An end to the nearly incessant flooding of the Pawtuxet

[mattmfm]

Pawtuxet Falls project is biggest dam removal job in R.I. history

The sound of cascading water competed with the cacophony of a hydraulic jackhammer on Wednesday as workers began restoring the Pawtuxet Falls to the way they were in Colonial times.

Bit by bit and chunk by chunk, the 150-foot concrete dam spanning the Pawtuxet River between Warwick and Cranston started to succumb to a project to clear the way for fish that have historically migrated up waterways across Rhode Island. It’s been a long time since river herring, American shad and other so-called anadromous species, which live in salt water but breed in fresh water, have had much of a chance of getting past the dam to spawn upstream.

“This was a natural falls before there was any kind of dam here,” said Thomas Ardito, policy director for the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program.

Ardito called it the largest dam-removal project in the state’s history, one that should play a small role in relieving flooding that has chronically plagued the Pawtuxet watershed.

http://www.projo.com/news/content/DAM_REMOVAL_08-11-11_LAPM1L8_v20.44769.html