What the River Recalls
Our valley has been traversed by the Branch River since before any of us had names for it.
When my ancestors came in 1793, they discovered that it was following its own course, completely controlled by elevation and volume, and unaffected by human preference.
They constructed the dam that first summer out of a practical realization that, when water is correctly managed, it becomes something that supports life rather than endangers it, rather than out of conceit or ownership.
They used their hands to cut the stone. It was laid by hand. The only argument a building ever needs to make about how well it was constructed is that it was still standing two hundred and thirty-two years later.
On this property, I am the sixth generation of Thibaults. I have thirty-one years of professional experience, a degree in civil engineering, and a 180-acre property that includes the old mill, the dam, the reservoir, and the dock where my late wife and I used to spend our evenings watching the bats emerge from the mill loft.
Coralie, my daughter, was a great hydrologist and a powerful ally since she inherited her mother’s knack for mathematics and my intransigence in about equal measure.
I tell you all of this because the story that follows is about expertise, and expertise is only meaningful if you know who possesses it and how much it cost.
Four years before to the storm, Heather Lynn relocated to Cascade Meadows Estates.
Because my family’s dam had been controlling the Branch River’s spring behavior for two centuries, the subdivision occupied the lower valley, downstream from my property, on terrain that had been dry and buildable for two centuries.
This was not a complicated or technical relationship between cause and effect.
A simple afternoon with the pertinent watershed maps or a quick talk with any longstanding valley resident would have revealed this kind of relationship.
Heather Lynn did not spend afternoons studying watershed maps or having quick talks with longtime locals.
She conducted internet research, joined environmental advocacy Facebook groups, and ultimately found a real estate developer named Hammond Realty LLC.
She would later learn that the company’s interest in the river valley was more about acquiring exposed riverbed for residential development than it was about ecological restoration.
Later on, she would get this information thru unexpected ways. I’m getting ahead of myself.
Fourteen months before to the flood, she made her first complaint with the State Agency of Natural Resources.
She claimed that the demolition of my dam would return the river to its historic state for the benefit of the entire community, that it was an unlawful blockage of a public waterway, and that it denied downstream property owners their natural water rights.
In the filing, she identified herself as an environmental campaigner and concerned citizen. She characterized me as a private landowner who exploits public resources for personal gain.
After reading the complaint, I experienced what I can only characterize as the unique weariness of someone who has dedicated their career to explaining things that shouldn’t need to be explained. For eleven years,
I had been in charge of this dam and the water rights that went along with it. I had been doing so by adhering to the same stewardship guidelines that my father had taught me and that his father had taught him.
These guidelines were passed down thru six generations of people who realized that a reservoir is a responsibility rather than a luxury.
I asked Heather Lynn to meet with me. The original 1793 land grant, the water rights certification, the structural inspection reports from the preceding ten years, and a draft flood risk assessment I had created to show how the demolition of the dam would affect the properties downstream, including hers, were among the documents I brought.
In my three decades of engineering work, I have discovered that the most effective communication is that which treats the other person as intelligent and thinks they will respond to evidence, which is why I provided this material in a straightforward and non-condescending manner.
The evidence did not pique her curiosity.
She wanted to win.
I was able to identify this distinction quite early on in the discussion.
When people are sincerely attempting to comprehend something, they exhibit certain characteristics of listening, such as a modest forward attention, a willingness to be shocked, and an occasional pause that indicates the information is being processed rather than waiting to be refuted.
That was not how Heather Lynn listened. She listened in the manner that individuals listen when they have already made up their minds and are waiting for you to finish speaking so they can go on to their next point.
She informed me that the dam was unlawful. Citing the pertinent statutes, I informed her that it wasn’t.
The public owned the river, she informed me. I described the particular difficulty and informed her that water rights were more complicated than that statement implied.
She informed me about the degradation of the fish habitat. I informed her that the original streambed, with its higher velocity and different sediment profile, might not have been able to duplicate the reservoir’s healthy ecosystem.
She informed me that I was precisely the type of person who concealed his private interests from genuine public scrutiny by hiding behind technical jargon.
I went home after thanking her for her time.
Six weeks later, the lawsuit started.
Since litigation is tiresome even when you are winning, and I was ultimately losing, I will not go into detail about every procedural step of the eighteen months that followed.
Heather Lynn hired a lawyer who was adept at the particular nexus of environmental law and public interest framing, which had been gaining traction in state courts during the preceding ten years.
My professional position in the engineering world was unquestionable, my documentation was comprehensive, and my attorney was outstanding.
Despite all of this, Judge Sandra Crow issued a removal order in March, noting the dam’s impact on the Branch River’s natural flow regime and concluding that, despite my water rights’ historical validity, the public interest in restoring the watershed took precedence.
