I always appreciate a trip out to Maryland’s Eastern Shore. There’s so much space. Deep breaths. Cruise control.
I’m driving from Northern Virginia. No space. Brake lights. Honk honk.
This winter I got to drive out to the Eastern Shore many times to track the evolution of a river coming back to life. Water flowing. Sun shining. Freedom. YES.
Most days I sit at my desk. My dog asks what we’re working on today. I tell him we’re saving rivers. Making people safer. Making communities more resilient. He says that looks like a lot of documents and Brady Bunch (he’s old school). He’s right.
But this winter, oh boy! Out to the mythical “field”! This is what we’re working for. Transformation. Rejuvenation. Living. Breathing.
The day I went out after the river was finally reconnected, I felt like an idiot walking by myself with a big stupid grin, bopping along with my muddy, happy feet. We did it! Years of work lead up to this moment. This future.
I couldn’t help but think back through the hurdles to get to this moment.
This project didn’t start with me; it started with Serena McClain, who is now the leader of our National Dam Removal Program, but who at that time was in the trenches. We were working on wrapping up the Bloede Dam removal project, and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources had another dam in another state park that they were thinking about removing— Cypress Branch Dam in Cypress Branch State Park in Millington.
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While this is a newer state park, the dam was old and busted. You had to wander around in the woods to find it. It was a relic in the milling history of the Eastern Shore. No one really knows who built it and when. More recently, it had become breached, but was still keeping fish from migrating upstream to spawn and disrupting normal river functions. Hence, the motivation to look into removing it. It checked all the boxes:
- Not serving a useful purpose ✅
- Public safety hazard ✅
- Impacting fish passage and river function ✅
- Falling apart ✅
Serena got things started in 2019 with the Maryland Geological Survey who did some investigations on sediment. If you follow rivers in the Chesapeake region at all, you KNOW sediment is a big topic of conversation. Where’s the sediment coming from? Where is it going? What do we do about it? And on and on until I’m buried six feet under.
I digress. Fortunately, the sediment experts determined that there was no contaminated sediment at this site, and the volumes were fairly low because the dam had been breached for some time already. So, not a big concern, which was great.
Fortunately, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was an early supporter and funder of the project. They saw the potential to reconnect more than 35 miles of habitat for herring, hickory shad, and other species, and they dove right in with us.
Next, an engineering firm, Princeton Hydro, was hired to pull together design drawings. They got rolling along… and then the pandemic hit. What day is it again? Ugh.
Things start to move again… then we had some design disagreements. I love having good partners and working with good contractors. Everyone is invested in making the project the best it can be, with the most positive impact for the system. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone always agrees on the path to get there. So sometimes we have to wade through the process, compromise, and eventually find the path forward.
I stepped in as Project Manager in the middle of this wallowing period. Determined to shake this thing loose and get to the finish line. We move a step forward.
Now, I’ve talked about this in the past— one problem with projects that float around for a while is that other problems can arise as time goes on. In this case, the cost of construction work popped right up after the pandemic. I realized that we were not going to have enough funding to make it through construction. We needed some more dough.
Fortunately, the Environmental Protection Agency, by way of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, agreed to help us out with a generous grant. Awesome! Back on track.
Just need the final permits. Negotiating. Still waiting. Need to figure out historical mitigation. More negotiating. More waiting. Need an adaptive management plan. What’s that? An adaptive management plan is more or less a plan for if things do not go as expected. Who makes decisions? What triggers actions? We figured these things out. We worked with our partners and regulators to decide on a plan for follow-up post-project. We received our permits. Whew.
In the midst of these permit negotiations, there are rumblings about a problematic railroad crossing that bypasses the park and incidentally our construction access road. Do I know anything about railroads? Really not much more than I’ve learned from Thomas the Tank Engine. So, we go back and forth about what to do with this crossing. We don’t want to damage things with our heavy equipment. Eventually, we decide that we can use mats to cross it and then work towards a plan to rehabilitate it while construction is ongoing.
In Fall 2024, we hired an environmental construction company, Ecotone, to do the work on the ground. We hope to go to construction in December. We need to get some shop drawings (i.e., detailed plans for a specific element of the design) approved before we can do that. It is right in the middle of the holidays. Deck the halls and all that. More waiting.
Finally, we are able to break ground in mid-January! And there was much rejoicing… until… we have a new federal administration. And federal grants are being paused. And my anxiety shoots through the roof. Will today be the day we lose our funding? Tomorrow? Court cases. Temporary reprieves. Will we make it?
The thing about these projects is that they are akin to a massive surgery. You get to a certain point where the guts are all out, and you just can’t go back. The only way is to keep moving forward.
Fortunately, our grants did not get paused. And we got the guts all put back, this time in the right places without a clogged artery.
And it is beautiful. And cool!
We installed some very neat root wad structures to stabilize the river banks. It’s like nature reaching out with its creepy fingers. We removed all the concrete from the former spillway and moved around parts of the earthen portion of the dam. We also realigned the channel which had been breaking off into different sections to make its way around the spillway. It was an odd site to photograph from the ground before the removal, so I am sharing some aerial images to help give a sense of the restoration effort.
Did we ever figure out what to do with the railroad crossing? Oh yes, indeed. We came to an agreement right near the end of construction. Thanks to a funding supplement from Maryland Department of Natural Resources, we were able to fix that crossing right up while on our way out of the site.
We also received a bit more funding support from RJN Foundation to round things out at the end. I am so grateful to all of our funders for their support.
Shortly after the final plantings were completed, I revisited the site to see how things were adjusting. This osprey seemed to be enjoying itself quite thoroughly in the former impoundment! What a lunch!
And there you have it. Another one bites the dust. Huzzah!
