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By GEORGE SMITH [email protected]
Saturday, February 19, 2000     Page:

The breaching of the dam at Mountain Springs Lake should not have a negative
impact on the Bowman Creek watershed, officials say. The Pennsylvania Fish
and Boat Commission announced last week that it would breach the dam at the
40-acre lake in Ross Township rather than repair it. The lake is on a
322-acre parcel owned by the fish commission. The agency paid $43,457 for it
in 1959, according to Kerry Messerle, supervisor of the fish commission’s
Northeast Region Office in Dallas. Routine inspections by commission
engineers revealed the dam to be unstable. The cost to replace it with a new
structure would approach $1 million. The breaching will be a slow process
that should not affect Bowman Creek, a blue-ribbon trout stream. Mountain
Springs Lake feeds the stream that continues 20 miles to meet the Susquehanna
River in Tunkhannock. “The breaching should have negligible impact on Bowman
Creek,” said Dan Tredinnick, press secretary for the fish commission. “There
will be no surge of high water or surge of silt washing downstream.” It has
taken several weeks to “let down” other commission dams that had to be
breached because of disrepair, according to Messerle. That slow process of
gradually releasing water should not have an unfavorable impact on the creek
or the fish, but might actually improve conditions. “There is a downside to
having an impoundment on a coldwater fishery, and loss of a dam might not be
detrimental. Without a dam, you lose the warm water that collects behind it,”
Tredinnick said. Tredinnick said the creek’s pH level – the level of acidity
– would not change, but the water temperature might actually be colder. That
could prove beneficial to trout, which need cool water to survive. “I am not
aware of any negative effects of any breaching,” Tredinnick said. “In one
instance a dam we had to take down because of structural deficiencies has
turned into a lovely meadow.” That ingrown meadow might resemble the one
that has formed behind the now-defunct dam on the Tobyhanna Creek within State
Game Lands 127 in Monroe County. Tredinnick said the commission has no plans
to divest itself of the remote property near the Wyoming County line that is
bordered by Ricketts Glen State Park and State Game Lands 57. But the region
will lose the 4,500 trout that have been stocked in the lake each year for the
past five years. Those trout will become part of the statewide pool of
hatchery fish to be liberated by the commission as needed. Breaching the dam
in a controlled manner is preferable to having it breach unexpectedly during a
time of high water or flooding, according to Ralph Kates, president of the
Stanley Cooper Sr. Chapter of Trout Unlimited. The chapter has “adopted” a
1-mile stretch of Bowman from the vicinity of Route 292 downstream to Marsh
Creek. Kates said Bowman Creek should be protected at all costs. “The
(Bowman Creek) watershed as a fishery is much more important than the lake is
important as a fishery,” Kates said. No specific date has been set for the
breaching, which will occur sometime this summer. Cost of the breaching is
expected to approach $100,000.
Call Smith at 829-7230.