And the discovery of gravitational waves. And you can tune in tomorrow afternoon at 2 this is Connecticut Public Radio w n.p.r. N.w. N.p.r. H.t. One merit and at 90.5 w p k t n w p k t h d one Norwich at 89 point one w e Stamford at 88.5 w. Southampton at 91.3 and w. Npr dot org The. Previously reported. Over there Ok maybe you actually can see from where you're sitting for point is if you could see a pond this is very very good chance there would be a dam associated with it somewhere you would if you couldn't see that there are 4000 or so dams in Connecticut some of them are very old some of them are built before modern engineering ever happened some of them are in consequential but some if they broke. Huge cascading problems this is happened before in the history of Connecticut it could conceivably happen again particular if we don't keep up with inspections explaining all of this today but also some good things about dams we're talking especially about how we can still hydro power out of dams and one or 2 new projects that might do exactly that all that's coming up after the news. Live from n.p.r. News in Washington I'm Jack Speer in a 5 to 4 decision the Supreme Court Justices of up held president Trump's order banning travel from a handful of Muslim majority countries initial reaction of the decision to uphold the president's travel ban sparked a protest in Washington today Mr trauma Cacchioli from member station was there and has this report Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the opinion the ban falls within the president's right to strengthen national security. Outside a small crowd chanting Muslim American direction Raj a sees the move as another means by which the trumpet ministration can use the border to separate families that's painful to know that you live in a country that does not only not exception but seems you and bending your community as something of a national security issue in a statement President Trump said the decision had vindicated him and his policies on immigration for n.p.r. News I'm Mr Tom Akili in Washington the nation's highest court today has blocked a California law requiring crisis pregnancy centers run by abortion opponents to provide information about abortion services justices in a 5 to 4 ruling endorsing the argument advanced by critics of the democratic back Lorena fall of the Constitution's guarantee of free speech Kristen Wagner's general counsel of the group Alliance Defending Freedom the Supreme Court rightly put a stop to this unconstitutional law today that undermined the good work of the Senate and it Bradly stood up for the 1st amendment rights of all Americans to be able to speak messages that are consistent with our deeply held convictions were the abortion rights group name roll Pro-Choice America calls the centers fake women's health centers because they did not provide details about a range of options available to women including abortion the group accused the court of turning its back on women a wildfire burning northwest of Sacramento is continuing to force of accusation some 1500 people have already had to leave. Our homes in the Lake County area of fire is now grown to nearly 800 square miles and poses a threat to an area already hard hit by wildfires Suki Lewis of member station k.q.e.d. People started evacuating Saturday night and then kind of ballooned a little bit over the weekend I'm Sunday and took out a number of homes so far it's 22 structures I think is the count 12 of those are homes 10 of those are outbuildings and Porter Suki Lewis California Governor Jerry Brown yesterday declared a state of emergency in Lake County about a motive trade group says it intends to inform the trumpet ministration of us tried to impose tariffs of up to 25 percent of imported vehicles will cost consumers upwards of $45000000000.00 a year roughly $5800.00 a vehicle lines of Automobile Manufacturers represents General Motors Toyah Volkswagen and a host of others on Wall Street today the Dow is up 30 points the Nasdaq rose 29 points this is n.p.r. . 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Hello So there are thousands and thousands of dams in Connecticut but many of them are so baked into the landscape and you probably don't notice them even if you see them and you probably also can't imagine what the landscape would be like if the dam weren't there you probably don't even realize that that pond that is ponded up behind the dam is the result of a dam so when talk about all that today we're going to also talk about how there's still the potential not more than just potential for getting electricity out of certain dams Well what about their effect on fish or hard stuff like that so we're going to begin a little bit unusually for us last week Betty Kaplan producer Betsy Kaplan said I want to go out and learn more about dams go out in the field this is an places where there have been dams and I said that's very hazardous could be very dangerous short of the clip from Chinatown. I should or disaster movies I said Arkin have you out there are going around looking at their homes senator in turn that's what they're for but she insisted on going ourself not just by herself though she was actually joined by one of our guests today are also here in this clip Steve got part supervising fisheries biologist for the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental protection otherwise known as Deep fisheries division All right so let's hear Betsey's adventure I visited at Bill's pond on the East branch of the river in Lyme Connecticut last week to learn how the removal of one Connecticut dam changed life in and around this waterway the 8 mile flows through lime and joins the Connecticut River at Hamburg Cove 8 miles upriver from the Long Island Sound here in Lima on the East Branch This always has been a babbling trout stream Steve Gephardt showed me around he's worked on Connecticut dam projects at the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental protection for over 35 years but we built this dam and turned a section of that stream from babbling trout stream into a pond with a lily pad. Yes there was more suitable for pickerel frogs and bullheads and it also filled with mud in the leaves and not much was actually living in here when we drained it the dam that had been there since