Kinneytown Dam in Seymour looks practically idyllic rimmed in two-day-old mid-February snow as the Naugatuck River cascades off its ledges. But this hulk of a structure, however majestically flowing, is causing more harm than anything.
Originally built around 1840 in the river’s industrial age of mills, the dam stopped generating its small amount of hydropower about five years ago. The artificially high part of the river created upstream by the man-made falls poses flooding risks to Route 8 on one side and a Metro-North rail line on the other. The base of the falls, which is a large concrete apron that transitions to a boulder-strewn river, often becomes a fish graveyard — those that go plunging over the falls and those migratory ones that can’t make it up a poorly constructed fish ladder that by all accounts has never worked well.
“If you don’t have good downstream passage as well as upstream passage, you can pass them upstream all you want, but it’s going to kill them on the way down,” said Laura Wildman, a fisheries water resource engineer and vice president of ecological restoration for the advocacy group Save the Sound, which for years has pushed for and assisted with dam removals.
Kinneytown is destined for exactly that. More than $16 million — mostly federal money augmented with a little state funding — has been made available for its removal, though a good bit more will likely be needed.
But Kinneytown is just one of thousands of aging dams in the state that challenge those that oversee and regulate them — public officials, environmentalists, landowners, utilities and almost every community with conflicting interests and priorities.
Historically, dams have provided power, recreational enhancement and water supplies, but their environmental impacts have been a focus for state and national advocates for decades. Climate change is now exacerbating those impacts.
More recently, dams are being considered for their potential to contribute to Connecticut’s quest for more renewable energy.
The competing interests and responsibilities around these structures are playing out in increasingly urgent, but often uneasy, ways.
Dams, dams and more dams
The Department of Energy and Environmental Protection puts the number of dams in Connecticut at approximately 4,800. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. Based on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers information, that’s believed to be the highest number of dams per 100 river miles of any state in the nation.
The vast majority of Connecticut’s dams have histories that go back more than 100 years (though some are much older), range in size from small to tiny, and are privately owned. Most are not even noticeable — a waterfall here, a cute little pond there that in reality are the products of a dam redirecting water flow. And they likely would have remained unnoticed if not for a near-catastrophic breach in January at a small, poorly maintained dam with longstanding non-compliance issues.
The Fitchville Pond Dam along the Yantic River in Bozrah catapulted dams in Connecticut into public consciousness, at least briefly. Storms and runoff — likely intensified by climate change — caused the January problem, just as they have caused flooding and dam breaches around the state in recent years.
[Leaky dam with troubled past tests CT’s dam safety system]
Last summer, old earthen dams proved no match for a series of storms as flooding of a magnitude not seen since catastrophic floods in 1955 washed out some areas in the Northwest part of the state. Many of those old dams were actually part of a dam-building frenzy after 1955 that was aimed at preventing further such catastrophes.
While dam issues can cross several state departments, local and federal jurisdictions, DEEP is the key regulator. It maintains a publicly available spreadsheet of dam registrations as well as a point-and-click map that is so crowded, it is almost impossible to read without zooming in to miniscule areas at a time.
The most important regulations concern safety. Classifications include hazard level — “high” and “significant” being the two worst. High hazard denotes a probable loss of life if a dam failure occurs. Then there are condition categories that range from unsatisfactory to good, based on an engineers’ investigations.
At last count, DEEP said 567 dams fall into the two worst hazard categories, and 66 of those are considered to be in poor condition. Owners of dams in the high and significant hazard categories are required to file what’s known as an emergency action plan with DEEP, although they have no responsibility to tell nearby residents if they are living in a dam breach inundation zone.
“Those emergency action plans have inundation mapping, so we know, if that dam were to fail, what areas would be inundated,” said Chuck Lee, assistant director of dam safety programs at DEEP. “It doesn’t require the dam owner to notify people downstream. It does require the dam owner to notify emergency personnel and give a copy of that emergency action plan to any municipality that would be affected.”
A new dam inspection system in place since 2014 has put the onus on dam owners to inspect and complete repairs and emergency action plans as needed. It has enabled DEEP to better account for its dams, especially those at highest risk, and better maintain them.
In 2021, the state passed a law that requires property sellers to indicate if there is a registered dam on their property. In many cases dams can be so obscure that property buyers may not even be aware of their existence, let alone understand the requirements owning one.
Legislation proposed this session would allow DEEP greater ability to take action when a dam poses an imminent risk.
Dams were built for many purposes. Those that generate electricity, control flooding and supply water are the kinds most likely to be kept in use. Some were built for recreation, providing large and small water bodies — referred to as impoundments — calmer and safer than the river itself.
Many, many more in Connecticut, however, were built in the 1800s to run mill operations for everything from textile manufacturing to grinding grain. Many of these have been left to essentially rot, posing all kinds of hazards, likely to be felt more profoundly due to the extremes of climate change.
