Dam

SAUGUS - With sunny skies and balmy temperatures, Friday would have been a perfect day for nine holes at Cedar Glen Golf Course. But a freshly constructed dam - a 25-foot-wide mound of stripped branches and bark - had turned swaths of pristine greenway into swampland. The course was so waterlogged Thursday by beavers' handiwork that Burton Page, who runs the business, was forced to close down for the day, estimating $10,000 in lost revenue. "If we get an inch of rain," Page said, "we'll be out of business.

Local talk show hosts and staff of WXBR-AM (1460) have been locked out of their Brockton broadcasting studio for more than a week, leaving many listeners wondering what the future holds for the radio station, which is also in the process of being sold. On May 2, deputies from the Plymouth County Sheriff's Department showed up at the studio at 60 Main St. and evicted the staff. John Birtwell, a spokesman for the Plymouth County Sheriff's Department, said that Brockton District Court issued the order for the sheriff to take possession of the property on behalf of the landlord, Northborough...

The owners of the Hathaway Pond dam and the cranberry business that uses it have agreed on managing the property. This means the dam will not be torn down, a possibility that had area residents and farmers worried in recent months. The Buzzards Bay Coalition bought the dam in May and planned to tear it down to restore fish passage and health of the Sippican River, but met resistance from cranberry growers. Under the agreement, the coalition and Beaton's Inc. will work together to make improvements without tearing the dam down, according to the coalition's website.

SAUGUS - With sunny skies and balmy temperatures, Friday would have been a perfect day for nine holes at Cedar Glen Golf Course. But a freshly constructed dam - a 25-foot-wide mound of stripped branches and bark - had turned swaths of pristine greenway into swampland. The course was so waterlogged Thursday by beavers' handiwork that Burton Page, who runs the business, was forced to close down for the day, estimating $10,000 in lost revenue. "If we get an inch of rain," Page said, "we'll be out of business.

GREENSBURG, La. -- These eager beavers had a whole new slant on money laundering. A bag of bills stolen from a casino was snapped up by beavers that wove thousands of dollars in soggy currency into the sticks and brush of their dam on a creek in eastern Louisiana. "They hadn't torn the bills up. They were still whole," said Major Michael Martin of the East Feliciana Parish sheriff's office. The money was part of $70,000 to $75,000 taken last week from the Lucky Dollar Casino in Greensburg.

The river restoration on the Jones River is an excellent project, and I would like to bring to your attention to the Monponsett Ponds and the efforts to have the dam at Route 106 removed and a couple of fish ladders installed to bring the herring back to the ponds. My group thought it would be done by the US Army Corps of Engineers, but [President] George Bush took the funds out of the federal budget. Nothing has been done since then. My wife has lived in Halifax since 1940 and can remember the herring getting up the Satucket River, through Robbins Pond and into the lakes.

Route 110 in Haverhill has been reopened after a beaver dam failure closed the road yesterday morning, officials said. The breach caused water to enter the roadway, and Route 110, or Amesbury Road, was closed around 8 a.m. yesterday, said Michael Verseckes, spokesman for the state Department of Transportation. He said he was unsure what caused the dam to fail. The road was reopened shortly after 1 p.m. "It caused some potholes and roadway erosion due to the volume of water," Verseckes said.

Engineers in Yarmouth, Maine are opening up a dam to inspect it and get a sense of what would happen if water flows freely through the area. The work on the Bridge Street dam was spurred by community members who wanted the town to study the issue in hopes of improving the Royal River's ecology. The town will also try to open the flow of another dam that's upstream — the East Elm street dam. But a town engineer tells WMTW-TV ( http://bit.ly/rikKhH) that would be more difficult.

WASHINGTON - A Supreme Court dominated by Easterners tried to make sense yesterday of a Western water dispute. The court heard arguments in a lawsuit between a power company and the state of Montana over who owns the riverbeds beneath 10 dams sitting on three Montana rivers. The state says it is owed more than $50 million in back rent and interest from PPL Montana. For an answer, the court is looking back as far as the travels of Lewis and Clark, more than 200 years ago. The outcome could affect property rights, public access, and wildlife management along Montana's rivers, as...

