US dams are going back to nature Demolition efforts step up
NEW YORK -- By the banks of the birthplace of American fly-fishing, backhoes are demolishing a dam that for a century has blocked the easy flow of the Neversink River.
The Cuddebackville dam in the Catskills is being pulled down by the Nature Conservancy and the US Army Corps of Engineers in a $2.2 million project that is among dozens of dam demolition efforts underway this year across the country. The Corps of Engineers, long the nation's preeminent dam-builder, is learning to become its dam-eradicator instead.
Never before has a dam in New York State been demolished solely for the environment's sake. In the muddy aftermath of recent hurricane-related flooding that swelled the Neversink flow to 50 times its normal rate, a construction crew continued to dismantle the low-lying, 107-foot-long dam. A third of it has been torn down.
The fish are now swimming freely.
"We have the dam breached; we have fish past the dam for the first time in 100 years," said aquatic ecologist Colin Apse at the Conservancy's Neversink River project office.
The Cuddebackville dam is among 60 being torn down this year in 14 states as part of a growing movement to clear rivers of defunct barriers, according to American Rivers, an environmental group in Washington, D.C.
More than 77,000 dams straddle streams nationwide, with at least 7,000 in New York.
But few waterways so neatly illustrate the paradox of coexistence between nature and urban-dwellers as the Neversink, a tributary of the Delaware River that flows through the rolling greensward 90 miles north of New York City.
No other stream in the 13,000 square miles of the Delaware River watershed is so pristine or occupies such a special place in the history of angling. But it also is heavily integrated into the plumbing of a major metropolitan region.
Every time a New Yorker takes a bath, he or she takes a dip in the Neversink. Every glass of Manhattan tap water, every sprinkle from a Staten Island showerhead, every Brooklyn toilet flush begins, in part, with a chilly rivulet cascading across the smooth cobbles at the bottom of the Neversink River.
The headwaters of the Neversink are cached upstream in a 35-billion-gallon reservoir and then channeled through the world's longest continuous underground tunnel to become the purest source of water for the city's 8 million residents.
Even so, the waters below the reservoir retain a reputation as one of the finest wild trout fisheries in the world. There, anglers in the 1840s first developed the techniques that set fly-fishing in the New World apart from the more placid practices of Europe.
Its currents nurture brown trout, rainbow trout, smallmouth bass, alewife, and shad. The world's healthiest population of endangered dwarf wedge mussels lives below the dam. Osprey and eagles nest in overhanging trees.
The Cuddebackville dam, 40 miles downstream from the reservoir, was built in 1915 to feed local canals for barge traffic and to generate hydropower. It was abandoned in 1945.
By tearing it down, the Conservancy and the Corps are striving to balance often-competing worlds.
"We are not going to have a truly natural river, but we will get conditions that are good enough that all the native species can thrive," Schuler said.