the 1930 s. Was removed a few years ago returning it to the gently flowing stream Connecticut's earliest colonists would have seen when they arrived here in 16 hundreds today the streams cool clear water flows over lots of different sized rocks and there's vegetation be growing along the banks it was hard for me to envision the massive pond that once filled the land where we were currently standing look at the Bath Tub Ring there see that line right along there that was where the water level was all the way along and so all of this would have been under water if you look over there you'll see that the sun is shining on some very bright green trees in the distance the pond extended right around the corner beyond those bright green trees and so this whole area was an expanse of pond of water there over $4000.00 dams in Connecticut the earliest ones built in 16 hundreds to harness water pair for Connecticut's earliest industries like grain paper and wood Mills while most of these dams no longer drive our modern economy they remain a symbol of and in the static reminder of where we started about 80 percent of Connecticut dams on land of its privately owned the remaining dams are on land owned by public municipalities non-profits and about 200 located in state parks and forests are managed by deep. Many of these dams in the recreational areas that grew up around them seep into the collective memories of a community as we're standing looking down at were the dam used to be there's this very prominent rock and you can see by the coloration the downstream side is dark and weathered the upstream side is white the dam used to go right across that huge boulder in the summer when people were here swimming and fishing there was just a little bit of water that cascaded down and spilled on that rock and people used to sit on that rock and it was called kissing rock and I suspect that many people got their 1st kiss on that rock and so there's a sentimental attachment and one of the things we were asked when we were working with the dam owner to remove the dam you're not going to destroy kissing rock are you but these old stone earth dams can also read Kabat on the streams they block they threaten migratory fish and plant life trap contaminants left in the industries they once powered and pose a safety hazard to the people and property that abut them the inland water resources division of deep is responsible for enforcing Connecticut's dam safety laws those deemed unsafe must be repaired by the owner or removed Steve spends time with owners to explain the benefits of removing a dam. He says March in the not apprehension gives way to pleasant surprise at the beauty of the streams return to its natural state and Bill pond it was named after the man who built the dam or at least rebuilt the dam in the 1930 s. And this land had been in the bill family for many generations and it still owned by Ed bills grandson and so the decision to remove this dam was not entered into lightly the grandson swam and fished in this pond and loved it sometimes in Connecticut still play a vital role in hydropower flood control water supply and mitigating runoff caused by development Steve says others should come down to restart the vibrant native plant fish life that existed in Connecticut rivers and streams before the dams this was a pond for. Over 100 years it's only been a free flowing stream again now for a couple of years and every time I'm here I'm c.n.n. Evolution and maturity of the habitat those can't tails over there we're not here last time I was here. Those are a native wetland plant that has reestablishing that and the other thing that you can't see is underwater there's loads of native stream fishing here now including trout but the other thing is the rocks and the substrate itself how how clean and natural it is how quickly the river will recover if you give it a chance. All right that's but the Kaplan out in the field she returned fire and nothing bad happened so legally who else is here well 1st of all you heard in that future as I mentioned before Steve got part supervising fisheries biologist for deep Fisheries a division also in studio Howard Epstein the show was very much his idea has done things with us before emeritus professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at u. Conn and our Christian supervising civil engineer akin to the Department of Energy and Environmental protection and dam safety unit so Steve Gephardt in that clip and your prejudices are very much on display most of the time you'd probably rather not see dams there but there's something about this particularly the European subtler in the new world and especially in the 18th century are they can help themselves as a river they wanted to dam it up well I think that the dams were inevitable for the development of this land the only thing that we can be sorry about is that we didn't have the technology back then to mitigate for some of the environmental impacts and also as time went on and these dams became obsolete we didn't deal with them along the way so now here we are many years later and of those 4000 dams you mention a whole bunch of them are abandoned and dead beat and they're going to be problems certainly not all of the the dams are problems but some of the dams are problems Howard I've seen it might be worthwhile just to kind of define our terms I think when people hear damn you doing about beavers or they think about the Hoover Dam and they don't think about the vast middle ground in between those 2 extremes right there's a lot of things that can be a dam well absolutely almost anything that holds that water but that if I May the reason that I suggested this show as you know I'm a structural engineer but I've been supervising senior design projects at Yukon for a number of years and love the ones especially we do all real world kinds of situations the ones that help out towns municipalities not. Profit's took cetera and last year I was approached by some people from the town of Manchester to private non-profits who owned a couple of dams and they said they were confronted with the fact that they had to because of deep regulations that went into effect a couple of years ago. Not only inspect their dams periodically. But also form a breach 30 and emergency action plan for the town and that's how