GUILFORD, Vt. — The Guilford select board wants the state of Vermont to rebuild a failing dam that helps create the body of water that the popular Sweet Pond State Park is named for. Town officials plan to ask the Vermont Department of Forest, Parks, and Recreation to replace the dam after the 18-acre pond is drained because of concerns the dam could fail, threatening people and property downstream. State officials said that the dam, which was built in 1922, must be removed right away to ensure public safety and...

Another 100,000 people may have to move away from China's Three Gorges Dam due to the risk of disastrous landslides and bank collapses around the reservoir of the world's biggest hydroelectric facility, state media said Wednesday. The Ministry of Land Resources says the number of landslides and other disasters has increased 70 percent since the water level in the $23 billion showcase project rose to its maximum level in 2010. Some 1.4 million people already have been resettled due to the huge project on the Yangtze River.

LAS VEGAS - A tour bus with dozens of international tourists suddenly caught fire Monday as it was leaving the Hoover Dam Visitor Center near the Arizona and Nevada border, officials said. The driver, a tour guide, and 59 passengers got off the bus before it was consumed by the fire, said Rose Davis, a spokeswoman for the US Bureau of Reclamation in Boulder City. No one was injured. The bus had exited a parking lot on the Nevada side of the Hoover Dam when the driver smelled smoke and saw fire at about 4 p.m., Davis said.

IN YOUR front-page March 4 article "Grim soundings from Northern deep," you report on the declining population of cod fish in our coastal communities. You note that smelt are a "source of food for cod" and that the smelt population has declined "sharply. " This should alert us to the need to remove dams from our rivers. Shad, herring, and smelt once spawned upstream in areas now blocked off by dams. Building fish ladders may enable herring migration, but smelt cannot negotiate fish ladders, and shad do so with little success.

Officials with the Army Corps of Engineers say a series of flood control projects built decades ago helped spare Vermont tens of millions of dollars in damage during flooding from Tropical Storm Irene last summer. The town of Springfield, which had no significant damage from Irene, exemplifies the communities protected by a flood control dam upriver. The North Springfield Dam held back the floodwaters that damaged communities upstream, such as Cavendish and Ludlow. Police Chief Doug Johnston says that without the dam, Irene would probably have inundated the shopping plaza near the intersection of...

The goal horn had sounded. The red light had flashed behind Henrik Lundqvist. The Bruins, off a point shot by Dennis Seidenberg, seemingly had made it a 3-1 game at 10:01 of the third period. But Seidenberg thought it all looked a little weird. "When I shot it, I tried to get it past the first guy," Seidenberg said. "I saw his pad on the short post. I didn't really see any room for it to go in. I was kind of surprised when they showed it was a goal. But I didn't expect it to be one. " Video replay confirmed what Seidenberg had feared.

The newly formed Dam and Pond Management Committee is charged with drawing up a list of all dams and ponds, some of which have been hard hit by storms the last few years, and determining their current condition and maintenance needs. Members appointed by the Board of Selectmen are: Warren Ball, Donald Rzasa, Marina Giovannini, Michele Riggs, and Lauri Nehring. - Davis Bushnell

CORONA, Calif. -- Authorities released a fierce river of brown water from a Southern California dam and evacuated more than 1,000 people from its path yesterday after an earthen barrier at the site began seeping water. The Army Corps of Engineers unleashed more than 10,000 cubic feet of water per second to relieve pressure on the dam southeast of Los Angeles. "That's like a swimming pool every second," Corona Mayor Darrell Talbert said. The water gushed into the Santa Ana River, whose banks were deep enough to handle the flow, said Lieutenant Colonel John Guenther, deputy...

KEENE, N.H. - A Keene State College student from Massachusetts is lucky to be alive after floating over a dam in an inflatable kiddie pool and getting trapped in the churning current. Keene firefighters grabbed the exhausted student as he sank in the frigid Ashuelot River Friday evening. They also had to rescue a woman who jumped in to try to save him. "He went over the dam, got caught in the turbulent water, and was clinging to the pool," said Deputy Fire Chief Mark Boynton.

BELGRADE - Overwhelmed by deep snow and harsh temperatures, some countries in Europe closed schools and struggled to run public transport yesterday, and post-snow rains caused a dam to collapse in Bulgaria, flooding a village and killing at least four people. Officials said the 8-foot flood hit 700 houses in the village of Bisser, near the Greek border, after the dam on the Ivanovo reservoir collapsed. Another four people were killed by floods in southern Bulgaria, and 10 people are missing, authorities said.