About a year after Vermont became a state, some of the Green Mountain Boys built Dunklee Pond Dam on Tenney Brook in Rutland City. Vermonts earliest dams were built to provide power for mills which often were central to the communities that developed around them, and Dunklee Pond Dam was no different. The dam originally served as a linseed oil mill for cooking food and manufacturing solvents and paints.

As time passed, the Dunklee Pond Dam went on to power a sawmill, pencil factory, and was used for ice-harvesting for summer refrigeration in the late 1800s and early 1900s before the advent of electric refrigeration in the 1920s. The Rutland High School hockey team also practiced and played games on Dunklee Pond in the late 1800s. Over the years, locals also used Dunklee Pond dam for swimming and fishing, picnics, wading, boating, and wildlife.

However, Dunklee Pond dam wasnt meant to last forever, and it certainly wasnt designed to withstand 229 years of use with little maintenance. There are 1,200 known dams in Vermont and many, like Dunklee Pond dam, no longer serve a useful purpose. Today, the defunct Dunklee Pond dam threatens public safety in Rutland City and along the Route 7 travel corridor.

The Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) is partnering with the dam owners, city staff and the Vermont River Conservancy to remove the dam to alleviate flooding in Rutland and along Route 7. City and State Officials removed parts of the dam on Oct. 30, 2019, just before the Halloween Storm which helped to avoid a catastrophic failure. The full dam removal is slated for 2020 or 2021. The engineering design for the full dam removal is funded by the Vermont Ecosystem Restoration Program with a grant to the Vermont River Conservancy. The full removal will reduce future flood risks and costs in the community while also restoring the floodplain and wetlands and remediating adverse stream impacts.

Obsolete dams obstruct the natural flow of rivers by causing sediment to build up behind the dam and retaining wall. The Dunklee dam had a low-level outlet that was periodically opened to flush out the impounded sediments at various times in the past. Those historic efforts unintentionally flushed fish and aquatic organisms downstream, which harmed the stream ecosystem. Defunct dams also raise the elevation of flood water and increase water temperature, further harming fish and wildlife. Removing the Dunklee dam will return Tenney Brook to its natural biological state, creating a healthy river community of plants, fish and animals.

Todd Menees is a river management engineer for the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation.

More:
Removing the Dunklee Pond Dam | Local News - Barre Montpelier Times Argus

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