River levels drop for dam maintenence
WOONSOCKET – The Blackstone River was pretty low above the Woonsocket Falls Flood Control Dam on Monday but obviously not because of a lack of rainfall or summer drought.
The river’s water level above the dam was lowered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers due to annual maintenance projects, according to Michael Debroisse, the city’s superintendent of solid waste and engineering.
“The Army Corps is doing their annual maintenance on the Woonsocket Falls Dam and released water from the impoundment area upstream from the dam,” Debroisse explained.
The project includes maintenance on the dam structure and equipment as well as testing of the flood control gate mechanism that is done each year, he noted.
The gates can be raised to different levels in order to control the speed of water flowing downstream when rains swell the river and cause concern over flooding.
The impoundment area running to the Blackstone town line has raised rip-rip covered banks that were installed as part of the Woonsocket Flood Control Project built following the massive flooding of the Blackstone Valley in August of 1955. The flooding occurred when two back-to-back storms passing through the area caused earthen dams, including Woonsocket’s old Horseshoe Falls Dam at Harris Pond, to fail and send a wall of water to roaring through the Social Flatlands.
The project also installed flood walls and levees along the river’s course through downtown Woonsocket along with pumping stations to lower rising groundwater in the protected areas.
The city maintained the
project for years and then turned it over to the Army Corps’s ownership and operation in 2009 as part of a major update of its facilities.
Debroisse noted that the river’s lowering above South Main Street also provides the Thundermist Hydro power generating plant, a city-owned facility now leased to a private operator, to do maintenance work on its intake system and clean up work to also be done on the upstream river bed.
Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt noted on Monday that a large tree carried by the river’s waters could be seen high and dry on the banks near the Singleton Street Bridge.
Although no Earth Day River clean-ups were held this year due to the coronavirus crisis, but Debroisse said some area residents and the city have been taking advantage of the lowering to remove visible debris.
Keith Hainley, a member of the Blackstone River Watershed Council-Friends of the Blackstone, has been among the individuals going out on the river in canoes and kayaks to drag in some of the easily collected discarded materials.
“He’s been a doing a lot of clean up while the river’s dam is open,” Debroisse said.
The debris includes the bikes and scooters tossed in from the banks as well as rigid plastic items, shopping carts and other metal items such as shopping carts, he noted.
“We let them bring the debris to the highway facility on River Street and then dispose of it properly,” Debroisse said.
Much of the material, such as the metal items, can be recycled and the city will also go to the river to collect any heavier items that are brought up the river bank and left there, he added.
That is all that can be done for now given the continuing crisis and postponement of large scale public clean-up events, according to Debroisse.
“There are no organized river clean ups and we can’t do anything right now,” Debroisse said.
The Army Corps of Engineers usually works on its annual maintenance projects for a week or so and then starts to refill the impoundement area, according to Debroisse.
“When they have everything all set, it then takes a couple of days to slowly fill up,” he said.