Video: Time-Lapse of Hughesville Dam Removal

Update summer 2017: American shad have already returned to the Musconetcong River after the removal of Hughesville Dam! State wildlife biologist Pat Hamilton shared this “thrilling” news with NPR reporters – read the story – and then watch the video below of the dam coming down. 

Dim the lights, turn up the music and help us celebrate the take-down of Hughesville Dam on the Musconetcong River in New Jersey! The entire dam removal took nearly three months, but you can watch the sped-up version here.

Removal of the 150-foot-long and 18-foot-tall dam in Pohatcong, NJ, is a major success for all who love and care about the mighty Musconetcong. A designated “National Wild and Scenic” river, the Musky flows for 42 miles through the state and is a popular place for fishing, boating and swimming. Hughesville is the fifth dam to be removed as part of a larger partner-based effort to restore the Musky to a free-flowing state.

Removal of the dam is projected to provide $2.5 million in economic benefits – including increased access for sportfishing – and reduce flood risk to nearby communities. The project was supported by many partners and funded largely by the USFWS through the Department of the Interior (DOI) under the Hurricane Sandy Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013.

In September 2016, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell toured the project, calling it a “model for collaborative conservation,” and joined a roundtable discussion about dam removals.  Since completion of the dam removal, volunteers with the Musconetcong Watershed Association have helped restore the site by planting trees along the river banks to serve as a buffer and help keep the water clean.

Congrats to all the people and partners involved in making this project a success!

USFWS staff, partners and community members pose with Sally Jewell at the Hughesville Dam removal event on Sept. 8, 2016. Credit: USFWS

One Salt Marsh at a Time: Building Coastal Resiliency After Hurricane Sandy

Dr. Susan Adamowicz is standing on a salt marsh along the shores of the Webhannet River at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in Maine. This refuge is practically her home, where she has worked for the past 13 years as a land management and research demonstration biologist for the Service.

Coastal marshes are a habitat she has known and loved since she was a child. But today, salt marshes are facing new and unprecedented threats from climate change. We asked her to talk to us about the important role salt marshes play in protecting coastlines and building coastal resiliency.

Q: What are salt marshes and what makes them important?

Susan: Salt marshes are exciting places to work! They are dynamic areas. Salt marshes form where rivers meet the sea and where the velocity of water is slow enough to allow the sediment to deposit and for plants to take root. Over time, as salt marshes continue to grow, they rise in elevation and expand outward horizontally.

They support a wide variety of wildlife that’s specialized to live in this salty, tidal environment, everything from micro biota to birds such as the saltmarsh sparrow to numerous species of mammals and fish. They also provide environmental services, such as storing carbon, filtering water and providing natural defenses against storms by buffering the force of both storm surges and storm waves.

Q: Let’s talk about storms—how did Hurricane Sandy change the way we think about protecting coastal communities?

Susan: The coast was forever changed, as was our perception of what it means to live along the coast. We saw the tremendously destructive force of what nature can do, but we also saw how this force can be lessened by having salt marshes in place to protect our shores.

After Hurricane Sandy, I think many of us woke up to the challenge of having to think about our coastal systems in new ways. How might we redesign our coasts so that in some areas we could restore the natural systems, like salt marshes, that can provide more natural flexibility and protection from storm surge, big storm waves or even additional rainfall?

Q: How do we prepare for future storms and sea-level rise and stay resilient?

Susan: Salt marshes play a vital role in the resiliency of coastal systems. Imagine if this salt marsh was not here. There would be no buffer from the turbulence of storms. And because healthy salt marshes can grow higher in elevation, they can provide a continuing protection to human communities if sea levels don’t rise too high too quickly. By being able to handle the force of storms and recover quickly, we say that salt marshes are resilient and they pass this protection on to surrounding human communities.

We’re also using all kinds of new techniques to restore coastal marshes and improve resiliency. Thin-layer deposition is one example. It uses clean dredge sediments to build up the marsh surface elevation to a height that’s optimal for the salt marsh grasses to continue to build the marsh on their own over time. We have several thin-layer deposition projects on national wildlife refuges as a result of Hurricane Sandy funds [for example, at John Chafee National Wildlife Refuge in Rhode Island and Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey].

Susan Adamowicz shows interns how to take salt marsh elevation samples. Credit: USFWS

Q: You’ve worked in coastal marshes for a long time—how has your work changed and what do you see for the future?

Susan: A lot has changed. We no longer talk about restoring a salt marsh to the configuration it had in the 1600s. Now we talk about restoring the trajectories of salt marsh-building forces so that a salt marsh can sustain itself and have a high degree of integrity over time.

With super storms, climate change and their effects, we’re seeing unprecedented forces placed on the coast.

It’s like Godzilla is walking all over our picnic and we are trying to figure out how best to prepare ourselves, how best to respond to this climate change Godzilla. I may be exaggerating a little bit, but maybe only a little bit because it has been such a challenge to us.

Some of the models predict that our coastlines are going to be entirely changed by sea-level rise in the next 100 years and I worry a great deal about the kind of planet that my nieces and nephews and their children will inherit.

I take hope in realizing it is not just me alone, but within the family of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and my family of other professional scientists, there are a lot of us that are concerned about the same thing. We want to pass on a healthy planet to future generations. If we can bring these salt marshes 50-75 years into the future, I think we will have done a service for the next generation of scientists, wildlife lovers and folks that live on the coast, a service that they can then build on.

