Old Dams Will Destroy Us
To save our towns from climate change, we must free our rivers
This week, as nine inches of rain fell on Vermont in a single day, and citizens of the state’s capital, Montpelier, found themselves waste deep in river water, I was reminded of the time bombs that are ticking all over New England ready to blow. I’m talking about the 10,000+ useless dams left over from the industrial revolution that were simply not built to endure the inundations they will face in the years to come.
And I thought in particular of one success story to the south of Vermont where things are working out much better. I’ll retell the story here.
In staid New England, if a younger man drives onto the property of an elderly woman and threatens to knock something down, you expect pushback: an argument, a call to the authorities, and the subsequent removal of the man from the premises. But on a cool November morning in Colchester, Connecticut, quite the opposite is occurring. Here, on the banks of a midsized watercourse called the Jeremy River, Steve Gephard, a fisheries biologist with the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environment Protection, has arrived with Sally Harold of the Nature Conservancy and a backhoe-mounted jackhammer. They direct workmen to rip down a dam on the property of 84-year-old Yankee matriarch Nan Wasniewski. As…
