Connecticut has approximately 4,800 dams, according to the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. According to information from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, that’s thought to be the highest number of dams per 100 river miles in the country.
WSHU’s Molly Ingram spoke with CT Mirror’s Jan Ellen Spiegel to discuss her article, “Thousands of dams in CT pose risks and challenges,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. You can read her story here.
WSHU: Your story is about the thousands of dams in Connecticut. Getting anywhere in the state is difficult without driving past a dam. Most people probably don’t even think twice about them. What prompted you to write this story?
JES: What prompted me to do this is quite a bit of reporting on climate change and flooding issues. And in the course of looking at the many, many flooding issues the state and region have faced, arguably exacerbated by climate change, the issue of dams and the potential for their removal as a way to ease flooding interested me. It kept coming up, and it seemed to be somewhat counterintuitive, that you would take out a dam to prevent flooding. I think most people would think, well, it’s a wall put up to stop flooding, but it’s exactly the opposite. So that’s why I started working on it in the first place.
WSHU: At the beginning of your story, you say there are competing interests and responsibilities around the dams. Who is responsible for the structures, and how was that decision made?
JES: Well, that’s a complicated question. These dams are owned by different entities. For instance, at this stage of the game, you might have a municipality that owns a dam or the MDC that owns a dam, especially if it is providing water to an area. The Feds would kick in on a hydroelectric dam because they would have to license it. Licensing can mean giving them a license or saying they’re exempt from a license, but it still has to go through FERC. But then you have all these other tiny dams, that may be on private property; in fact, most of them are like that.
And you get to individual homeowners, or, you know, something may be on a company’s land, a vestige of an old mill when a lot of these were originally built in the late 1800s, even mid-1800s. And so you have this whole group of potential owners here, some of which, you know, have financial interests that are formidable, like a company that owns a hydroelectric dam, as opposed to somebody who has what they think is a little pond out back of their house, and it turns out, that’s actually a dam. And if something were to go wrong with it, it’s on them to deal with it. So you’re dealing across the board with all kinds of different possibilities.
WSHU: Let’s talk a little bit about the pros and cons. First, what are the dangers of these structures?
JES: Dams, especially in the northeast, were a source of power going back to the 1800s. When they ran industrial operations, they ran them to grind corn and to make fabric, they ran them for all kinds of things. And so they were a functional industrial component. A lot of them are, of course, no longer needed. Some of them have been left to rot. So some of the downsides would be that they’re just sitting there blocking up the river, making problems, not allowing stream flow to go through as a result of the blockages there.
All kinds of sediment can pile up on the backsides of those dams in the area, which they would refer to as the impoundment; that’s where the water gathers. It will push out the sides of the river in that area, which is why and how they can cause more flooding. Once you pull a dam out, that whole width will actually shrink. So those are some of the issues. In addition, with the sediment that piles up because of the industrial legacy, there can be a lot of toxins in this day and age, runoff just from pavement, since there’s so much more impervious surface in the state that can get in there.
We haven’t even gotten to the wildlife. One of the biggest issues for any dam is that it will block wildlife passage. And that’s been a big issue in Connecticut, where fish can’t climb up and down. Those migratory fish that need to go upstream to spawn can’t get up. Often fish passages are put in sometimes something known as a fish ladder, which looks like a ladder. They’re very fish-specific; only some can get up, and once they get up, getting back down can be anywhere from difficult to impossible. So you haven’t really solved that issue.
The impoundments, those areas that are closed off because they don’t have a lot of flow, and they don’t have a lot of flushing, you know, we talk about flushing on the shoreline when tides come in and out. But if you’re blocking water passage, you’re not getting that kind of flushing; you can get algae and other kinds of growths piling up there that can be toxic to humans and wildlife. We’ve seen that in a number of dams around the state. Rainbow reservoir, for one, up in the northern part of the state, has had a lot of problems with that. Plus, you can get invasive species of all kinds, whether it’s plants, animals, insects, you name it. So what you’ve done, and I guess this is sort of the overarching point, is you’ve taken a natural flowing area of the geography and closed it up in various places. So all the natural wildlife that occurs around those areas can’t do what they would normally do. Whether they will eventually adapt, we don’t know. Will they die off? Sometimes we’ve seen that happen. So that’s sort of the overarching issue there.
WSHU: And what does the future look like for the state’s dams? Are there plans to start deconstructing any? Is there legislation in play? What’s going on there?
JES: Well, there’s a bunch of things going on. We do have a few hydroelectric dams in the state that generate, not a ton of power in the scheme of power. You know, we’re talking something along the lines of about 30 megawatts at most. What that means in real time is that we say about 750 homes can be powered per megawatt, you know, compare that with some of the bigger hydroelectric dams in northern New England, they’re in the 160-170 megawatt range and something like Millstone nuclear power plant, that’s 2100 megawatts. So I’m just giving that as a comparison. But there is a movement to see if some of the smaller dams can be repowered. And if so, some of the smaller dams that are very, very tiny, less than a megawatt that are running but are running really at a loss, if something can be done to make them more profitable. It’s very, very, very expensive. I think that’s clear.
A task force has been working on this for about a year; their report is due on April 1. It’s being led by the biggest of the hydroelectric owners in this state, a company called First Light. And they do have dams around the region. So that’s one avenue. Can we make it more useful with what’s there to give us a zero-emissions type of power that is entirely renewable? Is it entirely zero emissions? Not exactly. But there is that movement.
On the other hand, we have these old dams falling apart, and they are causing problems: the fish can’t get through. The water is stagnating, it’s causing flooding. So there has been an ongoing, though very, very, very slow movement to remove some of the dams, there was one in Wilton in the last several months that was just removed. There’s a move right now to remove a much bigger one, the Kinneytown Sam. It’s a two-part dam in Seymour and Ansonia. As expensive as it is to rebuild these things and make them profitable for hydroelectricity. It’s just as expensive to take them out. And then you have to get all that built-up sediment from behind, which may be toxic, and dump that somewhere.
The flip side is literally as soon as you take a dam out, that impoundment goes away, the river shrinks and fish can get through. So there is that. So we have very, very oppositional things going on two different tracks. And there is legislation right now at least to deal with that report when it comes out also to potentially allow the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection to take quicker action than they’re really allowed to right now in the case of a dam breach or some other major problem.