Torrential rains and runoff put more pressure on dams that were not built to handle those volumes of water. Drought and heat can result in other problems.
“That sort of speaks to the requirement for owner-responsible inspections,” Lee said. “Those inspections we’re receiving are much more detailed than we would have done in the past. And what part of that inspection will look at is the spillway and the capacity of that spillway.”
Even if components like a spillway are adequate to meet the Army Corps of Engineers standards the department uses, Lee said that when owners come in for permits, his office will push them to increase spillway sizes to accommodate the unknowns of climate change and to even think about removing dams.
But very few permits are requested in any given year compared to the number of dams.
Advocates argue there’s a lot more to consider environmentally than whether a spillway is big enough.
Dams and their environment
“One of the things that people don’t realize about rivers is that they transport water and sediment. And that’s a delicate balance,” said Wildman, of Save the Sound.
What she means is that if you put in a dam in a river, instead of allowing for the natural erosion and rebuilding process that fills deltas and beaches downstream, the river leaves sediment and contaminants clogged behind the dam. Just about anything in or around the river can wind up stuck there too — from fish to mussels, to aquatic invertebrates to little bugs to turtles.
These beings need to move for all kinds of reasons — their life cycles, to avoid predators, and to deal with the changing climate, re: moving to cooler waters if it’s too hot in one area.
“Anything you affect as far as the aquatic species affects the terrestrial species, the birds of prey, the bears, the raccoons everything else,” Wildman said. “When you’re putting a dam in this dynamic, interconnected ecosystem, you’re changing all these natural processes and functions, and it has a cascading effect.”
But don’t think a fish ladder or fish passage that’s supposed to help migrating fish up over a dam to spawn upstream will fix it. They’re species-specific, leaving the majority of fish behind. And if there’s no way to get the fish back down, then it’s for nothing.
“Fish passages, fishways are horrifically inefficient,” Wildman said. “The most recent studies show fish passages can be, in best case scenarios, like 50% passage, and worst case scenarios zero, and many of the fishways we have in Connecticut actually probably aren’t passing any fish.”
Dams arguably are a key reason Atlantic salmon are basically gone from Connecticut. And they’re no small part of why shad, river herring and lamprey eels are reduced to tiny populations.
That’s not the extent of the problems caused by dams, however.
Over decades, the build-up of impervious surfaces like roads and buildings are producing more and more runoff that, in turn, stresses dam systems built when roads were often porous dirt and there were fewer people.
The runoff now carries more debris, chemicals, septic contamination and potential toxins than it did a century ago, dumping all of this into rivers and dammed bodies of water. This creates a contamination stew that can also heat water, making it more hospitable to invasive species, dangerous insects and other types of growth.
The impacts of climate change and weather extremes can make the situation even worse. There’s less flushing and aeration of the water and lower dissolved oxygen, which leads to toxic algae blooms in the less dynamic water bodies created by dams.
Rainbow Reservoir on the Farmington River in Windsor still has an active small hydro-electric plant, but even that amount of water movement has not prevented algae from growing.
“Three separate summers, the algae blooms got to such high levels that the water became toxic,” Wildman said. “It would have been dangerous for your pets or your children, or anyone for that matter.”
And that’s just the short list of reasons removal is often the preferred course of action for so many of the state’s dams — something DEEP supports when it’s appropriate and feasible.
“If anything comes from this emergency and almost tragedy in Bozrah, we hope it will be really a renewed interest in barrier removal or dam removal,” said Graham Stevens, bureau chief for water protection and land reuse at DEEP.
The key question, he said, is whether the dam is still serving its intended purpose. For instance, if water regularly pours over a spillway of a flood control dam, then it’s causing flooding, not preventing it.
Stevens points to Dana Dam on the Norwalk River in Wilton, removed last September with help from a number of groups that had fought for nearly a quarter-of-a-century to eliminate the dam. The cost was nearly $4 million, and it opened a fish passage that had been blocked for 125 years and almost immediately narrowed the channel, allowing for better water flow.
“We really want to work with dam owners, municipalities, nonprofit organizations, to strategically address dams that no longer serve their intended purpose and that pose a risk so that Connecticut is better positioned to deal with the effects of climate change,” Stevens said.
But some people have begun pushing for another option for at least a few of the state’s old dams. A legislatively mandated task force has been looking into repurposing some for hydropower, which is considered renewable energy.
Could hydro help?
The task force was proposed last session by Rep. Bill Buckbee, R-New Milford, the house ranking member on the Energy and Technology Committee. Buckbee runs a nonprofit park where the Still River meets the Housatonic, not far from some of the state’s biggest hydropower dams.
