LONDONDERRY — At its March 24 meeting, the Londonderry Selectboard voted unanimously to recommend the town pursue removal of the Williams Dam. The annual Town Meeting warning includes an article seeking to raise $40,000 for engineering costs for the removal process.
Londonderry's annual Town Meeting will be held on April 30, at 9:30 a.m., at the Town Hall.
The Williams Dam was constructed in the 1880s and is located on the West River in proximity to Vermont Route 11, just east of the intersection of Vermont Route 100.
According to a news release by Town Administrator Shane O'Keefe, a state inspection from 2015 noted that the dam was in poor condition and was continuing to worsen, and recommended that the town “retain a professional engineer qualified in dam safety to evaluate the dam and prepare plans for repair, replacement, or removal of the dam.”
At the 2021 Town Meeting, citizens voted “to raise $50,000 for an engineering study to evaluate the condition of the Williams Dam and to determine the comparative costs of its repair, replacement or removal.”
In November 2021, the town hired the engineering firm of DuBois & King., Inc. to perform the study, which was presented to the town in final form on March 24, after a presentation to the Selectboard on the findings on March 21.
Removal of the dam was previously recommended in June 2008, when the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources issued the Basin 11 (which includes the West, Williams, and Saxtons rivers) Management Plan.
The plan outlined known issues with the basin and mentioning the Williams Dam be considered for removal due to deteriorating conditions, blocking of fish passage, sediment accumulation, and potential for safety hazards. The 2021 update of the Basin Plan continues to make this recommendation.
In early March of this year, the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation's (DEC) Dam Safety program reclassified the hazard classification of the Williams Dam from “Low Hazard Potential Dam” to “Significant Hazard Potential Dam,” further emphasizing the town's need to act on one of the alternatives to address the condition of the dam.
Because of the DEC's new dam safety rules, the deteriorated condition of the dam, and the hazard reclassification, this means the town will need to take some sort of action, and a “no-action” alternative is not feasible.
The recent DuBois & King, Inc. study estimates the costs of the various alternatives as follows: no action, $2,000; rehabilitation, $767,000–$900,000; replacement, $1,331,000; and removal, $425,000.
The study notes that the rehabilitation alternative could receive some historic preservation grant funds. But according to staff of the Connecticut River Conservancy and the DEC's Watershed Planning Program, the removal alternative can be covered at little or no cost to the town as there are earmarked funds for removal projects, such as Londonderry's.
According to Selectboard Chair Tom Cavanagh, “Our consulting firm is particularly skilled in dam safety evaluations and has extensive Vermont experience, and it conducted a thorough analysis of the various Williams Dam alternatives that the public can rely on to draw conclusions about what direction the community should take.”
O'Keefe said that the town “clearly needs to act on one of the alternatives as the dam is in very poor shape and poses a risk to the community; the option to have it removed at little or no cost to the taxpayers appears to be the most prudent and environmentally sound way forward.”