we got involved with this and once I saw what the regulations were all about I was just amazed that the number of dams and by the way you're going to have a larger audience than usual because we've informed all the buildings spectators and town engineers around the state. Of the show today we've been going after that demographic for a really long time our decision you know our Howard talking about sort of basically emergencies and a lot of times and it's nice to hear that some prophylactic considerations are being made at this moment usually we start talking about dams when something horrible has happened sorrow 963 in Norwich you have a dam burst 6 I think 6 people died it goes right into Norwich. Right into Franklin Square and all I can stuff 6 people bar and at that point people start wondering I think how many dams do we really have here yeah yeah and in 1063 right after that the legislature got back together and they said you know what we have to start keeping track of our dams we have to know how many there are and there was a big influx of some money and also of bodies and for the next 3 years they went around and looked at every water body the state walked around the whole perimeter of it and decided whether it was a damn whether it was a pond or natural pond you know dug. And then measured up to see how high it was than and how tall it was. And also set a hazard category for at that point what could happen if it were to fail hypothetically So are you say walk around to decide whether there's a dam that might sound to some people like an odd thing to be wondering about with some of these dams really are kind of big in the landscape right there not big concrete structures or anything like that they really are I remember before we sent out letters to tell people because we had a new registration program we wanted to update all the image Tori from the 1960 s. And we. I sent out registrations to people and we got a whole bunch of calls and I remember this one woman saying I don't have a dam on my property I have an 8 foot waterfall and and really you know there's there's a few waterfalls and Connecticut but there are there the chance of her having a full waterfall in her backyard right you know where we thought there was a dam was pretty pretty remote right so these things are there maybe almost a little bit closer would be verse do than what we do when we build a modern day I'm right there stone there are a lot of stuff going to wedge together yeah yeah and and actually even the spillways look kind of natural and that's and if they're not maintained you really almost can't tell they're there so Steve I think the 1st dam across the Connecticut River some of the 98 I think that's Turner's falls and in a way I mean one of your Because there's this fish stuff is never really been the same for fish probably since that right I mean there are certain fish and eels that want to go up the Connecticut River and the minute you build a dam there it gets very complicated Yeah you know that dam was the engineering marvel of the world at the time probably the one of the largest dams built at the time and at that time we still had Atlantic salmon coming in the river and spawning up in Vermont New Hampshire and that wiped out the run and after that we started building lots of other dams Holyoke dam was built after that dam and Enfield except for a and from from the fishes point of view yes it was all downhill from there because a lot of these native fish runs that we have we call them Diandra as the ones that come back and forth between the ocean need to get in early and to access spawning entering the habitat and these dams block their way and so fast forward to you know the 19 $170.00 s. We now have just little fragments of these runs clustered at the bottom of the 1st dam areas where there's still some habitat and so part of our job. In the department has been to get fish around these dams so we can start restoring these native fish runs right weird are more about that other fish the poor fish have been screwed 6 ways to Sunday too because I mean not only did we do that but then later we started building nuclear power plants that warm up the water which knocks off the clock or the cycle of these fish right well that certainly has a potential are big the big one that was sort of the pioneer in Connecticut the Had a Connecticut Yankee study showed that you know something it wasn't so bad because the fish swam underneath it how hot water but they couldn't swim over you know even a 12 foot dam much less a $35.00 foot dam So are these some of these dams are the kinds the lady who owns the property doesn't even they don't even know they're there they think they have a waterfall they think they have this cool little pond but some of the other dams that make up the Canadian landscape are demonstrably left over from 19th century business right I mean whether it's paper mills or twine or cotton or ivory I mean basically people need to turn Wales Yeah definitely comes to mind there's 100 dams in Greenwich and that's the town has the most dams and some of that was it had a rocky terrain and it had a long reach as there was 810 dams in a row each one with a melon it and now all those mills have been bought it and nurse houses on each of them so those people did know they were buying a dam but but they still didn't know what could happen if the dam failed and how much hazard and how much liability they brought upon themselves by buying that dam So Howard you know after 163 deep no words but as regards got not dams they get 3500 we can now add 500 more or so into that so a lot of dams are a little tiny state I assume that's partly because our terrain varies in other words you have a big flood stage probably you know you have too many dams in. A Midwestern state where the train doesn't enjoy it very much Absolutely and I've been told that Connecticut per square mile has the most them in the country I mean when I looked at the map I was astonished 4000 dams in this little state. Out of which some of which you would never know that they were there but there are several major ones that could potentially cause some problems. Almost like 600 I think that are a class b. And c. Was class b. Or that sounds ominous but you know well actually a is not much of a problem because the quest for