Aside from the park flooding more regularly, either from storms or from letting more water out of the nearby impoundments to deal with those storms, Buckbee said his research determined that hydro is keeping energy rates down in other parts of the country.
“Why aren’t we rethinking things here?” he said. “Every time people talk green energy, that means we’re talking wind or solar, wind or solar, wind or solar. … We have to explore the other options and see what’s going to be the safest and the most economical.”
He’s not talking about the tiny dams — some of those, he said, should come out. But he figures some dams could be upgraded. “I don’t think you can make great decisions unless you’re looking at the whole picture,” he said in explaining the point of a task force.
The legislation received few comments. DEEP was noncommittal in its brief, three-paragraph submission that essentially just offered assistance.
Since then, the task force has been criticized for being top-heavy with energy industry representation, with only one environmental advocate. The report, due Feb. 1, has now been delayed to April 1.
The task force chair is Len Greene, vice president of external affairs for FirstLight Energy, which, by its account, owns about 84% of the total installed capacity of hydropower in the state — about 10 of the roughly three dozen active hydropower operations.
Connecticut doesn’t buy a drop of FirstLight’s power.
The nearly 91 megawatts — roughly enough to power around 68,000 homes — generated by four of FirstLight’s plants is all purchased by an array of municipal electric operations in Massachusetts through contracts that don’t expire until sometime between 2029 and 2040. Among those plants is the largest hydro in the state at 42.6 megawatts — Shepaug Dam on the Housatonic River in Southbury and Newtown — and the Stevenson Dam in Monroe, providing 28 megawatts.
By way of comparison, the two largest hydro operations in New England are on the upper Connecticut River between Vermont and New Hampshire — Moore Dam at 192 megawatts and Comerford Station at 168 megawatts.
The point of the task force is to assess whether it’s worth getting some of Connecticut’s many old dams, just sitting there producing no power, back in operation to help increase the renewable power mix.
The answer, according to Greene, is maybe.
The big issue, likely to no one’s surprise, is money.
“The very, very few dams that exist right now that could be powered, the reality is that it’s incredibly expensive to build, incredibly difficult from a regulatory standpoint,” Greene said. “But even if you got over those hurdles, building and maintaining those facilities without a solid revenue stream is impossible.”
Even for dams that are already powered, it’s a stretch, said Duncan Broatch, chair of the Connecticut Small Power Producers Association and a task force member.
Broatch, who has rehabbed a number of small dams in the state, owns Dayville Hydro, which generates 100 kilowatts. That’s 0.1 megawatts. The problem the way Broatch sees it is Connecticut only pays hydro owners like him the wholesale rate for their power — an approximate, meager 3 cents per kilowatt hour. That means he makes about $11,000 gross revenue annually. His insurance runs $5,000, and he has to pay people to maintain and repair his dam.
“I lose money every year,” he said. “Fifteen cents [per kilowatt hour] would keep projects like this in the black.”
He said that amount would cover relicensing by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which issues licenses or exemptions to all hydropower dams, and would help dam owners upgrade their systems as new technology becomes available.
“Connecticut is way behind; it’s embarrassing how they have neglected hydro,” Broatch said. He’d like to see hydro get the same kind of consideration from the state as wind and solar. “The main thing in my mind is to save the ones that are still running so they don’t close up shop, and also those ones that were decommissioned — put those back on line.”
Hydropower has a problematic status in the environmental community. Although it is not carbon-emitting like fossil fuel power, there are greenhouse gas emissions associated with it.
It can also suffer from the effects of climate change. Hydro in the western U.S. and Canada has literally dried up during recent droughts. Even the Northeast, which buys big Canadian hydro, has faced temporary cutoffs — as recently as last summer — when heat and wildfires spurred by those droughts resulted in transmission shutdowns.
Hydro also often includes intentionally flooding certain areas to provide water sources, which has meant submerging towns, which was the case with Candlewood Lake north of Danbury when it was created in 1926 as part of the still-operating Rocky River hydro plant.
Pumping water into a reservoir, which certain types of hydro do, often requires a lot of power and can cause portions of a river to flow backwards for periods of time.
“There’s a good possibility that some of those that are out there now are not worth saving and may have much, much higher environmental impact than they’re worth,” Greene said.
But Greene also notes that hydros have a lot of flexibility. FirstLight, he said, is looking to potentially pair its dams with battery storage and other renewables. For instance, it’s considering putting solar panels on dams or at the Shepaug facility, on the adjacent land.
Environmental advocates urge caution for a variety of reasons.
Wildman, the lone advocate on the task force, and others repeatedly point out that even small hydro can have significant environmental impacts, which is why Wildman would like to see the focus on larger hydro facilities, especially those not on the main stem of a river where a dam can diminish water flow in the upstream tributaries.