I went over the order twice. I then gave my daughter a call.
When I had finished reading Coralie the pertinent passages, she remained silent for a considerable amount of time.
“The snowpack data,” she stated.
“I am aware.”
“Dad. At 140% of the seasonal average, the snowpack is present. If the dam is removed in May, when the melt is at its highest, and the valley has little retention capacity—
“Coralie, I understand.”
“The flood risk analysis must be formally filed. Not as an exhibit in court. as a warning to the public.
“I am also aware of that. Take up modeling.
The hydrological forecasts that served as the basis for everything that came next were constructed by her over the course of three weeks.
The models were conservative in their estimations, robust, and peer-reviewed in draft by two colleagues at the state university.
This meant that, should the dam collapse in May, the real flood danger would be at least as terrible as the models predicted, if not worse. The figures were neither speculative nor dramatic.
They were mathematical. The Branch River would convey water to the valley floor more quickly than the channel could if the retention capacity were removed and a warm front was added to an extraordinary snowpack. This was not a forecast. Hydrology was the subject.
In the ninety days that followed the removal order, I did what engineers do when they lose a court battle but don’t give up: I alerted everyone and documented everything.
The State Agency of Natural Resources, the County Emergency Management Office, the Town Select Board, the FEMA regional office, and the Cascade Meadows Estates HOA board received certified letters.
Coralie’s hydrological models, my 283-page environmental assessment, and a simple synopsis written especially for readers without technical backgrounds were all included in each letter because I didn’t want anyone to later claim that they didn’t understand what was being said.
Seventeen form letters acknowledging receipt were sent to me.
Garrett, the Deputy Commissioner of Natural Resources, who had collaborated with me on three infrastructure projects over the past ten years, personally responded.
“I have flagged this file internally, Rowan,” he said. We’ll move quickly when it breaks. “Take care of your family.” Thank you for being so honest. Instead of using “if,” I pointed out the term “when it breaks.”
Stellan Brink was the person I hired to do the removal. Over the course of his career, Stellan had demolished fourteen dams in this state and possessed the quiet authority of someone who has worked with non-negotiating forces all of his life.
Before he spoke, he took off his reading glasses and carefully put them down after reading my flood risk papers at my kitchen table.
“Mr. “I want to professionally go on record with you, Thibault, that this dam shouldn’t come down in the spring,” he stated.
“I am aware, Stellan. We will continue to complete the task.
That afternoon, he signed a written document stating that the removal date was against recognized engineering procedure and that the structure was sound.
He signed my official warning to the state. We were creating something that Heather Lynn had not expected: a written record that would endure whatever came next and provide a clear account of who knew what and when.
As a last resort, I wrote directly to Heather Lynn. In the simplest terms possible, not as a litigant, not as an engineer, but as a neighbor. I described what the models displayed.
In exchange for her dropping the petition, I offered to stop complying with the deportation order. I had no desire to win. I wanted to avoid witnessing the water in the lower valley.
She shared a picture of my letter along with a 1,500-word essay on her blog.
I was portrayed in the essay as a wealthy landowner who uses intimidation to shield his private lake from proper public scrutiny. A few of her neighbors made similar remarks.
I was nicknamed a dinosaur by someone. Another person used the term “typical engineer arrogance,” which I thot was intriguing considering that I was specifically accused of drafting a letter that provided a thorough explanation and a compromise.
Stellan’s team started the removal on May 14.
Every stone has to be saved, according to my stringent instructions.
They were all photographed, given weatherproof paint numbers, and relocated to high ground above the old mill.
As I watched them work, I felt like a man who has come to terms with an inevitable conclusion and is resolved that the way it was carried out would leave him with no regrets.
For the first time in 232 years, the Branch River flowed thru its original course by day seven.
The reservoir had vanished. The dock where Margaret and I had spent so many evenings was four feet above dried black muck that had an ancient, deep, and chilly smell.
That Friday nite, Heather Lynn hosted a celebration. It was dubbed a River Liberation Ceremony by her.
A cartoon beaver with a crown was depicted on the invitation. Wine was distributed by her husband. There were forty-three locals present.
She read a speech about rehabilitating public waterways. Eleven years had passed since the snowfall on the mountain above the valley began to melt.
That evening, I was at my hilltop home relocating my servers, tractors, and family records to higher ground. I prepared enough food and water for three weeks.
I informed my insurance provider. I went to bed at nine o’clock because I had discovered over the course of thirty years of observing infrastructure under stress that the hours leading up to a crisis are the last ones you will get a good night’s sleep for a while, and you should make the most of them.
