After a week of clearing trees and vegetation, crews of four to seven workers recently finished demolishing concrete on top of a large, century-old dam in West Rutland, Vt. to prevent future flooding and restore watershed ecological resilience along the Youngs Brook tributary.
Removing most of the 250-foot-long by 40-foot-high Young’s Brook Dam’s concrete and excess soil restored “the channel for the dam’s stream as if the dam had never been there,” says Ron Fabian, president of the project’s excavation subcontractor, Fabian Earth Moving.
Prioritized by the Vermont Dam Task Force and the Vermont Dam Removal Initiative, which seeks to raise awareness, identify abandoned dams and partner with communities and organizations at the watershed scale, the project is among 80 dams physically removed in the state by October 2025, including eight dams removed this summer, says a restoration project by Karina Dailey. manager overseeing the Youngs Brook Project, who also serves as chairman of the Vermont Dam Task Force, which prioritizes projects for dam removal.
After experiencing historic flooding in 2023, Vermont has removed more dams per capita than any other state, according to the environmental nonprofit American Rivers, and also enacted its 2024 Flood Safety Act, a first-in-the-nation law that gives the state jurisdiction over twenty-three thousand miles of streams and rivers effective in 2028.
Dailey estimates that five dams will be removed by 2026 and that environmental partner groups will add four more. “But this work is dynamic, so it’s all forecast,” he says.
Funded by appropriations from Congress and administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency along with state agencies, Young’s Brook Dam is “a great example of an abandoned dam that no longer serves a useful purpose,” Dailey says.
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In September, Fabian Excavation crews removed concrete dam debris and sediment from the face of Young’s Brook Dam in West Rutland, Vt.
Photo courtesy of the Vermont Natural Resources Council
Recovery of flood plains
Removing the Young’s Brook Dam, the source of flooding and safety hazards for decades, could restore more than half an acre of floodplain. West Rutland City Manager Mary Ann Goulette says removing the dam “not only reduces the risk to homes, businesses and infrastructure downstream, but also restores a natural river system that will serve us much better in the face of increasingly severe storms.”
In that spirit, the Flood Safety Act will authorize the state to prevent development within the river corridor of dams removed from a stream site with a drainage area greater than two square miles, helping to “manage stream and floodplain processes toward a more natural state of balance,” says Mike Kline, a member of the Vermont Dam Task Force that led the Vermont Care Act. of Environmental Conservation.
Kline says dams can disrupt the natural processes of sediment transport in streams, causing more sediment deposition in some places and more erosion in others. Removing dams with reservoirs allows for the creation of “floodplains that function to store floodwaters and promote a greater balance between erosion and deposition, thereby reducing river erosion during flood events,” he says.
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The old water control gate infrastructure was preserved during concrete removal at Youngs Brook Dam.
Photo courtesy of the Vermont Natural Resources Council
River excavation
The $626,000-plus Young’s Brook Dam Removal Project was originally scheduled to be completed by Oct. 1 to protect aquatic species that use the river in the fall, but received a two-week extension due to “FEMA’s long wait for funding approval to proceed” and the 11,000 cubic yards of sediment in the reservoir required to remove the linear channel and directional 85 of the channel Vermont stream alteration permit requirements,” says Dailey.
The river dredging project began in August, after more than a month’s delay in receiving federal approval. The project ended Oct. 15 after planning, design and permitting for the project, which is due in 2023, took about five years, says Jessica Clark Louisos, principal water resources engineer for SLR Consulting, the project’s on-site engineer and designer.
Louisos says removing such a large dam requires advance planning and implementing the project in stages to control water and any potential sediment movement. “The water at any point in the project can change direction,” he says.
As of Sept. 30, the remaining dam concrete was located along the lowest point of the bedrock with the top of the concrete at 804 feet elevation, flush with the bedrock on either side, an SLR Consulting report notes. An outlet pipe from the dam was also identified at 800 feet. Fabian’s crews also removed impounded sediments and graded the upstream channel.
Louisos credited the third-generation excavation subcontractor’s “skill and experience” in earthmoving and concrete demolition in the area for the complex project’s success. He said the 88-year-old company “has worked on many river projects and understands the context of the river”.
The recent removal of Young’s Brook Dam in West Rutland, Vt. created a diversion channel tailings basin to help reclaim the floodplain.
Photo courtesy of the Vermont Natural Resources Council
Time tracking
Removing a dam creates a channel that resembles a natural river for water to flow through, says Louisos, who notes that “thinking through all the steps to go from the river above and behind a dam to a natural channel can require thinking about the weather, which can change quite quickly.”
The SLR team and the contractor must keep an eye on the weather and have agreed that if rain is expected, they must “button or stabilize the site,” he adds. If the project is nearing final grade in some areas, the work could include final stabilization, including placing seed and mulch or adding additional erosion controls such as self-fencing or hay bales. If water flows through the project through a temporary culvert, an additional pump may be required.
The dam was originally built as West Rutland’s water supply, but became obsolete when it was replaced by a more modern water supply system in the 1980s, a VNRC press release says.
In 2008, Russ and Ellen Green purchased the property where the dam is located. Three years later, the couple says, flooding from Hurricane Irene created a “mini-Niagara Falls that cut a big new bend in the river below the dam,” uprooting trees, disrupting the stream’s flow into the reservoir and filling the pond with sediment that harmed its aquatic life. “We’re interested to see the transformation over the next few years as the new creek channel is created and the shrubs, trees and wildlife return,” says Russ Green.
