ORRINGTON, Maine — Swetts Pond’s water level should hold steady for another 50 years or more, thanks to a new dam structure recently installed at the pond’s northern tip.
Though there weren’t any immediate problems with the old dam, the town was directed four years ago to repair or replace it by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Town Manager Paul White said during a visit to the dam earlier this week.
“All it does is maintain the level of the pond,” White said. “That’s it. And it was suggested quite strongly that we do some repair. So we hired some people to take a look at it and so forth.”
White said the original dam was built in the late 1940s as a rock-and-concrete structure to maintain a higher water level for ice manufacturing. It was installed around an old beaver dam, he said.
“It’s actually been here since [then] without any major maintenance,” he said.
Longtime Swetts Pond property owner Reggie Glidden said the original dam was built by Hank Hanscom and Bob Tabor. The idea was the higher water level meant ice could be harvested closer to shore with fewer weeds.
To raise the roughly $100 needed to build the dam at the time, people who owned property around the pond chipped in toward the cost, said Glidden, who has served as dam keeper, removing planks when necessary to control the water level.
“They went around to everyone who owned land around the pond and had an interest in the dam and collected $5,” he said. “They ran out of money and had to go around and collect another dollar from everybody.”
Things were different this time around.
White said that when town officials began exploring what it would take to build a new dam, the initial cost came in at about $275,000 for a complete rebuild, with repairs expected to cost less.
“The decision of the Board [of Selectmen] was not to do a lesser repair that’s going to last 10 or 15 years, 20 years. Instead it was, ‘Let’s do something that’s going to last longer,” he said.
“But as time goes on, engineers start looking at things and that cost started escalating to over $600,000,” he said.
That prompted another look at the project to see whether it could be done less expensively.
White said he worked to that end with town engineer Bill Olver and resident Jim Ring, a retired Bangor city engineer who offered his expertise to the town if it ever was needed.
What they came up with was a design-build concept, where the contractor would do both, White said.
“The problem was, when we put this out to bid, nobody bid on it because it was such a small project for the bigger companies to do, it just wasn’t worth it,” he said.
Ring said the plan called for using a cofferdam as part of the construction process, which would have involved building a temporary enclosure and dredging to create a dry space in which to install the new dam.
Olver then consulted Sargent Corp., the company that handled the removal of the Veazie Dam on the Penobscot River. A Sargent Corp. official came down to the site and said the project could be done for far less than what was originally estimated. As a result, what had been a $650,000 project became a $275,00 project.
“We did not remove the old structure. It’s founded largely on ledge or at least partially on ledge,” Ring said. “What this design did was it used in-place construction and precast panels that the contractor built off site, and this encapsulated the old dam in one massive structure.
“It’s very solidly pinned to the bedrock. There’s no reason that this structure won’t last as long as if we’d taken the old one out and built a new one,” Ring said.
The process took about a month and was completed a few weeks ago.
Because it was recommended by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, the new dam is equipped with a device designed to help elvers migrate. The elver ladder looks like a strip of black bristles that run up over the dam along one of its edges.
The idea, White said, is that the bristle strips slow the running water, allowing baby eels to go up and over the dam.
“If one ever showed up, but let me tell you there’s probably never going to be any in there,” he said.