cation of dams and art can correct me if I'm wrong here is not necessary by the size of the impoundment but by the potential hazard that it would cause if it failed. Right art of your great a.d.m. You can sleep easy yeah yeah those actually are there's a synonym we uses a low hazard dam and solos those B.'s and C's that Howard was talking about are high hazard downs for season significant Houser dams for 4. Right so now you so much nervous when take a break when we come back we're going to talk about a little bit more about these Hauser but also one of some of the other reasons why you might want to get rid of dams some final signal talk about some reasons why you might want to keep certain dams. When. Support for Connecticut Public Radio comes from Bender now open in Waterbury at 155 south Leonard Street featuring decorative plumbing kitchen and bath cabinet tree tile and stone to support local trades but Bender also supplies h. Back and plumbing materials more locations at Bender plumbing dot com on the Next Radio Lab or talk about objects I believe wonderful things objects brimming with meaning that that lives on the moon. On the moon if this was on the moon very cool very interesting and with their own impermanence Let's hide it we know it's going to disappear Oh no no no it won't last I know it was here that's after you guys leave. Things that's on the Next Radio. Hope you can join us tonight at 9 on the next fresh air why so many middle class people are having a hard time staying middle class we talk with journalist Alyssa quart author of the new book squeezed and we hear from Frank knew some who sings acappella him Xina style that's one of the oldest American music traditions He's a former Virginia coal miner who now has black lung disease joining us. Tonight at 10 Good evening and thanks for joining us I'm Bruce barber and you're listening to Connecticut Public Radio. Welcome back to our damn show I mean r.d.m. Show damn show Steve Steve in the heart supervising fisheries biologist for the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection deep fisheries division is with us now is Howard Epstein emeritus professor and civil and environmental engineering at u. Conn our Christian supervising civil engineer going to depart with deep again deep dam safety unit so during the break Howard just handed me a sheet of paper about how to inspect your DNS I had no idea the dams are growing but there was a growing apparently a growing. Our did you know that yeah I get it it's where it meets the natural ground on the sides of it when it's constructed writes So Howard without terrifying people and this is there a way to. Tell us why or what could happen to a dam and other words one of the signs this is actually on the sheet that you just gave you the signs that could suggest that a dim might be in one of these going to high house or categories Well one of the major problems that can happen to a dam as if spillway is inadequate for whatever reason and it overtops. Them as we're talking about primarily are earthen dams concrete dams usually when present that much a problem if they were designed properly. But when they overtopped then they start to erode then obviously that can take out a whole chunk of the top of the dam and lead to all sorts of problems downstream but animals burn burrowing through them. The. Spillway is not acting correctly or inadequate spillway is the lots of things that need to be looked that and spec that periodically so you know Art I think earthen dam or something like that and enchanting little mill pond is there are there places where a lot of water is backed up behind one of these more integrated dams out Oh definitely so the mill ponds there's a kind of 2 classifications one of them is the mill pond along the reverse of which don't have much of an. Paghman and I looked at look at the maps of the topography maps and ill 800 that was one section I can't call it a flight because there was no flying involved but to be like an aerial flight but in that there really are no big puns all the dams are dammed up rivers. And and because the there were they didn't spread out that much the kind of state in bank they're almost where something we call one of river where basically there's no storage it wasn't till later you know when they started trying to store water for both hydro power and water. Drinking water and 1st that x. You know. Recreation they started making these big impoundments right so there's like a big d.m. That creates leagues or. I think there's a bridge that goes across that way connects Oxford and Monroe I think so to you know there's a whole room or there's a dead body inside the dam but there is no there's no dead body inside that and I just some guy who punched in a bit and bunch up. He just took off something like that so so Howard one of the concerns that we have in certain situations you know maybe there's not a huge amount of water backed up behind a dam but there's the so-called cascading catastrophic failure right where the water you know over tops one d.m. Runs down to the next dam boom gets past that dam I mean you could really have something that really builds up as it heads down to its ultimate destination one of the towns that engage that's this semester's Stafford Springs and that's exactly the scenario that they were afraid of. There's a chain of 5 of these dams in a row and when the 1st one goes it's very likely that the next ones will go and downtown Stafford Springs will no longer be dry which is what happened in Essex in 1902 right there was there was only $22.00 dams where the more than 2 dams that die or you know one of them you know it started up at bushy hill and came all the way down planted all that stuff for them to sort of right all right well 1st of all if you live in Salford Springs you might want to just I don't know pour yourself a shot of whiskey or take a look at the bends or as a parent or something because joining us now I know he's that you're not going to make you worry but here's a Dennis from Stivers me who I believe is the town engineer from staffers brings I guess you know I call it oh you so you're listening to this conversation is there a specific thing that you would like to add to it. No it's just you know it's it's it's all about. You know geography and geometry and you know my kids