Flood Control
The Birch Hill Dam is a flood control dam located on the Millers River in South Royalston, Massachusetts. It is a part of a network of flood control dams on tributaries of the Connecticut River. Completed in 1941 at a cost of US$4 million, Birch Hill Dam was one of the first dams the Army Corps of Engineers built in New England to prevent floods like those that devastated Athol and Orange in 1936 and 1938. It has a storage capacity of 16.3 billion US gallons (62,000,000 m3).
The Reservoir Regulation Team (RRT) is the "nerve center" for the New England flood control dams such as Birch Hill Dam. Using radio and satellite communications, RRT constantly monitors river levels and weather conditions that influence flood control decisions. Corps personnel, in conjunction with RRT, regulate the amount of water released downstream by raising or lowering the four 6 ft (1.8 m) by 12 ft (3.7 m) gates located in the gatehouse at the dam. In a time of high water, the gates are lowered in order to hold back the water, only to be released when downstream river conditions begin to recede. In April 1987, two storms dropped over 6 inches (150 mm) of rain, raising the water level to over 33 feet (10 m) at the dam, utilizing 80% of the storage capacity. It is estimated that Birch Hill Dam prevented over $9 million in damages to downstream property from this one storm.
Read more about this topic: Millers River
Famous quotes containing the words flood and/or control:
“The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell
emerges strange and lovely.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)