Neversink River Freed to Run Its Old Course
NEW YORK — By the banks of the birthplace of American fly-fishing, backhoes are demolishing a dam that for nearly a century has blocked the easy flow of the Neversink River.
The Cuddebackville dam in the Catskills is being pulled down by the Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in a $2.2-million project that is among dozens of dam demolition efforts underway this year across the country. The Corps of Engineers, long the nation's preeminent dam-builder, is learning to become its dam-eradicator also.
Never before has any dam in New York state been demolished solely for sake of the environment. In the muddy aftermath of hurricane-related flooding last week, which swelled the Neversink flow to 50 times normal, a construction crew continued to dismantle the low-lying, 107-foot dam. A third of it has been torn down so far.
Already, the fish are swimming freely.
"We have the dam breached; we have fish past the dam for the first time," in decades said aquatic ecologist Colin Apse at the Conservancy's Neversink River project office.
The Cuddebackville dam is among 60 being torn down this year in 14 states, including California, as part of a growing movement to clear rivers of defunct barriers, according to American Rivers, an environmental group in Washington, D.C.
More than 77,000 dams straddle streams nationwide; at least 7,000 in New York state alone.
Few waterways, however, so neatly illustrate the paradox of coexistence between nature and urban life as the Neversink, a tributary of the Delaware River that flows about 90 miles north of New York City.
No other stream in the 13,000-square miles of the Delaware River watershed is so pristine or occupies such a special place in the history of angling. Yet it is also heavily integrated into the plumbing of a major metropolitan region.
Every time a New Yorker takes a bath, they take a dip in the Neversink. Every glass of Manhattan tap water, every sprinkle from a Staten Island showerhead, every Brooklyn toilet flush, begins, in part, with a chilly rivulet clear as gin cascading from the Neversink River.
The headwaters of the Neversink are cached upstream in a 35-billion-gallon reservoir and then channeled through the world's longest continuous underground tunnel to become the single cleanest source of water for the city of 8 million.
