Cleanup on Housatonic River continues

MONROE, Conn. (WTNH) — Efforts to clean the debris from Sunday’s flash flooding out of the Housatonic River continues.

Most of that debris was above the Stevenson Dam, as of Thursday morning. That is about to change, according to one company’s plan.

Up above the dam, it was the fourth straight day of trying to clean up the part of the Houstaonic River called Lake Zoar. Members of the Lake Zoar Beach Club have been helping the owners one piece at a time.

“I have no end in sight,” said Rob DeFeo, who manages the beach club. “I’m going to do it until it’s done. There’s a lot to do. I’m just waking up every day and doing it until the sun sets.”

The group is getting help from FirstLight, the power company that runs the nearby Stevenson Dam. It had crews out in the lake moving the bigger pieces of debris towards the shore, but there is going to be a lot of small stuff left that may end up going over the dam and down into Lake Housatonic.

FirstLight’s plan to do that is not going over well people downstream.

“Their job, under their debris management plan, is to remove that debris from the lake before it comes over, not to dump it over,” Lake Housatonic Authority Chair Mike Stahl said.

A hundred feet or so from the dam is a line of orange and white buoys. That is called the boat barrier. Most of the stuff in the lake is upstream of it.

FirstLight said it is only going to release the stuff between the boat barrier and the dam. The plan is to keep water flow over the dam low, like it is now, to avoid damage.

“If you look at the river now and see the flow, there’s no flow,” Stahl said. “Once they dump it over there, it’s just going to sit here like a swamp. If they run it too fast, then it’s like a torpedo, banging into all these boats you see on this river.”

Folks who live along Lake Housatonic already experienced that trauma with several feet of flooding on Monday. Boats are still beached up in yards where they floated. Back above the Stevenson Dam, the cleanup may be extensive, but at least the beach club sees people coming together.

“It is incredible to see smiling faces in the face of adversity such as this,” Defeo said.

There’s just no telling how long their cleanup, or FirstLight’s, will take.

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