“Yes, they have significant impacts on the ecosystem, but we’re getting a significant amount of power and economic benefits out of these. I would rather have the impacts in fewer spots and get more benefit from that one spot than spread the energy out over an entire landscape,” she said.
She and others also suggest that the best candidates for producing power are dams that already serve a critical purpose such as flood control — the state has about 75 of these dams — or large-scale recreation with economic benefits.
“A good example of a dam that I think should be producing hydropower [is] Colebrook dam,” said Alicea Charamut, executive director of the Rivers Alliance of Connecticut, who is not on the task force but has monitored its work.
Colebrook was one of several dams built for flood control after the 1955 floods. Its three-megawatt hydro component was shut down a few years ago.
“That dam’s not going anywhere. It’s a flood control dam. It’s a dam behind another dam,” Charamut said. “That’s a very good example of something that should be incentivized.”
She and others point to the Upper Collinsville hydro, also known as the Canton hydro. It was re-activated last year — more than half-a-century after the hydro portion of the dam, built in the 1860s, shut down — with a $6.5 million retrofit with state-of-the-art equipment and a fishway. The lower Collinsville dam, on the other hand, is slated for removal, and Charamut said that’s the right move.
“There has already been a feasibility study that says that it is not going to be economically feasible,” she said.
Given the flooding and extreme storms in the last few years, Greene said that dams that were never designed for flood control are essentially serving that function anyway by releasing water from impoundments in anticipation of large volumes of stormwater and runoff.
“We have to manage that water as best as we can to try to mitigate flooding where we can. At some point, though, the river just takes over, and it doesn’t matter what we do,” he said. “We basically just have to open all of the gates up and just let the water through.”
As to the question of whether Connecticut should look to nature or hydro as a way to deal with its dams, there’s no single answer.
But for Kinneytown Dam, the answer is clear to Aaron Budris, environmental planning director at the Naugatuck Valley Council of Governments.
“I think it’s a really good example of hydro is not necessarily a bad idea, but hydro in a bad location is a bad idea. And I think Kinneytown Dam is in just a really bad location.”
Losing Kinneytown
Kinneytown is the first dam on the Naugatuck, so it essentially blocks migratory fish from the entire river. Until Kinneytown is removed, Tingue Dam — a mile north — is stuck with a brand-new, but essentially useless, $7 million fishway and adjacent park. Tingue was not removed because its structure is intertwined with a road over the river. After Tingue, there’s no dam until Thomaston.
Kinneytown actually has two powerhouses — a bigger one in Seymour and a smaller one in Ansonia. Ansonia stopped operating in 2010, Seymour in 2019. It’s arguably 30 years behind on maintenance after having changed ownership a number of times. And it can’t always handle the kinds of water flows extreme storms are producing.
A just completed independent safety inspection of the smaller dam in Ansonia – also known as the Coe Pond Dam – has found it to have several poor conditions and its structural integrity is questionable. Such conditions could cause the dam to breach which would pose an immediate threat to public safety with the potential for loss of life. It could also threaten the adjacent Waterbury Branch on the MetroNorth line.
“It is an example of small hydro that’s no longer a viable place to create electricity,” Budris said.
Best case scenario, it will take another couple of years to remove Kinneytown, which will bring to around 50 the number of dams Connecticut has removed in the last 90 years.
Small earthen dams are relatively easy to remove, compared to a big, concrete dam like Kinneytown. Some of the removal problems stem from the Naugatuck River’s industrial history. Not only was it known for changing colors depending on what had been dumped in it, it also caught fire in the 1940s.
The remnants of all that contamination can likely be found in the sediment that has built up behind the dam, downstream at the Ansonia portion, and in the canal and pond between them. Disposing of that sediment will be tricky at best.
“I think towns that own dams, they’re starting to come to terms with the real cost of owning that type of infrastructure. And I think if you remove a dam, it’s a one-time cost,” Budris said. “If you want to keep it, you have to maintain it, you have to inspect it, you have to work on it. It’s a lifetime of costs.”
River experts say little river restoration will most likely be needed at Kinneytown or other dam removals.
“There is no more effective way to restore a river than to take out a dam,” said Colleen McNally-Murphy, associate national director of the Hydropower Reform Coalition. “What we’ve seen time and time again is that the rivers can heal themselves. It takes time. It’s not necessarily overnight. But again and again, we’ve seen that once a dam is out, the river heals itself faster than people expect.”
After Kinneytown is removed, the flood risk the area faces now from all the impounded water will basically disappear, and the river will be able to open up to greater recreational use.
Laura Wildman from Save the Sound tramps through snow, past the rusted metal of the old hydro station above the inert fish ladder, careful to avoid rotted flooring.
She said that she sees taking out the dam as the key to turning what was once an industrial sewer of a river back into what she called a “gem.”
And then added: “I’ve always said it’s my favorite river I’ve ever worked on because it’s the one that needs me the most.”