you know what keeps me up at night is you know for the top one goes you know it's going to take them all with them but it's not a matter of just failure it's a matter of erosion some of these are there earthen dams and when we talk about overtopping them it's not like the things are going to collapse as much as they're going to fall apart much like they didn't and they. See the Wild West and. The Cascades. Or they will. But yeah they're going to they're just going to just get a road apart you know the well the side walls are going to fall apart all thankful all right that should help people who suffered brings a lot here in America so so are the good news is the deep house today in safety you know the bad news is there's 4000 dams I don't know we're in a budget cutting time I'll keep up with all those the I mean one of things we did it 3 or 4 years ago the legislature did it actually you know with a little bit of prompting from us is change the instead of d.p. Doing the d.p. At the time and. Doing all the inspections ourselves and billing the dam owners we change it over to be a owner responsible inspection program so we now we tell the owners that it's time to inspect their dam and they need to go hire somebody and get that inspection done so he put the burden for the actual to make sure the inspections got done back were kind of it belongs on the dam owner who is always was always liable for for the dam right I mean a lot of them when they buy their property to maybe get power you know that they have a dam but now it's their responsibility comma in case you kill everybody period so . So Steve I mean another possibility here that was would probably be kind of interesting to you is to not have. Many dams in other words if you've got fire dams or coal go boom boom boom boom boom in a catastrophic cascade one possibility would be to have fewer dams Yes Yet in fact there's quite a dam removal movement going on right now not just in the United States but worldwide and I have to say Connecticut is a leader in this there's a number of states Pennsylvania Massachusetts Maine but Connecticut's been removing a lot of dams too and when I say Connecticut I don't mean just our agency but we work closely with n.-g. O. Non-profits the Nature Conservancy is a leader in dam removal save the sound watershed groups like the Farmington River Watershed Council association rather and land trusts and so what has been happening is we've worked with. A number of these groups particularly the Nature Conservancy in prioritising dams in Connecticut in which we look at it not only from a hazard point of view although that's really Art's job not ours but we look at it from an environmental impact point of view and particularly in terms of the benefits that would be realized. To migratory fish and so we can look at all that target certain dams that if we remove this dam we might get 17 miles which is what happened in culture just a recently 7000 miles of upstream habitat gets reconnected and then we were with the In that case that was a nature conservancy project. Run by Sally Harold and that opened up she applied for grants she got grants federal grants to help with that and those dams are removed so we need more of that again we're not looking to remove all the dams in the world but by being strategic we can rely some great environment. Benefits You know so Steve some people are listening probably thinking I don't know how many people would be thinking this but I thought you had fish ladders or ill after the things like that I thought the fish were just fine climbing up those ladders Well we do we have probably the 3rd most fish weighs on the East Coast we have over $65.00 fish ways and a whole bunch of eel passes but there's limitations to those 1st of all even a good fish way sometimes targets only the stronger swimming fish and so salmon and shed and trout seem to in some cases Alewife seem to do well with those fish ways but other species particularly the smaller species don't do so well furthermore. If you build a fish way around a dam you have addressed that one environmental issue which is fish passage whereas the dam has lots of other environmental impacts the disruption of sediment transport it warms the water it changes the habitat from one type to another it introduces habitat that non-native invasive species tend to favor and so if you're able to remove the dam you address all of those issues at once right in that we heard of the beginning of the obits account when you're talking about tactiles and things like that coming back absolutely so it is more than just fish I'm a fish guy so the fish thing excites me but you know Reece turning mussels freshwater mussels some of which are listed under Our Endangered Species Act and all sorts of other native plants and animals right so we want the muscle that we want another zebra mussels that we don't one zebra mother and they're absolutely right are terrified you know I'm a fish are they taste good but you know maybe just me I said No I'm a fish guy doing periodically not every year Alex you dress up as a shot and some of the river with them and one thing I think I've seen Yeah exactly one thing that I found out is that for example in 2015 only 14 percent of the shad the got past the Holyoke dam made it to the Turners fall down right there's some way in which they start stalling out even if the passages are ladders or that yeah absolutely we've had a real problems with the 3 fish ways that turners Falls and just as an aside you'll be happy to know that Turner's falls is going under relicensing and we're you working with the feds are going to make sure that those problems are addressed but meanwhile the next dam up Vernon is passing a lot of shad So there's a bright spots and then there's low spots but one of the things I'll emphasize if you. Retain the dam and build a fish way you then have to. Maintain that dam and fish way forever and that's costly with a lot of money and if. If you're 1st light or Trans Canada and you're making a lot of money off that dam Maybe that's worth it but if you're a local landowner and you're not making money off your dam and you've got to spend a quarter of a $1000000.00 fixing your dam and then you've got to spend maybe a half a $1000000.00 building a fish way and then you've got to do this all over you