That evening, the warm front came.
Between ten in the evening and four in the morning, the temperature increased by eighteen degrees.
At eleven twenty-three, it started to rain heavily and persistently—the kind of rain that falls with a purpose.
Two inches of rain had fallen on top of the snowfall by three in the morning, according to the meteorological station.
It was three and a half inches by six. In May, the Branch River, which typically flowed at 800 cubic feet per second, started to rise in the manner that rivers do when nothing is stopping them: slowly at first, then rapidly.
It was forty-eight hundred by midday.
It reached seventy-one hundred at four o’clock in the afternoon.
It overflowed its banks at the location of my former mill pond at 4:43.
My landline rang at six-eight.
“Rowan.”
I had never heard her voice tremble like this before.
Not the incisive, moral vigor of the public gatherings and blog entries. Beneath that, beneath the shield of confidence, there was something that had always existed.
“Heather,” I said. “Where are you at this moment?”
“In our basement.” Water is making its way up the steps. When we phoned 911, they informed us that the road was underwater.
How far down is it?”
“Four feet.” Perhaps five.
“Go to your second floor,” I instructed her. “Disconnect everything that is within safe reach.”
Any food and water you have upstairs should be rationed. Don’t try to drive. When it can, a rescue boat will arrive.
“Please, Rowan—”
“I’m going to hang up now, Heather, since the cell towers will fall down and other residents of your subdivision will require the phone lines. Hold on tight. I’ll see you over there.
I put the receiver down and gazed at the landscape outside the kitchen window.
Over the low land, the sky was flat and complete, the color of old zinc. Although I couldn’t see the water from where I was standing,
I could tell its shape from the models, where it was traveling and pooling, and how long it would take to reach the foundations of the homes on the lowest lots.
When an avoidable failure occurs in accordance with its anticipated parameters, engineers refer to it as “the river does not vote.”
This expression has never satisfied me, not because it is incorrect, but more because it doesn’t describe what the person witnessing the flood should do with themselves while they wait for it to peak.
The National Guard, the local fire department, and the sheriff’s dive squad were using flat-bottom boats to work Cascade Meadows Estates by nine that evening.
The first floors of 47 houses were completely destroyed by flooding. Partially off their foundations were two of the lowest lots. Nine feet of water covered the neighborhood baseball diamond.
All of the residents had been evacuated by midnight. Nobody perished.
In the years after, I’ve given this fact a lot of thot and considered it alongside everything else, but I’m not sure if I should give credit to the effectiveness of the emergency response, the relative rapidity of the rescue, or something else I can’t quite put my finger on.
Nobody perished. I am more appreciative of that than I can articulate clearly.
The following morning, Stellan Brink and his two flat-bottom boats and excavator were at the edge of the floodwater.
I spent eleven days conducting structural safety and damage assessments in the disaster area. Coralie charted the hydrology’s retreat.
When the mobile network was unavailable, my niece Petra operated the ham radio from the hill, communicating with rescue personnel.
A National Guard boat crew retrieved Heather from the window of her bedroom on the second level.
In a desperate bid to save his vintage motorcycles, her husband had fled to the rafters of his garage, where he was rescued.
They appeared to have reached a destination they were unaware of when they came at the community center refuge draped in Red Cross blankets.
At the time, I said nothing to her. There was nothing to say.
Her husband came up to me at the shelter on the fourth day of the cleanup.
He gave me his phone, which had a press release on it. The company that had been financing Heather’s environmental lawsuit, Hammond Realty LLC, was the subject of a formal fraud investigation by the State Attorney General.
It was found by investigators that the LLC had no biological interest in the Branch River. They desired to build homes on the exposed riverbank.
A private developer had planned to use the environmental campaign, the legal fees, and the River Liberation Ceremony as a means of gaining access to land that he would not have otherwise been able to obtain.
He didn’t defend or clarify. He simply gave me the phone, gave me one nod, and turned to return to his wife.
As I watched him leave, I considered all the things that had been triggered by a confluence of one person’s ideology and another’s greed, and how those two forces had crossed paths in a subdivision meeting room to create a flood that had destroyed 47 homes and claimed two years of lives.
The damage assessments were not going to finish themselves, so I returned to work.
On the eleventh day, the governor made a call.
“Rowan, are you able to oversee the project and rebuild the dam?” he asked.”
“Yes to both,” I replied.
Over two hundred persons attended the public meeting.
The vote was called by the newly elected HOA president. A total of 277 hands were raised in support of reconstruction. In the third row was Judge Crow.
She got up, turned to face me in front of the whole group, and said in public that she had not given my expert testimony the weight it deserved.
