This article looks at the bilateral U.S.-Canada remaking of the St. Lawrence River and Niagara River/Falls during the twentieth century for hydropower and navigation. Utilizing a range of archival records from various governments and organizations, and an envirotech approach, I focus on the role of estimation for controlling water and ice formation on these iconic waterways. The engineers employed an iterative ‘cut and try’ approach which relied upon considerable place based knowledge of the local Niagara and St. Lawrence environments, which was then used to generate synoptic models that served as the basis for remaking those very environments. But the gap between local and abstract expertise often resulted in uncertainty. To deal with cases where they had only approximate knowledge, engineers and bureaucrats used the qualifying phrase ‘as nearly as may be’. Not only did this allow them to proceed in the face of uncertainty, but it required experts to incorporate flexibility into their plans.
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