U.S. Water News Online
GARFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. -- Taking a break from their kayaking trip, teenage pals Dusty Otto and Graham Yost look gleeful at the prospect of longer excursions on the Boardman River if three aging dams are removed.
"That'd be great," Otto says, eyeing a stretch of gurgling water knifing past a sandy bluff. "There's some good places to kayak around here, but this is my favorite ... especially the rapids."
But farther downstream, where the narrow rapids give way to a sprawling 103-acre pond, Chester Gill desperately wants the Sabin, Boardman and Brown Bridge dams kept intact. Removing them, he fears, would convert the waterway surrounding his property on three sides into a weed-choked mudflat as the river resumes its natural course.
"We have a beautiful place here, and they're going to turn it into nothing but a swamp," says Gill, a 78-year-old retired Dearborn firefighter who spent seven years building his waterfront house in Grand Traverse County's Garfield Township.
Recreation enthusiasts and shoreline homeowners are among interest groups watching keenly as officials ponder whether to breach the dams, the youngest of which - Brown Bridge - was built 84 years ago.
"This is the most comprehensive dam removal project in Michigan history," says Todd Kalish, a fisheries biologist with the state Department of Natural Resources. "You're talking about opening up an entire river system, reconnecting 160 miles of river with Lake Michigan."
The dams have become a financial drain and are blamed for numerous environmental problems, including fish habitat degradation on the Boardman, rated among Michigan's top 10 trout streams.
Traverse City Light and Power, a municipal utility, wants to decommission its small hydroelectric turbines on the three dams after losing money on them for years. That would force the county, which owns Sabin and Boardman, and Traverse City, owner of Brown Bridge, to foot the bill for millions in repairs and improvements.
The local governments agreed this summer to join state and federal agencies, an American Indian tribe, recreation groups and interested citizens in a two-year study of the dams' future. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers submitted a plan in August with several alternatives, including leaving the dams as they are and dismantling them.
The plan also targets for possible removal the Union Street Dam in downtown Traverse City, 1.5 miles upstream from the river mouth. But it would stay in place with a rebuilt fish ladder under the alternative favored by the DNR, which would take out the Sabin, Boardman and Brown Bridge dams. Estimated cost: $5 million.
The project would dovetail with a nationwide trend. American Rivers, an environmental advocacy group in Washington, D.C., says 185 dams have been removed since 1999 and 56 others are scheduled to come down this year, including the Dimondale Dam on the Grand River and Rice Creek Dam on a Kalamazoo River tributary.
Thirty-five dams have been partially or completely dismantled in Michigan, including 16 within the past decade, says Sharon Hanshue of the DNR's fisheries division.
"Dam removal is the best way to restore the natural function of a river," says Serena McClain, conservation associate with American Rivers. "It restores depleted fisheries, especially migratory fish populations. It restores the natural nutrient balance, the natural movement of sediment. In some situations it can aid in flood management."
And it saves money, supporters say. Many of the thousands of dams around the nation are getting old and springing leaks. Some need costly upgrades to meet government safety standards.
Federal regulators say Brown Bridge Dam needs a rebuilt spillway, costing up to $2 million. Plugging a leak in the Boardman may cost $800,000. The to-do list will grow, says Dennis Aloia, Grand Traverse County administrator.
While neutral for now on whether to keep the dams intact, city and county officials don't relish assuming financial responsibility for them.
"It's bad enough when you take over a 100-year-old building, but a 100-year-old dam is even worse," Aloia says.
The three Boardman River dams with turbines account for just 3.4 percent of the electricity generated by Traverse Light and Power, spokesman Jim Cooper says. Brown Bridge turns a slight profit; the others lose money.
Kalish, the DNR fisheries biologist who chairs an interagency committee advising the local governments, says the DNR favors removing the Sabin, Boardman and Brown Bridge dams because they damage the fishery.
The Boardman River, which forms in Kalkaska County and winds westward before emptying into Lake Michigan's Grand Traverse Bay, draws anglers in pursuit of brook, brown and rainbow trout. A 36-mile stretch qualifies for the DNR's blue-ribbon trout stream label.
But over the final 20 miles, the dams fragment and degrade fish habitat in numerous ways, including riverbank erosion and sediment buildup, Kalish says. They encourage inbreeding that harms the gene pool. They cause water temperatures to rise, which can kill coldwater species such as brown and brook trout.
"It's a beautiful river," says Dave Leonard, who runs a local angling school. But sediment buildup has ruined one of his choice fishing spots upstream from Brown Bridge Dam. "It's a couple of feet deep at best now ... slow, warm. It's really not the fishable water it used to be. Removing these impoundments could only help the resource."
The Michigan Council of Trout Unlimited is awaiting the study results before taking a position, executive director Rich Bowman says.
"We're always looking for strategies to restore and improve rivers and from a commonsense standpoint, the removal of these dams would seem to do that," Bowman says. "But we need research to confirm that."
Kalish says he's sympathetic with residents of a subdivision near Boardman Dam where 27 homes line the pond that would dry up as the river takes shape. A possibility for reducing their loss would be redirecting the river to run nearer their homes, he says.
That's a poor substitute, says Gill, one of the homeowners. Besides, it probably wouldn't work because the natural river channel is three times deeper than the bottomlands that would be drained.
"They're going to spend $500,000 studying the situation," Gill says. "Why can't they just use that money to repair the dams and leave it the way it is?"
It may be impossible to please everyone, Kalish says. But he's hoping that involving the public in the two-year study will help people understand whatever decisions are made.
During a tour of the dam sites, he veers down a woodsy path and points out a crumbling slab of concrete partly obscured by grass and moss - the remains of another dam that collapsed in 1967.
This entire area was under water back then, a 60-acre artificial impoundment. Nature has reclaimed the lush valley. The river, restored to its natural boundaries, plunges over and around boulders and fallen tree trunks. Poplars, aspens, ferns and grasses cover the landscape.
It's a hint of what could happen elsewhere if the entire Boardman ran freely once more.
"There was a time when dams served a good purpose," Kalish says. "But that day is pretty much over and done with."
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