Eyman Park in the southwest Ohio city of Washington Court House is a fun place to be a kid: There are basketball courts and softball fields, a playground and a splash pad, even an old train engine.
But the stream that runs through the middle of the park isn’t for playing in.
“You're gonna keep kids back from the dam,” said City Manager Joe Denen. “It's just not very inviting, particularly if you have a family of younger kids.”
Just a few feet from the sidewalk, Paint Creek’s ditched banks drop steeply into the water, which flows over a low-head concrete dam just downstream.
“I am 53 years old and the dam has always been there,” Denen said. “There's no clear record of when that was constructed or really why. It has no functional purpose on the creek.”
He wants to see it removed, both to improve the water quality of the creek and make it more welcoming to local families. With funding from the state’s H2Ohio Rivers Program, that will soon be a reality.
The danger of low-head dams
An estimated 13,000 low-head dams span the width of rivers and streams across the country. Unlike the behemoth Hoover Dam, these dams are much smaller, usually less than 15 feet tall. And instead of holding back floodwaters, water generally flows over them continuously.
Originally built to do things like power corn and flour mills or irrigate farm fields, many have long outlived their original purpose. But they can pose a serious danger to the public.
“Some of them were engineered so that they slow water down as soon as the water goes over the dam, but that engineering can create a circulating current downstream,” said Sarah Hippensteel Hall, manager of communications, outreach and stewardship with the Miami Conservancy District.
“If you got trapped in it, you would not be able to get out,” she said. “And it's so strong, it could rip your life jacket out.”
Hundreds of people have died at low-head dams across the country over the past few decades.
Hippensteel Hall says that’s partly why the Miami Conservancy District has worked to remove five of them in southwest Ohio.
Removing low-head dams across Ohio
It’s not cheap to remove low-head dams, like the Tait Station Low Dam near Dayton, which had fallen into disrepair.
“It was a really old piece of concrete structure,” Hippensteel Hall said. “We identified the amount that it would take to pay for the dam's removal and it was quite expensive” – roughly $1.7 million.
But it would have cost three times as much to repair.
“So removal really was the best option,” she said.
Organizations all over Ohio are taking on similar projects. In the state’s northeast, there’s work underway to remove nine low-head dams along the Mahoning River, where they were once used to provide cooling water to big steel industries.
Now, Hippensteel Hall says there’s more demand to recreate on some streams.
“There's definitely some momentum to get these dams out, get these rivers safer,” she said.
The City of Washington Court House is getting in on the action. With nearly a million dollars in funding from the state’s H2Ohio Rivers Program, it’s partnering with the Fayette County Soil and Water Conservation District and the nonprofit Rural Action to take out the dam in Eyman Park.
The city anticipates the project will take about a year to complete. When it’s finished, it’ll offer more than public safety benefits.
Environmental benefits
Standing near the Paint Creek on a recent hot summer day, Matt Ledford, Rural Action’s watersheds program director, made note of the buildup of sand, silt and dirt caused by the dam.
“If you look over on the other side of this dam, you'll see there's a bunch of sediment piled up back behind there,” he said.
That sediment wrecks habitats for macroinvertebrates like bugs and worms.
“And then if there's no macroinvertebrates, the fish don't have things to eat,” Ledford said. “So it affects the whole system.”
Nutrients can also build up behind the dam and cause algal blooms. And dams stop fish from moving upstream, says Rich Cogen, executive director of the Ohio River Foundation.
“Once you put a dam in, you isolate particular populations of fish. And so it's important to remove structures so that population diversity can increase,” he said.
Having a healthy fish population impacts other animals — like several species of state-endangered freshwater mussels, which depend on fish to reproduce.
Freshwater mussels can filter around a dozen gallons of water every day. So removing low-head dams has repercussions that can trickle through an entire river ecosystem.
“While some people might value the aesthetics of a low-head dam, the greater value lies in removing the dam for public safety, water quality and aquatic species diversity,” Cogen said.
After the Tait Station Low Dam was removed, Hippensteel Hall said it didn’t take long for the Great Miami River to reap the benefits.
“We instantly saw a bounce back of fish and bugs that really like high-quality habitat,” she said.
City manager Joe Denen hopes the same thing happens at Eyman Park.
Next year, he envisions this section of Paint Creek with more gradual banks filled with native vegetation, where kids can wade in the water and people can go fishing. He wants it to be a place families are drawn to — not warned to keep away from.
