Case Study

Kent Dam and Waterfall Partial Removal

Challenges

The stretch of the Cuyahoga River that ran through the defunct Kent Dam was cited for noncompliance with the Clean Water Act by the Ohio EPA for exceeding pollutant concentrations. The EPA informed the City of Kent that they must pursue a modification-removal of the dam or face more stringent permitting limits at the City’s Water Reclamation Facility. Because this permitting would be costly to Kent taxpayers and have little benefit to the quality of the river, the City of Kent began the processes of review and public engagement necessary to remove the dam with historic preservation.

Solutions

Due to the potential conflict between historical preservationists and environmental advocates, the city created a 19-member Kent Dam Advisory Committee (KDAC). Their goal was to examine feasibility and decision-making pathways by studying factors like applicable laws and regulations, water quality issues, historical significance, and fish migration routes. After several meetings, the KDAC proposed a solution: the removal of a concrete wall that had been placed across the old lock area. This removal would allow water to flow around the arch dam, which would improve water quality and allow fish passage while maintaining the historic arch structure. Tannery Park was constructed surrounding the historic arch dam and a pump circulates water so water continues to flow over the front of the dam.

Successes

Lessons Learned

By creating an advisory committee dedicated to research and resolution, the project team was able to reach a solution that met the needs of the environment as well as the citizens of Kent. Because so much national attention was focused on the project, early involvement spurred the Clean Water Act, strategies of engagement, analysis, and implementation; it even helped to inform similar projects across the country.

The Kent Dam is also a good example of a project that was able to achieve the dual goals of habitat connectivity and historic preservation. By creating a public park at the dam site, the history of the site and sense of place was able to be preserved and possibly enhanced. In addition, by adding a water feature to the arch dam artifact, the aesthetic and acoustic experience of being near a waterfall was preserved.

References and Additional Resources

City of Kent: https://www.kentohio.org/409/Dam-Restoration-Project

Location
Kent, Ohio
River
Cuyahoga River
Year
2005
Type
Partial removal with historic preservation
Cost
$5,013,150
Project Partners
The Ohio EPA; Kent Dam Advisory Committee; The City of Kent
Funding Sources
The City of Kent
Ohio EPA WRRSP Grants
Clean Ohio Fund Grant
Ohio Department of Natural Resources Grant
Ohio EPA Section 319 Gran

The Dam Atlas is a guide for communities to understand, evaluate, and make decisions about historic dams.

New England is home to more than 14,000 dams, many of which are small, “legacy” structures built over a century ago. Most no longer serve their original industrial purposes and are reaching the end of their useful lives, raising concerns about safety, maintenance, and ecological impacts. These aging dams can threaten downstream communities, especially as climate change brings more frequent and intense storms. While dam removal is often advocated for ecological, economic, and safety reasons—such as restoring fish passage, water quality, and sediment flow—many communities feel a strong attachment to their local dams. Dams and their impoundments have become part of the landscape, local history, and sense of place, sometimes even serving as town landmarks or symbols of cultural identity.

The goal of this website is to share this work and support communities who are making decisions about the future of a dam. Decisions about dams are inherently complex and require the consideration of ecological, social, safety, and economic trade-offs. While there are many great resources and publications for proponents of dam removal, this website aims to provide an unbiased source of information on the ecological and social considerations associated with dam decisions. Rather than advocating solely for removal, the goal of this approach is to bring a community into an open conversation to think creatively about the future of a dam. While this may seem counterintuitive if your role is to advocate for dam removal, engaging communities in an open but structured discussion about the future of a dam has the potential to lead to better environmental outcomes and a community that has more ownership, connection, and sense of stewardship over their river. In addition, this approach has the potential to address what are often perceived as unequal power dynamics between dam removal proponents and the local community, which has led to projects stalling or failing in the past.

This website consists of four main sections: The first chapter, “Understanding Dams,” introduces key ecological, social, infrastructural, and economic factors that are important to consider for the management of dams at the individual and watershed scale. The second part, “Scenarios & Case Studies,” looks at various alternatives for the future of a dam and presents a series of case studies of projects throughout the region. The third chapter, “Making Decisions,” shares methods, ideas, and tools for how to engage in conversations about the future of a dam. The last section, the Interactive Dam Atlas, was developed in collaboration with faculty from the University of Rhode Island and helps to visualize and build a geographic understanding of dams in the Narragansett Bay and Rhode Island coastal watersheds.

While this Dam Atlas is focused on dams in the Narragansett Bay and coastal watersheds of Rhode Island, the metrics calculated in the GIS analysis can be applied to other watersheds, and the decision-making tools are not region-specific. By sharing our methods and the open-source decision support toolkit, the aim is to help support practitioners and communities that are looking for ideas, methods, and techniques for having discussions about the future of a dam. We encourage others to use, test, modify, evolve, and share these methods. Ultimately, the goal is for this work to contribute to a “library of approaches” that are openly shared to build knowledge and techniques to support collaborative environmental decision-making around dams.