Study: No hurdles to Ipswich dam removal
Ipswich Chronicle
By Sally Kuhn / Ipswich@wickedlocal.com
Posted Nov 7, 2018 at 5:47 PM
Updated Nov 7, 2018 at 5:49 PM
The downtown dam may go.
A feasibility study on the removal of the Ipswich Mills Dam concludes that there are no technological or regulatory hurdles to taking down the dam.
The former mill dam is located at the head of tide on the Ipswich River in downtown Ipswich, next to the River Walk footbridge.
Originally built to power industry in Ipswich, it no longer serves any commercial function and ownership was transferred from Sylvania to the town in the 1980s.
Senior Planner Ethan Parsons and Wayne Castonguay, executive director of Ipswich River Watershed Association, came before the Select Board on Nov. 5 to report on the study. A public information process will start in December so the town can decide whether or not to remove the dam.
The study concludes benefits to removing the dam could:
Help the river’s ecology
Protect infrastructure
Create recreational opportunities like fishing and boating and to the downtown area.
Reduce flooding
Eliminate town maintenance costs of keeping up the dam.
However, the study did reveal that lowered water levels caused by the dam removal could be a risk to an interior of a portion of one of EBSCO’s buildings. The building is not built on wooden pilings but on a slab. The soils under the slab could settle out, the study said. EBSCO did not give the project team permission to conduct the needed interior investigations to determine if those potential impacts existed and to what extent. The study recommends that an additional study be made.
The dam is a head of tide dam built at the transition between salt and freshwater.
With its removal, fish migration from the source of the river to the sea will not be blocked. It is the first barrier to migratory fish as they move from the ocean into the Ipswich River.
The dam was retrofitted with a replacement fish ladder in 1995, but the ladder does not provide adequate passage to all important species like rainbow smelt and American shad. These two important migratory fish species, historically abundant in the Ipswich River, remain blocked from upstream access by the dam.
Select Board member William Craft asked if there will be much more benefit to the town from removing the dam. “It has been there for a long time,” he said.
Castonguay replied that the dam will deteriorate over time and said funding now exists to remove head of tide dams.
Castonguay also said that according to research there were “no nasty sediments” created by manufacturing behind the dam that could be unleashed when the dam was removed. There are almost no sediments behind the dam. Whatever was there has been washed away, he said.
The Select Board is the first to be informed of the feasibility study. It should be concluded by Thanksgiving and then there will be a series of meetings to inform the public about the project, the first tentatively scheduled for Dec. 12.
In 2015, the state Division of Ecological Restoration gave the town a grant to study removing the Ipswich Mills Dam. The study, now out, is a year behind schedule. The Planning and Development Department obtained $25,000 grant from the Massachusetts Environmental Trust in 2017 to finish the project.
Besides DER, IRWA and the Ipswich Planning Department, members of the committee included EBSCO, the Ipswich Historical Commission, the Ipswich Department of Public Works, the Ipswich Conservation Commission, the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and local citizens. The partners contracted with Horsley Witten Group to lead the study.
If the town eventually decides that removal of the dam seems feasible and appropriate, it would take a period of years of extensive analysis, design and permitting with opportunity for community input.
]]>