know maintain it may be that cost formula just isn't that attractive so Howard we've been talking about all these dams these 4000 or so dams you know the reality is but I went out look at all 4000 of them 277 I think fit into this old class the high hazard dam category what does that mean to you as an engineer fix the dam tomorrow or inspect it on a more on a tighter cycle Well it means the same that the e.p.a. They inspect them at a tighter cycle as I say but also the necessity of doing the emergency action plans which means you have to assume that you're in the 100 year storm which seems to occur 5 years now and and all that water is there and that's that presents a flood problem in itself but on top of that now what happens if the dam would fail and a catastrophic event. How quickly where disorder go downstream and that's a heavy engineering study to determine that and to alert the Townson and maybe have them do periodic. Exercises to make sure that everybody knows who to call and what to do for that that should ever happen you know actually are holdovers or i just because Dennis Dennis you still there. I'm still what do you guys do about this that sounds like maybe something you you really should talk about among yourselves there and stuff or just brings Well it is the dams don't it doesn't occur you know unit in the heart what happens is. Well what we want to know is what kind of rainfall what kind of rate is going to create what kind of runoff which creates what kind of backup which creates when does the dam fall for and when does the dam become ineffective so there's a math calculations here based on rainfall. And runoff and how much the dam is going to collect from its tributaries that. Have to worry about a few years ago when the hurricane was urgent and. That was the question I was trying to get. The records you know that we have. And you've got a few days to try and figure that out but you want to get to that point you don't want to be you know Strategy number before it happens right no I don't think you want to even take a few days to figure out a Seems to me probably want to be with really when that happens although So I mean Howard this is questions are obviously good ones and ones we're considering but you're sort of saying also have a plan you know other than having some water wings and those plug in your closet you want to have a plan for what happens when that how we target how you get people to higher ground or where the high ground is you talked about that Norwich them failure and people were just scoring all around during that event and some actually went into the potential hazardous area where they should have you know made a left instead of a right one more interesting things I found out recently was. A dam that failed in the 1800s. Northhampton Massachusetts and the early warning system there was there was a person who was. At the dam and he was that them. Manager and he saw it failing and he sent somebody out on horseback just like Paul Revere to warn the people downstream that the water was coming Ok Well hopefully we've advanced beyond that maybe a reverse 911 call our former mayor was Robert Scott did wonderful ones our collective them all on a flash drive so our let's talk about this 1st of all I'm guessing but maybe I'm wrong he just said there is just hurricanes I sort of assume that dams feel in the spring right you get snow melt you get rain you know so in Connecticut bring rain spring freshet really we don't have enough snow to really. Create enough water for 2 to test the dams except for the maybe the one that kind of ever and there's only one kind of hit on the conch river and then the ones on whose tonic river so those I've seen come up during the spring but for the most part we've had dam failures in every month of the year in Connecticut so we had like a big rainfall as night that's the kind of thing you know that's a kind of thing we actually we have an alert system and so there was a spot in Oxford that got 2 and a half inches in one hour last night according to the next at radar so so we were kind of watching that and certainly that amount of rainfall is 100 year was 100 year rainfall event but it doesn't cause 100 year flood because it only happened for one hour and those drainage areas were bigger and didn't really it wasn't. It wasn't a hazard to those dams so I would imagine one of the problems with the 2014 policy where you start to put the onus on the dam owner is that the dam owner in the other sense might say Oh well I'm busy I don't know why aren't I would expect inspect my crappy dam every 2 years our money it's too expensive Go away go away you but does that happen that does happen for the most part we got a lot of positive feedback a lot of people have done and done their inspections the d p d e p sorry I've been here for a long time and. The t.v. For a while for your own good and yeah so one of the things that does happen is we did remain We did keep some ability for the d.p. To go out and inspect the dams ourselves if they wanted getting us back and so if somebody just couldn't do it slash I guess. You know a private property owner a little old man or woman who who didn't have the money to do it. You know we could actually go out inspect the dam put a lien on their property for that cost of our inspection and collect that at the end of the day we don't want to do that but but certainly it gives us the ability to at least make sure all the dams are looked at right d.m.z. If you like this into Dr movies we can do this the easy way to do this the hard work that's all right so listen a little break here we've got more to say about dams and believe me how to get hydroelectric power occasionally out of a dam we're going to talk about something called the Archimedes Screw which turns out not to be as exciting as I naturally thought it would be but it's also important. To. Support for arts and culture reporting comes from the Greater Hartford Arts Council the Hartford Symphony Orchestra and the vital projects fund and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. 