Dam created for skating rink coming down
In the 1930s, industrialist and philanthropist Charles Dana, of Wilton, decided his children needed an ice-skating pond.
In 1940, he dammed the Norwalk River to make one.
Now, about 80 years after Dana peremptorily decided winter fun came before the river’s worth, his dam is coming down.
“It’s going great,” said Alex Krofta, project manager for Save the Sound, the environmental advocacy group that has pushed for the dam’s removal
When the long-planned work is finished next year, the Norwalk River will flow unimpeded for more than 20 miles, from Long Island Sound to the old industrial dam in the Georgetown section of Redding.
Along that way, it will be reborn.
Louise Washer said the unimpeded river will allow migrating fish, eels and lamprey to swim upstream from the Sound.
“There will be aquatic plants that need flowing water,” she said. “There will be insects that feed in those plants.”
Krofta said those migratory fish — alewives, blueback herring — are nature’s great supply of bait fish, both in the rivers and the Sound.
“They feed everybody,” he said There will also be a natural flow of silt and nutrients downstream, said Jeff Yates, conservation chairman of the Mianus chapter of Trout Unlimited.
“It’s a natural way of fertilizing the stream banks,” Yates said.
Charlie Taney, executive director of the Norwalk River Valley Trail — which will eventually run 30 miles from Norwalk to Danbury — said a better, healthier river will draw more people to the trail.
The trail now runs through Merwin Meadows in Wilton, near
Dana Dam’s now-silted-in pond.
If there are river herring and alewives swimming on a restored river, there will be great blue heron and osprey hunting for them. People will be happy to see them.
“I think it’s great for the environment and great for the trail,” Taney said.
This is the third dam that’s been undone in the Norwalk River. The Flock Process dam in Norwalk was removed in 2018. The Cannondale Dam in Wilton, while not removed, has a six-foot wide breach that allows fish to swim past it.
The project is part of a general trend to remove old dams on state rivers and streams. They are mostly remnants of the state’s 19th century industrial past, when dams, mills and factories went hand in hand.
Alicea Charamut, executive director of the Rivers Alliance of Connecticut, said Connecticut has more than 4,000 such dams.
“They cause issues for migrating fish, as well as for the native fish populations,” she said. Trout, which seek cool water in the summer, can’t necessarily find that water if there’s a big, shallow warm pond blocking the river’s flow.
Chuck Lee, assistant director of the dam safety department of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection’s water planning and management division, said that today many of these dams no longer serve their purpose.
“They block fish and they create a hazard for flooding,” he said.
That’s because dams, like any structure, need maintenance.
People often buy land with a small dam on it, not knowing the cost of repair or removal.
If a storm breaches that dam, it can release a damaging flush of water downstream. The remnants of four tropical storms that soaked the state this summer brought this issue home. Climate change, as predicted, is bringing bigger, wetter, more unstable storms to the state.
Krofta of Save the Sound said the work this year at the Dana Dam will involve replacing the aged, inoperable drainage pipe at the base of the dam.
Once that wire is done, the pond behind it can be drained carefully. Then, Krofta said, Save the Sound will work to re-establish the river’s natural streambed, and restore the pond basin back to ecological health.
“It will look muddy at first, but
things will grow back,” he said.
The Dana Dam, and its concrete base along the side of the river will be removed completely. By this time in 2022, the Norwalk River will flow through where it one was jammed.
The word people use repeatedly in describing this work is connectivity — an attempt to connect natural resources, to put them back in balance.
Yates, of Trout Unlimited, said now there is active work to remove small dams on streams like Comstock Brook in Wilton, to connect them as well. Removing Dana Dam can spur that work on, he said.
“Hopefully, it will stand as another milestone,” he said. “Another, then another.”