Environmentalists Say River Work Raises Risk

(Host) In the days and weeks after Irene, excavators were allowed into rivers to extract gravel to rebuild road beds and shore up banks. The operators were given verbal permission to do the work, rather than the written permits that are typically required.

Now, environmentalists are saying that some of that work has caused environmental damage and raised the risk of future flooding.

VPR's Samantha Fields reports.

(Fields) Tropical Storm Irene dumped a whole lot of stuff into rivers and lakes across Vermont. In the weeks since, people have gone in and taken a lot of it out.  

Kim Greenwood is the water program director for the Vermont Natural Resources Council.

She says that a certain amount of emergency river work was necessary to protect people and infrastructure. But she says there are many places, from the Middlebury River to the Rock River to the Mad River, where it went too far.

(Greenwood) We're seeing work going far beyond what's needed to do emergency repair, to restore access to the public, for instance. And going after this opportunity to get further into the river and take more gravel out that people have frankly been waiting for."

(Fields) Greenwood says that removing gravel from rivers, and effectively "channelizing" them, disrupts the river's natural flow, and causes more problems than it solves.

(Greenwood) "We know now without a doubt that taking gravel out of a river will exacerbate flooding rather than helping."

(Fields) It also disrupts the balance in the river, and endangers aquatic species.

Louis Porter, of the Conservation Law Foundation, says that the supervision and guidance of ‘river experts' is necessary to protect the ecology of the rivers, and lower the risk of future flooding.

(Porter) "And Vermont has some of the best. Unfortunately, not enough of them were deployed, and in some cases their advice was not heeded."

(Fields) Justin Johnson is the deputy commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation. He says the state did the best it could given the widespread nature of the catastrophe. But he says there are certain things that will need to be fixed.  

(Johnson) "It's really a matter of looking at all of those things and trying to approach it in a way that works with the rivers. And I'm really heartened by the fact that there's such a big push to do it that way, because it's not always been the case."

(Fields) Johnson says come the spring, there's going to be a lot more work to do. The state is working to get plans and river consultants in place to help with the oversight.

And the rivers will continue to move sediment and do their own rebalancing, a process that the environmentalists say will take years.

For VPR News, I'm Samantha Fields.