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Today show was produced by Betsy Kaplan a Lara Croft of dams and make my own wealth of help from our internationally tailor a man to fish can't swim past the Hague and I'm damn proud of Bill Carey was played by Archimedes Screw and that back to college not really family feud that was Richard Dawson but all right so we're going to talk here towards the end we're talking about dams we're going to damn all star team in here everybody you want in Connecticut really Steven Gephardt who is the supervising fisheries biologist war deep in the fin there fisheries division Howard Epstein is professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at u. Conn the guy who brought us this idea are Christian supervising a civil engineer also with deep and specifically with their damn safety unit so you know Steve there are are and we're you're about to meet somebody who is working hard right now to exploit the hydroelectric power of at least one dam here in Connecticut We'll tell you about him in just a 2nd but Steve there are you know people people sort of like dams and ponds I think for 2 reasons one of them is they're just part of the landscape here in Connecticut you know we like our ponds we like the way things look we don't want to change it but the other reason is you look out and you think Well once upon a time a lot of these things were turning wheels you know as we said before for 20 or cotton or or whatever on the other hand I assume that doesn't mean that every day would make a good hydroelectric site Oh I agree entirely what we asked these small dams to do in the past was to turn wheels really for small periods of time a lot of time these old mills just work during the spring when there was a lot of water and they were off doing other things in the summer. I have to say that most of the dams that are generating electricity in the state of Connecticut now have been retrofitted that there are these old mill dams I thought for a moment of how many. Dams in Connecticut were built specifically for hydro electricity and I could only come up with 4. Stevenson rainbow and Scotland I can't think of anything more it's lake and the wood pumps Well yeah that's part of the ship hawgs system we could talk about that that's interesting we're going to get in the weeds of dams though yeah they do that but so anyway the point is that a lot of these small dams really don't have the hydro potential that they do it could cost a lot of money to retrofit turbans into these old dams and the payback isn't that great in order to make money off the hydro you need 2 things you need a lot of water and you need head that is the elevation of the of the dam and a lot of those are streams and Connecticut don't have that combination there are a few and there are developers who are working to exploit those sites which is a perfect segue into our conversation now with Armin Murray lay a partner in Canton hydro and hydro is. Seeking to do something with the Collinsville dam where I believe there was well I actually went out arm and arm and welcome to the show thank you thanks for having me so tell us what it is you're doing in Collinsville. So calling Well many listeners might know Collins Well from the caller's x. Factory which really was a thriving trail in effect trying to plant. For many. Decades. And that plant had truly got that energy from tool and it's really coming so that among the local ones. And since $66.00 These then are just relics of the industrial revolution and our as Steve pointed out. A barrier to aquatic habitat swimming upstream. Now. The full. You know I like to emphasize that when we talk about breaching dams and taking them down and. In order to improve to aquatic How did we really have to have a bigger discussion which is where does the energy come from where should it come from where will it come from and I think we need to have a public debate on the energy future here because if you look at. If you look at the energy sources in Connecticut you'll notice that out how both the energy comes from fossil fuels and we all know the problems that come from that and the other off about it from nuclear power and nuclear power at 1st class and at 1st Glens seems cheap and clean but there are many many hidden costs right including from Engine zebra mussels and so we want you will have aquatic safety and safety for our fish but there everything has a price so our men just before we run the time how close are you to being able to do something in Collinsville. So we are actually very close we just on Tuesday submitted our the rec bit which is a program by the state of Connecticut to. Encourage the development of renewable energy and if we wind a bit and how big clears then there's really only one major roadblock which is to further the licensing board that we issuing the license which we anticipate and separate and then theoretically we could start construction and so I mean I don't know it's hard to express this in layman's terms or terms that I would understand anyway but I mean in terms of when you think about how much electricity a dam like that could produce under optimal circumstances Armin What do you think is thinking about is there a way you can render this in a way that I don't know x. Percent of the electricity consumed by Canton or something. Well so to make it sort of accessible the what we're targeting 4.25 kg of ours annually and that translates into roughly 485 Connecticut select cities. So that's a significant amount of electricity that we can get out of this Yeah absolutely and it's a saving of about 3 metric tons of carbon footprint. Carbon dioxide right which is part of a conversation that that I think you very justifiable want to have very quickly because time is limited and there's a lot of things we need to cover here at the end but very quickly Steve since your concern is at least partly fish obviously if you've got turbines turning or anything like that you get a little worried you wonder what's going to happen to any fish that are trying to get past that dam How does that all shake out for you well so the 1st thing when when Arman says they begin to construct next year perhaps he's not constructing the dam the dam already exists in the dam is already having its impact Now when he undergoes Ferk relicensing Federal Energy Regulatory Commission relicensing both ourselves in the in the federal government has the authority to put certain conditions upon that and we've been working with our man and his team to make sure that there's effect of upstream