller structure designed to pump water back to Smith Mountain Lake and to also generate hydroelectric power for American Electric Power (AEP) customers. Smith Mountain Lake covers 20,000 acres and has a 500-mile shoreline, which borders Franklin, Pittsylvania, and Bedford Counties. Over the years, development near and around Smith Mountain Lake has exploded, and this has presented both opportunities and challenges in regard to stewardship of the area's natural resources.

Blending meteorological history with the history of scientific cartography, Monmonier charts the phenomenon of lake-effect snow and explores the societal impacts of extreme weather. Along the way, he introduces readers to natural philosophers who gradually identified this distinctive weather pattern, to tales of communities adapting to notoriously disruptive storms, and to some of the snowiest regions of the country. Characterized by intense snowfalls lasting from a couple of minutes to several days, lake-effect snow is deposited by narrow bands of clouds formed when cold, dry arctic air passes over a large, relatively warm inland lake. With perhaps only half the water content of regular snow, lake snow is typically light, fluffy, and relatively easy to shovel. Intriguing stories of lake effect’s quirky behavior and diverse impacts include widespread ignorance of the phenomenon in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since then a network of systematic observers have collected several decades of data worth mapping, and reliable shortterm predictions based on satellites, Doppler radar, and computer models are now available. Moving effortlessly from atmospheric science to anecdotes, Monmonier offers a richly detailed account of a type of weather that has long been misunderstood. Residents of lake-effect regions, history buffs, and weather junkies alike will relish this entertaining and informative book.