Conversations with Michele Braun

by Jenny Blair, for the Montpelier Bridge

Removing obsolete dams is a huge and tricky job. Permissions must be secured and regulatory and financial hurdles cleared. Engineering and construction are complex. And protecting trout and bats puts hard limits on when the work can be done. Yet 2025 was a banner year for dam removals in Vermont, with a record nine removed from rivers around the state, including one in Barre City and one in Barre Town. 

Many more still dot Vermont waterways, including scores in the Winooski River watershed. Some provide flood protection, such as the Wrightsville and Waterbury dams. But others may worsen flooding or even fail catastrophically during flood events. 

The nonprofit Friends of the Winooski River helped lead the removals in Barre last year. This summer, The Bridge sat down twice with the nonprofit’s executive director Michele Braun to learn what’s next — and why dam removal can help with flood resilience. 

The Bridge: Why do we have all these dams in the first place?

Michele Braun: Vermont terrain is incredibly steep. When colonists came from Europe, they found falling water, and they recognized that that was a great source of power. The story of Vermont’s economic development, especially in the Winooski watershed, is very much about water power.

In the Winooski watershed, we have over 140 dams that we know of, and some of them still serve a purpose. We have three dams that provide flood control. We have about 15 dams that provide hydropower. About a dozen dams provide ponds for recreation that are of decent quality and value. That adds up to about 30 dams out of 140, and all of the rest serve no purpose.

The dams are getting old. They were built a long time ago. Concrete has a similar lifespan to human beings, so if your concrete dam is pushing 100, the clock is ticking on the potential failure of that dam. We saw in the 2023 flooding at least five dams in the Winooski watershed failed in that flood, either partially or entirely.

Where is dam removal planned or underway right now?

MB: The projects that we’re currently working on mostly were begun before the ’23 floods because we were already working on dam removals for mainly aquatic organism passage benefits and clean water benefits.

[Over the summer,] we kicked off a new dam removal project on Gunners Brook in Barre Town. It is called Giacherio. We’ve been interested in removing that one for some years now because Gunners Brook is full of barriers. The obvious challenge is that just upstream of the dam, the landowners have a private driveway bridge across the stream, and that bridge is undersized and it’s at an angle that might not be the best angle. Determining the impact of the dam removal on that bridge is going to be a big part of the engineering of that project. 

[We are also working on] the East Calais Dam, which we started working on when it failed in ’23, and the Old Batchelder Mill Dam in Plainfield Village. 

[For East Calais], because the impoundment [pond] is pretty large, we are trying to figure out whether it’s possible to lower the water level in the pond this fall so that it’s dryer next year when we go to work on it. That is a complicated question from a permitting and funding and community relation standpoint. 

The Habbep Dam [in Barre City] is the closest to implementation. Habbep Dam is in poor condition. It’s 97 years old. It hasn’t been maintained ever. [It] was meant to be removed this summer, but we are having challenges with funding and permitting. We made the call to delay till next year. 

The complexity with the Habbep Dam is that it is in a more urban context than many Vermont dam removals. There are very steep banks upstream with homes and businesses along the top of the bank. It’s going to increase velocity when the sediment is removed. The whole channel being lower and moving faster means it might erode the toe of the slope. 

To address that, we want to put a sick amount of riprap, and we’re talking like six-foot stones, up against the toe of that bank to ensure that that doesn’t happen. But in order to place that stone, we need to get a state stream alteration permit from every landowner upstream where we’re proposing to put the stone. [Barre City Ward III Councilor] Don Routhier, who’s one of the affected landowners, said that he doesn’t support the project and won’t sign the permit application. So that’s a challenge.

Any other dam removals to keep an eye on?

MB: The Cross Brothers Dam in Northfield has come out. It’s right next to the Dollar General in Northfield. That was not our project, but we’ve been tangentially involved. It was a FEMA-funded project. The town has quite a lot of folks very interested in improving the public river access, and specifically creating a nice public access area at that dam. We were just awarded a grant to work with the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps to go in there this fall and create that nice public river access. That’s going to be a great development for Northfield. 

In Williamstown, Rouleau Pond Dam is a significant hazard. We’re not managing that project — that’s the Conservation District working on that together with VNRC [Vermont Natural Resources Council]. We’ve pledged funding toward it from our U.S. Fish and Wildlife agreement to help fill the funding gap. [Removal] is still in design, and they’re having a hard time finding funding for it because it doesn’t have a strong benefit that aligns with a strong funding source. It has primarily a flood resilience benefit, and we don’t really have flood resilience funding right now. 

Wait, what about all the FEMA money Vermont got?

MB: All of the funding that came from the ’23 and ’24 disasters has been allocated.

Apart from avoiding blowouts during floods, why remove dams?

MB: There are multiple significant benefits of dam removal, and different projects have greater benefit in one area than another area. And the funding is siloed according to the specific benefit of a project.

The majority of the funding that we have access to is to provide the benefit of aquatic organism passage. Brook trout in particular really need cold water. They need to be able to get up into the forested headwaters where it is cool. And so removing barriers so that those fish can access the headwaters is critical for their persistence in changing climate.

There’s also a water quality benefit. Most dams, all dams really, have a tremendous amount of sediment backed up behind them. And when you restore the sediment transport, you re-naturalize the sediment transport through a stream system. It improves the water quality. It lowers the temperature. It improves stream bed habitat. 

And then there’s flood resilience, right?

MB: Flood resilience is not always a benefit of dam removal. But it can be. 

The biggest misconception that people have about dams is that every dam provides flood storage. If you stand on top of that Wrightsville Dam and you look down at Wrightsville Reservoir, there’s 60 feet to the surface of the water, and that’s a huge storage area to fill up with water when it rains, just as it did in ‘23. 

[But] all these other dams that are not the three flood-control dams, like the dam by Shaw’s, they have water flowing over the top all the time. If the water is flowing over the top all the time, if the dam is filled up with sediment behind it, there is no flood storage happening there. What it’s actually doing is elevating the whole situation. So if the dam is 12 feet tall, that means it’s holding the stream bed up probably 10 feet, which means the whole flood elevation starts from a higher point, and the water is able to spread out farther to the sides. 

The dams that we are targeting for removal are the ones that serve no purpose. If a dam has recreational value, flood control value, hydropower generation value, we’re not trying to remove those. We’re focusing on the hundred dams that have no value and are just causing actually worsening flood scenarios rather than serving as flood storage. 

These interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.