Wearing hard hats, fluorescent vests, thick wader boots, and expectant grins, a small group gathered along a dirt road in Berkshire County on a cool, gray Monday afternoon. Many in the gathering had waited years for this day.
“So we are in the Nature Conservancy's 1,500-acre Mount Plantain Preserve at the south end of Mount Washington, which is a tiny little town in southwest Massachusetts, population 200. We have a small pond here called Becker Pond, and it has an almost 100-year-old dam on it that has been failing. And so, for the past seven years, we've been working on permitting and design to take it out, and we're here today to watch the dam being taken out," said Karen Lombard, director of stewardship and restoration for The Nature Conservancy in Massachusetts. “We are in a small headwater stream in Mount Washington that flows into Sage's Ravine, which is a popular swimming hole spot and hiking trail, and the Appalachian Trail goes through right south of here. And this stream has a fairly high concentration of brook trout, which is a declining species, needs cold water streams that are getting more rare with climate change. But here we are up on a mountain, and the stream is great habitat, so we're restoring the stream for brook trout.”
The fish had already gotten the message. Just that morning, a promising omen had paid a visit to the Becker Pond Dam site.
“I was walking the stream and found a brook trout in the brand-new stream channel that was just constructed last week. So, they're already moving in," said Chris Hirsch, the dam removal program manager for the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game Division of Ecological Restoration. "We're already seeing early signs of success. The dam hasn't even come down yet. That's coming down today, and it's just incredible to see the fish already coming into the area that we've just restored.”
The Becker Pond Dam was built privately for recreational purposes in the 1930s.
“We've got thousands of dams that are relics of the past, and they were useful at a point in time, and it's just old industrial or ice dams. They’re just — we left our trash in the river, and now we’ve just got to get it out of the way. One of the things that's amazing is that as soon as we take dams down, doesn't matter if we're here, or in Maine, or out west, the fish come back like instantly," said Sarah Widing of Inter-Fluve, an Oregon-based company that works to remove dams and restore waterways to their pre-industrial condition across the United States. “A dam has been in place for a long time, and the river's been moving sediment downstream, it's been getting caught up behind it. So last week, what we did was we excavated a pilot channel, and we tried to follow what we understood to be the channel before the dam was built. And we're pretty confident we found it because we found all these stumps of trees that would have been in the banks. And then to stabilize the rest of the sediment — we're not taking it all out — to stabilize the rest of it in place, we built the banks out of wood. So, any of the trees that we had to take down, we just pushed against the edges and shoved them into the mud. And so, we've already got root wads and scour pools. And I don't know, I mean, it's low-tech materials, but we're just using what we have out here to build the river.”
For The Nature Conservancy, the Becker Pond Dam — hidden deep in an obscure corner of the Berkshires — is a crucial piece of a much larger puzzle.
“We're working in Massachusetts, and this is kind of ground zero for dams," said Barbara Charry, director of Rivers and Lands for The Nature Conservancy in Massachusetts. "We have over 3,000 dams in the state that are legacy dams. The majority of them are not used anymore, they're old and hazardous. And so, we're trying to restore rivers in Massachusetts. This is part of our Appalachians chain all the way down from Alabama all the way up to Maine. So, we're trying to restore rivers all in that landscape, and this is kind of part of our large effort to restore and reconnect rivers across the whole Appalachians and the whole globe.”
The crumbling concrete dam sits about a half-mile down a rough and ready trail off East Street in Mount Washington, about one mile north of the Connecticut state line.
After a safety briefing on the dangers of entering an active construction zone, the group set off into the woods.
At the foot of an access road flattened by the tread of heavy machinery, the SumCo Eco-Contracting team carrying out the actual removal had a pair of yellow excavators poised to strike just above the weathered gray dam.
“So, we've got an excavator here with a hammer on it, and we're going to just start picking away at the top of the dam," said Travis Sumner, SumCo’s co-founder and principal. "We're going to blow it up and make it look like it was never here. So probably within the next couple days, concrete will be broken up, removed from the site, and the only thing that will remain here will be the banks, and it'll look like we were never here.”
With that, it was time for the fireworks. The honor of taking first crack at the dam went to Karen Lombard of The Nature Conservancy to recognize her effort on the project. She climbed into one of the waiting excavators and with the press of a button brought years of painstaking planning, preparation, and procedure to a crushing end.
While almost every party involved in the Becker Dam removal had other irons in the fire to attend to almost immediately, the assemblage — particularly Lombard, still flush from her demolition experience — savored the day and the win it represented.
“Oh, it felt great," she told WAMC. "I've been working on this for seven years. It's a long process. You just touch that machine and it just does things. It's very exciting."