Reprinted from Fish and Wildlife News, Fall 2016, p. 18-19

Susan Adamowicz along the Webhannet River at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in Maine. Credit: USFWS

People Behind a Stronger Coast: Julie Devers

These three corrugated metal culverts outside of Centreville, MD, at a road-stream crossing are a severe barrier to fish migration, says Julie Devers, fish biologist. Water flows through the crushed and rusted pipes to drop into a shallow pool at the outlet. If fish were trying to swim upstream to their spawning grounds, they would be forced to jump, an impossible task for migrating fish species found in this watershed. Credit: Steve Droter

Communities are safer if culverts are correctly designed and installed. During storms and flash flooding events, such as Hurricanes Irene or Sandy, Devers says “the water flow [was] so high that it was going up and over the culverts and was wiping out the roads… So we’re trying to set states up to have the data [they need] so in the event we are replacing culverts for routine maintenance or if there’s a fish barrier, we’re putting the right size in.” Credit: Steve Droter

The North Atlantic Aquatic Connectivity Collaborative (NAACC) is a network of individuals from universities, conservation organizations, state and federal natural resource and transportation agencies focused on improving aquatic connectivity in 13 states from Maine to West Virginia. The funding they received after Hurricane Sandy from the Department of the Interior created common protocols for measuring road stream–crossings to identify high priority bridges and culverts for upgrades and replacement to improve coastal resiliency and fish passages. Credit: Steve Droter

“Even if they are not what we have historically considered migratory species, all fish need to be able to move freely within a given stream,” says Phil Herzig, a fisheries biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “The goal” explains Devers “is to maintain connectivity for species like brook trout so that we don’t cut a population off so that it doesn’t have genetic mixing with other downstream populations.” Credit: Stever Droter

Out of the more than 30,000 road-stream crossings in Maryland, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and partners have assessed approximately 1,000. With an average of one road-stream crossing every 1.3 miles in the Northeast, the ability to prioritize which crossings are the most severe inhibitors to safety and fish passage allows for the best distribution of resources. Credit: Steve Droter

At the base of this road-stream crossing is a scour pool. When culverts are undersized for high flow events, water comes through like a firehouse. This can widen and/or deepen the downstream area as it cuts through the banks. These scour pools destabilize stream banks and lead to an increase of sediment sloughed off into the stream. Credit: Steve Droter

“There’s a brook trout stream near my house,” says Devers, “A culvert in the stream has been replaced twice and the road repaired because of flooding and if they would just put it back the right size, there could be an opportunity for brook trout passage. I wish the public knew that some of these resources that they care about could be helped if we got the engineers to make the culverts the right size” to handle these high flow events. Credit: Steve Droter

Just outside of Centreville, Maryland, you can find Julie Devers waist deep in water on the side of the road. With measuring tape in hand, she is assessing one of more than 30,000 road-stream crossings in the state.  The particular culverts she is examining are known to be a severe barrier to fish passage. Safety for people and connectivity for fish and wildlife can be enhanced by simply repairing and redesigning these crossings.

Devers is a fish biologist with the Maryland Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office. By partnering with the Maryland State Highway Administration, NOAA Fisheries and Maryland Department of Natural Resources, they have been assessing road-stream crossings to develop recommendations of which culverts and crossings should be prioritized for repair. “Highways have a maintenance schedule,” says Devers, and through their recommendations, “the SHA could replace [the culverts] when they redo the highway.”

Entire roads can be wiped out if they are undersized or poorly designed.  “What we saw in the Northeast during Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee is that undersized culverts really caused a lot of damage,” says Devers. Flooding from storm surges are not able to pass through these barriers and can cause thousands of dollars of damage to roads and property. As we mark the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Sandy’s devastation of the Atlantic Coast, it is important to keep in mind the impact that these climate events can have on our communities.

For species of river herrings like alewife, blueback herring and American shad the difference between a fish-friendly passageway and a severe barrier is more than a safety concern; it’s about life or death. These species are vital to the food web. Alewife have been known to be eaten by nearly anything throughout their transition in habitat; ranging from cod, halibut, fox, and eagles.

These migratory species travel from saltwater to freshwater to lay their eggs. If there are blockages along the way, they won’t be able to complete their journey. Even for nonmigratory species, such as brook trout, the inability to travel upstream could leave entire populations separated causing a genetic bottleneck. The brook trout stream near her home, one of the last in Anne Arundel County, says Devers, is considered a “relic” to the locals.

Across the whole Northeast, there are an estimated 210,000 bridges, culverts, and dams spanning 280,000 miles of river. Many of them, you are passing on your morning commute and are throughout your community. While many of these dams and bridges serve important purposes, old and inadequate designs make them a risk.

After Hurricane Sandy, funding through the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013 has supported dozens of projects to restore rivers and streams and remove barriers to connectivity. With this funding, projects throughout Maryland have been able to better protect their communities and coastline through increases resiliency. Groups like the North Atlantic Aquatic Connectivity Collaborative were able to utilize this funding to create a map and database for biologists like Devers and for the public to use. These tools provide information about the assessed barriers in a region and rates how bad they are for fish passage or safety.

Through the work of biologists like Devers, we are able to make our communities more resilient. By working to identify the features in our communities that could pose a risk to people and wildlife, she is giving stakeholders the tools to create the change needed to make us #StrongerAfterSandy.

This is the second in a five part series of photo slideshows highlighting the people who have been working to defend their coastal ecosystems against storms in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Last week, we looked at Matt Whitbeck and Miles Simmons in Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. You can view the continuation of this series and other news regarding our restoration and recovery projects on our website.