April 13, 2010

Restoring the Weir River

Dear Editor,

The Weir River Watershed Association (WRWA) is a nonprofit organization concerned with the health of the Weir River and its watershed. We would like to provide some background as Hingham Town Meeting prepares to discuss the proposed dredging of Foundry Pond. The proposed project will be asking Hingham voters to allocate $150,000 from Hingham’s Community Preservation funds with the rest of the proposed $650,000 total cost of the project coming from leftover state monies from the Hingham Harbor dredging project.

Foundry Pond is a manmade impoundment formed by a dam at the head of the tide on the Weir River, which means it is the first dam on the Weir River before the river meets the Weir River estuary – a state designated Area of Critical Environmental Concern. The Weir River provides spawning habitat for herring, eels and smelt who migrate from the sea to freshwater to complete their reproductive cycle. There are fish ladders at the Foundry Pond Dam and upstream at the next impoundment on the Weir River at Triphammer Pond. In the spring of 2009, the Hingham Conservation Commission documented a total of 17 herring that were able to make it over the fish ladder and into Foundry Pond. The state fisheries biologists have indicated that they believe the re-built fish ladder itself was poorly designed and requires significant human intervention in order to operate. Even under the best of circumstances however, fish ladders are an unwanted compromise and species specific.

In the late 1990s the Foundry Pond dam was repaired under an emergency condition and the stream channel below the dam was widened, bank vegetation removed and riprap placed at the base of the dam and fish ladder. According to the state’s fisheries biologist, this habitat alteration resulted in a significantly impaired spawning smelt habitat. The state has promised to provide assistance to the town to restore stream channel and smelt habitat. This stream restoration work has not been completed, even though it has been in the planning stages for several years. Clearly, the fish population at this site has been significantly diminished to the point where herring are almost nonexistent from this river system and in danger of becoming locally extinct from this river forever.

In many other river systems that were dammed during the industrial revolution, communities and private dam owners are reviewing dam removal and river restoration as a healthy and natural alternative to keeping and maintaining a dam. In many cases, dam removal can makes the most sense from a cost and ecological perspective. Removing a dam restores river habitat, improves water quality, decreases thermal pollution, increases oxygen levels in the water, restores fish habitat and passage for migrating fish, restores river fish species, like brook trout, while at the same time alleviates the owner of liability associated with the dam, the maintenance of the dam or dredging of the upstream impoundment.

When river restoration is feasible, little or no dredging behind the dam is typically needed. In many river restoration projects, the impoundment is drained and the natural stream channel is allowed to form behind the dam. Some dredging to form the channel and grading to shape the river banks is often performed to improve aesthetics.

The WRWA would like to urge the residents of Hingham to ask that the town pursue river restoration as a means to restore fish habitat and decrease the town’s long term need and expense to maintain a manmade pond and its infrastructure. The Federal government has habitat restoration grant opportunities available that will provide up to half of the costs associated with dam removal and river restoration, including feasibility studies. The WRWA remains willing to assist the Town of Hingham in moving forward in this effort to restore the Weir River to the beauty that it once was.

For more information please visit our website at www.weirriver.org

Sincerely,

Darrell Baker

President

Weir River Watershed Association