Marianna dam removal project outlined
Scott Beveridge/Observer-Reporter
Lisa Hollingsworth-Segedy, director of river restoration for American Rivers, discusses the removal of the Marianna dam at an open house on the project Saturday with Julian Segarra, right, and his brother, Nikko.
An example of how Ten Mile Creek can be beautified after the Marianna dam is removed from the stream.
One example of a footbridge proposed for Marianna after a dam is removed from Ten Mile Creek.
MARIANNA – Imagine a pedestrian bridge across Ten Mile Creek connecting residents of Marianna with their neighbors in West Bethlehem Township.
It would cross into a new park that is also eyed for a former mine yard along the creek that would have playground equipment and a handicap accessible deck for fisherman and ramp leading to the water.
“We want to link people to this resource that has been overlooked,” said Lisa Hollingsworth-Segedy, a director of river restoration at American Rivers, a charitable organization that agreed to remove the dam and restore the creek at no cost to taxpayers.
“What can we do here that will give people an opportunity to come down to enjoy this?” Hollingsworth-Segedy said Saturday at an open house for the project in the Marianna Borough Building.
The century-old dam was built by a mining company to create a reservoir to serve the mine and provide drinking water to the nearby historic houses it developed for its workers.
The borough now receives its water from another source, leaving the crumbling dam without a purpose at a time when environmentalists have been calling for the removal of obsolete dams that prevent fish from reaching spawning locations.
Pennsylvania has led the nation in such dam removal projects for the past 14 years, Hollingsworth-Segedy said. To date, more than 320 of them have been removed since the 1980s, she said.
She said the dam removal projects are supported by the state Fish and Boat Commission, which might come into Marianna to take measures to increase the number of aquatic insects in Ten Mile after the dam is gone.
The borough-owned dam in Marianna is a low-head concrete structure that creates a dangerous current just downstream of the structure.
Marianna Council in December reached a consent agreement with American Rivers for the project.
Hollingsworth-Segedy said several men attended the meeting to assert that destroying the dam will ruin fishing in the creek. There also was support for constructing a footbridge across the creek after the dam is gone, she said.
The creek, she said, will become more of a sport-fishing stream than a fishing hole below the dam.
She said it also will make the stream more accessible for kayakers and other small boaters, especially those who attend the annual Marianna Outdoorsmen Association boat race, which was held Saturday.
The process to remove the dam is lengthy. It will include complying with the state’s dam safety regulations along with consultations with state and federal agencies to project natural resources.
The state Department of Environmental Protection might require a sediment management plan because a large amount of silt and mud has settled upstream of the dam, Hollingsworth-Segedy said.
A conservation easement also must be reached in which the borough will agree to not replace the dam and include a requirement to allow people onto its property to fish and boat, she said.
The project is expected to cost about $200,000 and be funded through mitigation bank, where investors direct money for streambank restoration in exchange for damages they caused elsewhere through development.
The design phase of the project is expected to begin in July. It will then be reviewed by the state for four-to-six months before the demolition will begin, likely in the summer of 2018.
A crew will then move in with heavy equipment to remove a small section of the dam to allow the water to slowly drain out of the reservoir before demolition begins.
American Rivers often finds large cut stones at a dam’s foundation, and they can be reused in the new, local park. It also often finds rare wood at the foundations, which can be donated to local woodworkers.
It will take three or four years for the stream to return to its original floodplain.
“We care about Ten Mile Creek,” Hollingsworth-Segedy said. “This community has had this dam for a century. They are going to have to let go of that.”