fish passage at the dam effect of downstream fish the way Fish passage at the dam which means the fish don't go through the turbans and get chewed up upstream and downstream passage for American Eagle Protection of mussels water quality so there's a whole host of things that will be incorporated in that 1st license that make sure that the Aquatic Resources of this area are going to be not only preserved but also enhanced So what we want about another project here and I'm mention it already twice now that Archimedes Screw it sounds like something maybe would be taught in Howard Dean's engineering classes that Yukon you want take a crack at explaining what an Archimedes Screw us the 1st I heard of it today all right there are an artist you will take a crack at it well the I've been involved with it because it's. There's a lot of fish components to it Archimedes developed this this screw. Back he's ancient Greek and he developed a screw to raise water out of a canal and into an aqueduct you turn this big screw and it just lifts the water up modern hydro developers have have reversed that and instead of using it to lift water they're actually using descending water to spin that screw and that screw up be in your your turban that turns the generator this is been used specializes in small sites you would never put one of these on the Connecticut River or the who is a tonic but it's good for small sites and the landed gentry in the u.k. Have been using it at their castles they had actually tear out these old Francis turbans and put in an Archimedes Screw So this one in Meriden it's on the 2nd dam on the Quinnipiac river Hanover Ponton New England hydro company put the 1st Archimedes Screw generator in North America there and it's now operating and the nice thing from for us in fisheries about this is that without the typical propeller type gent turban. It's it's a for fish because fish enter the screw and there's no doubt there's no really slicing part they just follow the screw all the way down so it's it still has some issues that we're working with the developers on for the Quinnipiac river but we don't have to worry about fish getting chewed up in a turban I mean I would assume one good thing anyway about people looking at dams in terms of hydro power from your point of view is a bit of a dam is being used that way is a D.M.'s me watch very carefully That's right yeah they're both being watched very carefully and there's now a. Monetary stream for for taking care of it which which a lot of the problem is that when there is no money coming in it's hard for a private homeowner or you know entity to to fund repairs and keep monitoring it and do those e.a.p. That Fessor is talking about and. And to the mains as needed monetary stream see what you did there here's John from Iran has a question maybe he'll stump the experts maybe he won't I John. You know I had a question on sensors letting you know of a crumbling infrastructure and whether or not that's in the works or 30 being done I mean you know find out how they're holding up and also if that would work for fish the fish as well to find out which ones are getting through so you know and which ones are maybe so that's not a case of shouting fraud. I see what you did there anyway I think that sensors on dams I mean that's where you saw argument itself inspecting them yeah I think so you know certainly it doesn't lend itself to that quite as much a visual inspection is probably as good as we're going to need some of the bigger dams with that are made out of concrete that would work the best on those things but those are usually done and there's quite of quite a significant factor of safety on those so it may not be the best one of those concrete dams have them built in. You know how are. We're almost out of time here but one thing I didn't ask you at the beginning of this conversation is I would imagine deals rather her rather hard to prepare to repair if they have a structural problem I mean you've got water backed up behind them how do people work on dams Sometimes you have to the water the area behind the net creates all sorts of other problems sometimes you can fail a dam by the water in it too quickly and so not not an easy thing to do. We have a big dam repair going on in East Windsor right now in Broad Brook and they just threw down the pond before the rains coming so they're struggling with this very thing right now right so you want to fix that dam but it's also environmentally a shock to the system from your point of view if they're doing anything and we've got to make sure they don't stray and fish when they draw down there's fish in mussels right exactly All right so we are almost out of time as anybody of well I mean our this might have actually made people nervous the street show I mean people maybe should be watchful but I would imagine are 100 is really her words with a big. Certainly you know if you see something say something but I think one of the things that we do have a pretty good handle on it now and it's getting better all the time in terms of what dams have been inspected and getting back to the ones that have been in making sure that everything's been looked at fairly recently. And if there is something wrong moving forward to to make it safe and I would advise people to go to the Deep Web site there's an awful lot of information there right thank you and yes I actually just go to the website he has a d.m. They think they might want to remove have him contact me will put him in touch with some people who may be able to help and just remember I mean like a babbling brook is really great too I mean I got a cotton holler Glastonbury all the time where they used to actually milk out and stuff like that The New York River goes where Roaring Brook goes going by there and it's wonderful So I mean ponds are great but so are babbling brooks. The all natural ice cream tricycle called what is real comes to our studio and our special guest is Mark Bittman author of How to grill everything that's on the faith Middleton right here on Connecticut Public Radio. Listen tomorrow afternoon at 3 support comes from white gate farm Carlos pasta jovial foods and Highland Park market. I'm Christopher Campbell from. This week I chat with author of the upcoming coke and she talks about the fascinating terrific culture.