A ruptured beaver dam sent a surge of water across the Taconic State Parkway in Milan on March 31, scattering debris across the roadway and shutting down traffic for a half hour. It also drained a large, biodiverse pond that residents say had long been part of a cherished wetland habitat.
Jeff Galm, assistant chief of the Milan Volunteer Fire Department, was driving north on the Taconic shortly before 8 p.m. when he saw several vehicles stopped ahead with their hazard lights flashing. At first, he thought there had been a crash.
But as he approached, Galm saw what he later described as “a raging river” pouring across the parkway from west to east, covering both the northbound and southbound lanes over a stretch he estimated at 100 yards.
“I’ve been with the fire department for 44 years, and I’ve never seen anything remotely like this,” Galm said.
The flooding occurred between the North Road and Ferris Lane exits. Galm immediately called 911 to report the emergency.
According to the New York State Police Troop K, the Taconic was closed at 8:05 p.m. and reopened at 8:30 p.m. when the state Department of Transportation arrived. DOT crews, along with Milan firefighters, remained on scene until 10:18 p.m. for cleanup.
Galm later learned the flash flood had been caused by the rupture of a beaver dam about a mile west of the Taconic, near the midpoint of Academy Hill Road, a winding five-mile stretch that runs roughly parallel to the parkway.
The breach drained an approximately 8-acre pond, leaving behind a muddy field dotted with puddles and clumps of sedge.
Some Academy Hill Road residents said they initially struggled to understand how water from the quiet, unnamed pond could have reached the Taconic, which lies beyond a steep rise. But a gorge, not visible from the road, cuts through the hillside and appears to have given the torrent a path downhill.
Along the way, the flood tore through part of Academy Hill Road, ripping a Japanese-style pedestrian bridge from its place over a small adjacent private pond and depositing it in the middle of the road.
By the time the water receded from the Taconic, it had left behind woody debris and large stones apparently pulled from one of the old boundary walls that run through the surrounding landscape.
No injuries were reported, and no vehicles were found stranded in the floodwaters, though cleanup crews did discover small car parts mixed in with the debris.
Residents near the drained pond said it had supported a rich wetland ecosystem. One described seeing a heron regularly perched on sedge mounds, ring-necked ducks courting and scouting nesting sites, and amphibians laying eggs in shallow pools. Now, they say, the site looks devastated.
Some believe the rupture could have been prevented.
Jim Etkin, who lives directly across Academy Hill Road from the pond, blamed the collapse and subsequent flooding on the removal of the beavers that had tended to the dam.
“This is what happens when you fire the maintenance crew,” Etkin said, referring to the beavers that built and maintained the large dam.
Last spring, Dutchess County hired a trapper to trap and euthanize nine beavers. At the time, residents reported the animals had been damming culverts and contributing to localized road flooding.
Dutchess County Public Works Commissioner Robert Balkind said, “The beaver activity at/around the culvert was causing flooding and costly damage to Academy Hill Road, despite the installation of a grate to prevent the beavers from getting into the culvert. The beavers continue to build dams up against the grate. The trapping was effective in mitigating the flooding.”
A spokesperson for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation said, “DEC cannot confirm the presence or absence of beavers at this site. Beaver dam failure can be related to many factors including spring snow melt, recent rainfall, human activity, or a lack of maintenance.”
Beavers are indeed Nature’s engineers and they obviously had been doing a better job than the experts the county brought in to control the situation. When will we ever learn to stop messing with the natural order
Exactly. When will we realize that humans don’t always have all the answers? When will we stop making decisions rooted only in our human-centered wants? When will we truly start listening to and appreciating the deep wisdom and needs of our more-than-human kin?
Well, remove the beavers and suffer the consequences. The County Road Administration has no idea of what they are doing and since Milan is basically the Northern part of Dutchess County, it is not tended to properly. Beavers have a job. It is to stop running water. What human being would have decided it was better to trap and destroy animals that were helping retain the pond – Now it is destroyed – Thank the Admin. Road Dept. Culverts were so much more important. Beavers were almost totally taken out of this area by killing them for their pelts. Had to import them and now we are killing them again. Purpose? Can’t we let any wildlife survive?
Was there any study done about the effects of removing the beavers? Was the DEC even consulted? It sounds like the county really dropped the ball here.
No one loves animals more than I do, but when beavers damned up our stream, over and over again, resulting in destructive flooding to our property, we had to come to the tough decision to have them removed. And I call it “our stream” loosely. It is actually The Little Wappinger and it belongs to all of us. And would not, anymore, had the beavers had their way.
Proven solutions exist to keep water flowing through culverts even when beavers build dams. Yet the county installed an inadequate barrier that did virtually nothing. Rather than investing in a proper fix, officials chose to have the beavers killed. Without them to maintain the dam, it failed, destroying the surrounding ecosystem.
This was entirely preventable. An uncontrolled dam breach also poses a serious public safety risk. The county’s decision to choose a cheap, short-term fix over a responsible solution is both environmentally negligent and inexcusable.
What a horrible lack of foresight and planning which resulted in a huge devastation to local, thriving ecosystem which we need more now than ever. There needs to be an investigation into why this took place and how to prevent it in the future.
“The trapping was effective in mitigating the flooding.” This defense of the county’s actions is the type of short term mindset that our public officials need to avoid. Not only did the county cause the complete destruction of a thriving habitat, the knock on effect was even greater flooding that caused a public highway to close. Is this really Mr. Balkind’s definition of success?
As other have mentioned, there are better methods of mitigating unwanted beaver activity that do not result in such extreme environmental and public safety impacts. Does Mr. Balkind know that the fire department has also used the water in this lake to put out nearby fires multiple times in the past five years?
We have always been against the killing of nature’s ecosystem engineers and when the trapper came to our door asking for consent to trap beavers in our lake, one of the first questions I asked was what will happen to the enormous dam they have been maintaining. The trapper didn’t have a good response to that question but nature has provided the answer. Hopefully those responsible will take these questions more seriously now.