Groundwork: Stone, Sandbags, and Brush

Not every phase of a hydro restoration is dramatic. This one was mostly digging.

May and June went to groundwork in every sense of the word. The excavator spent much of it in the tailrace — the channel that returns water to the river below the powerhouse — clearing stone from a collapsed section so the channel can carry water the way it was built to.

We also took delivery of a stack of used one-ton sandbags. They don't look like much stacked in the yard, but they have a job waiting for them: when work eventually moves below the waterline at the headgate, those bags become a coffer dam.

Alongside the digging, we cleared years of brush and overgrowth from the work areas. Some of it was burned on site in controlled piles, the rest hauled off. Under the brush, the site keeps revealing its history: stone walls, old foundations, and the water channels that served the original mill.

It's satisfying work in its own way. Every cleared channel, every opened sightline, every stump pulled makes the site look a little less like an abandoned corner of the woods and a little more like a working plant in the making.

Meanwhile, our engineering attention has turned squarely to the dam itself — and in particular to the left abutment, where a persistent leak needs addressing.