New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff

A day with an environmental catastrophe on the Suncook River!

Tuesday 05/16/2006

Today I bore witness to the worst environmental catastrophe I have seen in my 56 years of life, and to make matters even worse, it was occurring in my back yard. Today years of gouging, digging, trucking and lack of state over sight of a sand/gravel operation in Epsom mined for years, and a historic flood, have reeked probably everlasting havoc on the Suncook River.

On the west side of the Suncook River, near Bear Island, the Suncook River dramatically changed coarse from the results of excess removal of the earth near the Suncook River at the top of a half mile of river that tumbles down a series of falls and shoots dropping elevation in for distance. Today the scrap of earthen banking left gave way sending the historic flooding down through the pit area. The two dams at the head of the island, that for well over a century held the rivers waters for the mill, are now high and dry. As is the river bed below the dams for at least a half mile. Fish, huge trout in some cases, are flopping in the remaining pools. The river is no more. It simply vanished overnight Monday night. I stood on the dam at The Old Mill Restaurant and looked up river but could not see the flowing section. Less than 24 hours ago a huge wall of water washed over this dam. A huge pine tree straddling the dam bore witness to the volume of water that carried it there.

But the huge flow has created nearly a canyon through the pit sending untold torrents of silt and sand down river to smother the biota. The river's change was on the local channel 9 news at 6:00 pm, which sent calls my way, so I headed out to document as best I could this fateful day. I stood on a bluff watching huge slabs of sand collapse into the river and huge trees and car sized blocks of peat from the nearby bog rolling down the torrent. Tremendous amounts of earth on the move at a very fast rate.

Even if the gap is plugged, the tremendous amounts of sand and silt washed down towards me will simply change the river fore ever. No doubt the back eddies that hold the most life from frogs to fish will be smothered in this silty crush. I kind of expect the corn field and meadow below my house ,that is usually filled with frog voices, to be turned into a sandy plain when the water recedes.

I am so angry that the river wasn't protected by a buffer that would not have allowed such an event to take place. No I live in "Live Free NH". Do what you want and be damned with the environmental consequences. No one is watching the foxes of the forest habitat. Oh, blame will be placed on the "historic flood", but this should have been taken into consideration when the excavating was taking place. How much value was their in the few dozen extra loads of sand that were hauled off, no doubt to fill some wetland, versus the hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage this has done and will continue to do. This is cataclysmic! I am devastated by what I saw today and will document further tomorrow.