Keeping water at bay

On the Maine Road

Columnist Bill Nemitz will be on the road until Labor Day weekend, reporting on people and places of interest in western and northern Maine. To top of story

DEXTER - Randy Webber stood atop the small concrete dam that separates downtown Dexter from disaster.

"You see this measly little stream going through here," he said, looking down at the spillway that marks the end of Wassookeag Lake and the beginning of the East Branch Sebasticook River. "And you don't realize how much water is behind it."

Unless, of course, you're the operator of the Dexter Utilities District and you've got a leaking dam on your hands. Then the water is all you think about.

A short distance downstream, the river disappears under the Tillson True Value Hardware store. Then it flows underground beneath the Town Office, across Main Street and under Reny's Department Store and Mr. Paperback before resurfacing amid the splendor of Wayside Park.

Along the way, sump pumps collect water from the basements of each building and spew it back into the stream every 30 seconds or so. Just to be safe, Tillson owner Rich Pfirman has two separate pumps wired to two separate circuits so if one quits the other will keep running.

"If the dam were to go, you'd have more than 1,000 acres (of lake) that would have to drain," said Pfirman, who earned a master's degree in hydrology from the University of Arizona before coming here in 1975 to join his father-in-law's hardware business. "The dam's always leaked, but it's leaking more now."

Hence the town's new Emergency Action Plan, which includes this scripted message from the Dexter Public Safety Department's public address system: "The Wassookeag Lake Dam has failed. You are in the flood zone and may be in danger. Please alert your immediate neighbors and leave your residence. É This is not a drill."

Nobody in this town of 4,000 expects that to happen. On the other hand, nobody objected this month when the Town Council approved a $200,000 bond issue to repair the dam.

It's a simple matter of gravity. Up there, about 432 feet above sea level, is Lake Wassookeag, formed by the glaciers and fed mostly by springs. Down here, a good 20-30 feet lower, is downtown Dexter.

Between the two is the dam. Built in 1914 to raise the lake level and thus provide a steady water supply to the half dozen mills that once hugged the outlet stream, the dam normally holds back 8,437 acre feet of water (picture an acre of land covered with a foot of water). In the rainy seasons, when the lake fills three times faster than the dam's tiny spillway can drain it, the water storage swells as high as 12,000 acre feet.

Put more simply, there's a big wall of water up there Ð so big that a major dam failure quickly would overwhelm the serpentine system of culverts and gullies that carry the outlet stream through Ð and, when necessary, under Ð the downtown business district.

Just ask Webber, the dam operator. He'll never forget the day back in 1984 when he hooked his backhoe up to the dam's metal spillway gate to raise it a couple of feet. Suddenly, the current caught one end of the gate, swung it around and, just like that, it was gone.

The water cascaded through, flooding the first two floors of an old mill downstream until its basement windows exploded outward. From there, the surge continued on to the hardware store, the Town Office and beyond Ð flooding the basements and threatening to overrun Main Street.

Plywood saved the day. Volunteers rushed up from downtown, slipped the 4-by-8 sheets in front of a debris screen attached to an old railroad trestle just upstream from the dam, and the torrent quickly subsided.

Later that year, the town hired Reed & Reed Construction to beef up the dam with concrete and riprap, and everyone relaxed.

Then the heavy rain returned in 1987 and again, the lake came knocking Ð this time, via channels that had eroded their way around the sides of the dam and into the stream bed.

"I was here in the store and I heard a sound like someone was underneath with a big sledge hammer," Pfirman recalled. "It was the water and boulders pounding on the pilings underneath the building."

Pfirman ran upstream, saw the water pouring through the dam and summoned help. The local Kiwanis Club turned out in force, reinserting the plywood upstream and tossing sandbag after sandbag into the breaches.

Back came the dump trucks and heavy equipment. In went more stone riprap. Again, everyone calmed down É sort of.

Judy Doore arrived here as town manager slightly more than a year ago. By then, folks again were talking about the water that had found its way through the riprap and into the stream, bypassing the spillway and thus any human control over the flowage into town.

As usual, out came the sandbags. Only this time, when the first 50-pound bag was tossed into the upstream side of the dam, the rushing water immediately tore it to shreds and spit it out the other side.

Workers then filled large plastic bladders with dozens of 50-pound sandbags and gently lowered them into the breach. They held É sort of.

Last fall, state inspectors came up from Augusta, took one look at the water still seeping through, and declared a state of emergency.

"The dam is structurally and hydraulically defective and it would not be in the best interest of the public for the (town) to assume a wait-and-see attitude," the inspectors' report warned.

The town, thank you very much, already had figured that out. Last summer, Doore called together representatives from the town government, which owns the dam; the utilities district, which operates it with an eye toward maintaining a safe and stable public water supply; the business community, whose sump pumps can work only so hard; and the Dexter Lake Association, whose waterfront-dwelling members howl whenever the lake gets too high or too low.

"It's the first time all of these groups have actually sat down together and talked with each other," Doore said. "Now everyone's on the same page."

It shows. Where once trouble with the dam meant a lot of running, hollering and maybe a phone call or two, the town now has its first-ever, 17-page Emergency Action Plan. The document includes an elaborate telephone tree and detailed plans Ð aptly labeled "Operational Flow Charts" Ð for the police and fire departments to alert the citizenry and, if necessary, get the lowlanders out of harm's way.

First on that list would be Billie Jo Franklin. She lives in a rented mobile home with her 5-year-old son, Collin, and falls asleep each night to the sound of the river gurgling past her cinder-block foundation.

"It's kind of scary to think about," Franklin said, looking upstream. "I do worry about it when it runs higher. I came home one night and it was almost past (the foundation)."

In the interest of keeping that ocean little, the Town Council last month approved a timetable whereby a major dam overhaul will be designed by Sept. 1.

A construction contract then will be awarded by Oct. 15, and the actual work Ð including a much-enlarged concrete abutment and added spillways Ð will be completed by Dec. 31.

A metal coffer dam will be erected up by the railroad trestle to hold back the lake while the work is done. Webber, the keeper of the dam, has the spillway open wide these days to draw down the lake as much as possible to prevent it from flooding during the two-month construction period.

Meanwhile, the Wassookeag Lake Shareholders Group met this week and agreed that its work is far from finished: The new dam at times will release more water than the old one ever could Ð so much water that it could overwhelm some of the stone passageways downtown.

"The consensus is that we not just repair the dam and forget it," said Doore, the town manager. "It's important that we also address the downtown obstacles that are downstream."

In other words, even amid the never-ending sound of water, history has taught Dexter to accept its fate without panic or protest.

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