Reminder News
The state’s plans for a $3 million repair project on the 150-year-old Glasgo Dam drew a packed house of local residents Aug. 26, voicing worries about the project’s impact on their wells, the fish population and possible historic artifacts.
The state’s plans for a $3 million repair project on the 146-year-old Glasgo Dam drew a packed house of local residents Aug. 26, voicing worries about the project’s impact on their wells, the fish population and possible historic artifacts.
Officials from the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and engineering firm Fuss & O’Neill met with about 50 residents at town hall to present their plans for the project, which is slated to get underway in February 2015 and should be completed by summer 2016. They stressed the need to fix the structure to prevent catastrophic flooding that would almost certainly result from a dam failure, but warned that residents with shallow wells may lose water for the duration of work.
Philip Moreschi, vice president of Fuss & O’Neill; said that the most recent inspection of the dam shows enough signs of seepage, bulging and insufficient spillway and drawdown capacity to earn a “high hazard” classification. “If it were to fail, it could cause loss of life and severe property damage,” he said A dam failure could wipe out the cluster of houses at the foot of the spillway, along with the adjacent stretch of nearby Route 201, he said.
© 2014 Reminder News, an edition of the Hartford Courant