All this week, jackhammers have been destroying a small dam on the Wells River in Groton. The dam was built in 1908 to power Groton homes but it’s been useless since it was damaged by the 1927 flood.
At the demolition site excavators pulverize and cart away what’s left of the concrete structure that once held a turbine, a flywheel and a drive train for a small, defunct hydropower plant. Ron Rhodes is Steward for the Connecticut River Watershed Council, which is leading this project. Rhodes says "good riddance" to a dam that kept trout downstream from swimming and spawning upstream.
“These dam removals take pinch points out of the river,” Rhodes explains. “They’re good for fish passage and quite frankly they make our towns more flood resilient because… in high flows like Irene, you don’t have the dam pinching the river and holding the water back.”
Instead, he says, high waters will now escape into a flood plain forest and wetlands where they can dissipate, rather than destroy property.
As Rhodes strolls down a dirt path from his pick-up truck to the riverbank, he points out two big machines hard at work.
“The orange excavator is the one that has the hoe ram or the big jack hammer on it; the yellow excavator is the one with the bucket that’s removing the concrete as the other one breaks it up,” he says.
The cost for this project, funded by both public and private sources, is about $125,000. That includes re-planting of the scenic site. Rhodes says there are hundreds of small dams like this in Vermont that should be destroyed. The next one on the council’s take-down list is about 40 miles away.
“Ompompanoosuc River down in the Thetford-West Fairlee area. There’s no shortage of deadbeat dams, you know, to take out of the rivers,” he adds.
But there is limited funding for dam removal, and there can be opposition from people who like to swim in the pools dams create. That’s why Rhodes places a priority on small, obsolete obstructions like this one. The Groton dam is now owned by Green Mountain Power, which is helping to pay for the demolition. Eventually, Rhodes says, the town might buy the refurbished recreation site.