She also declared that she would no longer be involved in any future valley-related affairs. I sincerely thanked her. Declaring in public that you were mistaken is a serious matter.
I took the stage and suggested that the dam be rebuilt as a publicly maintained flood control facility rather than as my own property. The majority of the construction would be funded by FEMA grants.
The project would be led by my company at 0% profit margin and pure cost. The original 1793 stones that Stellan’s men had photographed, numbered, and relocated to high ground would be used.
It took fourteen months to rebuild. $4.2 million was funded by FEMA. In an official apology, the new HOA board, led by Heather Lynn’s replacement following her retirement, gave $200,000.
Standing eleven feet taller than the old, the new building is guaranteed to resist a 150-year flood event and is faced with the same eighteenth-century cut stone that my ancestors manually laid.
We leased the old mill building to the neighborhood group for ninety-nine years.
The history of the valley, the river, and the families who had negotiated their unique accommodations with both over the previous 200 years are now on display in this public history museum.
A picture of my parents on the dock, young and squinting in the summer sun, with the reservoir full and serene behind them, is located next to the entrance.
The original land grant from 1793 is depicted on a map on the wall. I insisted on including a section about the flood because a history that leaves out its own tragedies is merely a pamphlet.
After the new dam was dedicated, it took six months for the legal accounting. Forty-seven homeowners’ civil lawsuits were the first to arrive.
The state then filed criminal fraud charges against Hammond Realty and its associates. Heather’s husband gave up all rights to the riverbank land in exchange for a plea deal.
The flood-damaged home was sold at a foreclosure auction. What was left was eaten up by the restitution orders.
Heather was by the side of the road beneath my property on a chilly November morning when I last saw her. She was wrapping her final box in packing paper while standing next to a moving truck that she had rented. I didn’t realize how gray her hair had become.
Her shoulders bore the unique weight of someone who has set down a heavy object but is still getting used to walking without it.
As I went by, I slowed down my pickup. I threw my hat out the window. She didn’t raise her head.
I continued. Whether they affect concrete or humans, engineers don’t take pleasure in structural disasters. A failure is a failure. You record what went wrong, you figure out why, and you improve the next project.
You don’t stand in the wreckage and enjoy it because the wreckage isn’t the point and the people who live there are still people, carrying whatever combination of conviction, mistake, and self-deception brought them there, and none of that is straightforward enough to be enjoyable to see up close.
The valley mended in a manner typical of valleys: gradually, from the bottom up, and covertly. Clover and wild willow shoots gradually covered the raw exposed mud where the reservoir bottom had been.
The fish went back to their natural habitat. With the quiet authority of things that have been tried and shown adequate, the 1793 stones, now set in reinforced concrete and aged and scarred, held the Branch River.
After the flood, Coralie returned home on June 2. She leaned her head against my shoulder the way she used to do her schoolwork next to me in the evenings when we sat on the repaired dock as the sun set below the western hill, turning the water into something that appeared hammered from copper.
Do you believe she ever comprehended?Glancing over the eleven million gallons securely stored behind our wall, Coralie inquired. Do you believe she ever understood that winning wasn’t the main goal?”
I saw a blue heron cross the reservoir at a low angle, settling close to the mill with the leisurely accuracy of an animal that has been doing this long enough to have figured out the best course of action.
I answered, “Heather thot she was fighting for something real.” Even when they are mistaken, the majority of people do. even if someone else is using their belief for reasons they haven’t given enough thot to.
“She didn’t deserve that generosity.”
“Perhaps. However, Coralie, nature doesn’t change according to what people deserve. Regardless of who was correct or incorrect, the snowpack melts at the same rate.
The river follows the path of elevation. I felt the weight of the brass key to the mill museum as I twisted it in my fingers.
“Truth eventually finds the light, but it doesn’t do it on anyone’s preferred schedule.” The fact that the dam is holding is what counts. The truth was revealed by the paper trail. This is the valley.
She was silent for a while. The bat colony, which had been in the mill loft for decades, had emerged and was working above the water in the evenings.
She remarked, “Mom would have enjoyed the museum.”
“She would have rearranged everything and been entirely correct in every adjustment she made.”
Coralie let out a clear, pleasant chuckle that sounds much like her mother’s.
The water changed from copper to silver to the dark, which is simply the night’s version of itself, and we stayed there till the light disappeared.
The dam held.
The Branch River continued to flow.
Eleven million gallons were being held back by the 1793 stones with the indifferent competence of well-built, purpose-driven structures after the paper trail had completed its task.
Some things, just by virtue of being what they were intended to be, outlive the criticisms leveled at them.
When they manually cut the first stone and placed it in the river’s path 232 years ago, my family realized that.
The river recalled.
