The major rainfall of last month caused exceptional flooding in rivers across the state.
In Epsom, the Suncook River’s flooding was not only exceptional, it resulted in something none of the state’s river experts had ever seen in New Hampshire.
The river jumped its banks and carved an entirely new stretch of river outside its former floodplain.
Now, landowners, wildlife managers, geologists and town officials are left with figuring out what to do now.
New Hampshire Public Radio’s Kerry Grens has more.
Map of the Suncook River's usual course, and where it runs now. Click on the map to see an alternate version. Courtesy Chad Wittkop, Department of Environmental Services
At the selectboard meeting in Epsom Monday night, Chair Julie Clermont asked residents what they want to see happen to the Suncook River.
Clermont: All those in favor of returning it to its original bed, could you raise your hands? Ok, it’s between the undecideds and the…mostly people want it back in there.
No one raised a hand in favor of leaving the Suncook River to settle in its new channel.
Many of the land owners along the river, like Epsom Valley Campground owner Dwyna Arvanitis don’t know what to do.
Arvanitis: We’re kind of in limbo, I’m not sure what we’re going to do. Do we put a pool in because we’re not going to have a river any longer? You have people calling and making reservations for the fourth of July, you don’t know whether to say, yes we have fishing, and swimming, and canoeing, because right now we’ve got a little bit, but not nearly what we should have.
Arvanitis says the river level has dropped to a fraction of its normal volume.
Where the water used to slow and pool up behind a dam downstream, it now races down a new path free of such obstacles.
Chad Wittkop, a geologist with the state’s Department of Environmental Services, traces a topographic map of the area.
Wittkop: The area of interest around Bear Island is here, Epsom traffic circle.
Just southeast of the circle, the Suncook used to make a sharp ess curve and skirt a gravel pit, then split in two to shape Bear Island, and rejoin again about a mile and a half later.
That was until last month’s floods.
Wittkop: A pretty massive volume of water had filled into the gravel pit, and was looking for a way out. And then it found a way out.
And Wittkop’s colleague Rick Chormann says a mile and a half of old, meandering channel was replaced with just two fifths of a mile of new.
Chormann: It has a higher velocity now, because the channel course if much shorter than it was formerly, so the slope is steeper over that shorter section.
Which means those slow moving, deep trout waters have become muddy rapids.
The land around the river appears equally messy.
During the floods, so much dirt, sediment, and sand were swirled around, that when the water receded, local farms were left with a blanket of debris on their fields.
Fire chief and farmer Stewart Yeaton estimates he was the hardest hit in town.
Yeaton: We got fifteen acres of crop land that have five to seven feet of sand on top of it. And then we’ve got probably fifty acres of woodlands that we’re finding out from the forestry department that our pines are going to die also because they’ve been suffocated from the silt and buildup around the trees.
Chief Yeaton says he’d like to see the river repaired as soon as possible.
In the meantime, it’s unclear what the future of his land looks like and whether he’ll ever be able to plant again.
[sounds sloshing]
At the old Suncook channel, the future of a state-listed endangered species, a mussel called the brook floater, is also unclear.
Susi von Oettingen, an endangered species specialist with the US Fish and Wildlife, sloshes through an old section of the Suncook.
[sounds sloshing]
The former channel is a naked riverbed of exposed boulders and stagnant puddles.
vonOettingen: This is all aquatic vegetation on the rocks and it’s dying. Normally it would have been wet, most of the year. So the level is way below what it would have been.
When this area drained several weeks ago, von Oettingen came out with some colleagues and rescued eleven hundred brook floater mussels.
She sent them to a fish hatchery in Nashua for safe keeping.
But the animals can’t stay there forever, so now von Oettingen has to figure out what to do with them.
Von Oettingen: Here’s another one. See if you can see it filtering there.
On this trip, von Oettingen finds mussels some live mussel, and a little water flowing through, but she says she doesn’t want to return the animals here.
Von Oettingen: I would prefer to put them someplace where the water levels will be good. This is still uncertain. Until the state geologists can give us some information as to what is feeding this part of the river, I wouldn’t be ready to put them pack.
As von Oettingen drives North to Chichester to check out a new home for the mussels, she considers the option of moving the river back to its original path.
Von Oettingen: Well, it would certainly restore the flow and the water and hopefully the habitat. My question is, though, if you move it back, the banks have already been weakened. What kind of event will it take for it to jump those banks again? And are we going to be in the same position all over again, having a good stable population only to have it dried up and affected?
That’s what the state’s Rivers Coordinator Steve Couture wants to figure out.
Ultimately, anyone who wants to put the river back would need to apply to the Department of Environmental Services.
He says the state will need to make an assessment of the habitat and the river’s new course before any decisions can be made.
Couture: I think you really have to look at the ecological benefits and weigh them with the human management options. Obviously I don’t think you can have a project where there’s no ecological benefit just for the human desire for river to be at a particular location. And it’s really a balancing act.
Couture told the crowd at the Epsom selectboard meeting that within a year, he should be able to have enough data for a cost-benefit analysis of each option: leaving the river be, partially restoring it, or completely returning it to its former bed.
Reeves: We have an immediately problem that really can’t wait for a year for them to study what the impact is. The impact of that breach right there is that we have a water system that’s jeopardy.
That’s Kevin Reeves, a commissioner for the Epsom village district.
He says the main well for the town was submerged by the floods, and now the river is too close to the pumping station for the town to use it.
Reeves: I know we got to worry about trout and the floaters and that stuff. But we do have 300 families that depend on pure drinking water. And also fire protection. All our fire hydrants, with just one well, we do have a storage tank, but with summer coming we really need both wells in order to keep the system running.
Rivers Coordinator Steve Couture says there will be some rapid assessments that could help town managers make quicker decisions.
While the town scrambles to figure out what’s next, the river will be making its own decisions—carving its new bed and establishing a new flood plain.
Couture says it’s a fascinating process that geologists see only once in a lifetime.
Couture: You get calls about eroding banks and things like that. But it’s nowhere near this site when you go out there, where you just have this huge swath of new river coming down through. Completely unique. It’s almost like seeing birth for the first time. And that’s what it’s like, you’re seeing the birth of a new river reach.
The opportunity to study a new river could be short lived.
Over the next few months, DES, Fish and Game, the US Army Corps of Engineers, and town officials will be tracking the Suncook’s development.
And if it were up to the residents at the selectboard meeting, those teams would also be working to put the river back.
SOQ
The situation with the Suncook River in Epsom, NH is a problem that is not unique to the area, and has occurred for billions of years and will no doubt continue for billions more.
It is a natural process. While it is possible to block the new channel and force the river back down the "original" channel; such an act is temporary and eventually doomed to fail. There's a very real reason for the saying, "water seeks its own level." The materials needed to fill the new channel (and it would have to be completely refilled to keep the river from quickly going back there represent a gargantuan undertaking for materials, funds, and labor requirements that in this day of austere budgets and outrageous energy costs can not be justified.
The materials deposited in the feilds are also a natural occurrence and are a part of the process that produces the exceptional agricultural soils in flood plains.
Sorry about the pines dying. The best you can do would be to harvest them for lumber, pulp, or chips, and replant.
The area that the new channel was carved in lies within the floodplain of the Suncook River. Building on a floodplain is a risk that should only be taken by the builder/owner, and not the responsibility of anyone else. As such, the Town of Epsom, the State of New Hampshire, and the government of the United States is not responsible for, and would be fiscally irresponsible to, even attempt to restore the river to its previous bed.