A combination of neglect and last year’s storms demolished much of the Red Oaks Mill dam:

The linear “rocks” just downstream of the dam are sections of the concrete cap:

With the cap gone, the concrete-and-rock fill should disintegrate in short order:

Upstream of the rubble, the Wappingers Creek dropped about three feet, exposing bedrock and undercutting the old shoreline:

Downstream, not much changed. This wasn’t a catastrophic dam break that wiped entire towns off the map.
In February 2005, the fishing must have been pretty good:

It’s endured quite a few floods like this one in February 2008:

But in June 2008, after the waters receded, you could tell things weren’t right:

Looks like a shovel-ready project to me…
Thanks for making that documentation. I drive by there every day, so things did seem different, but I hadn’t noticed the stark contrast until now.
It’s one of our standard walk-around-the-block routes and we’ve been watching it disintegrate for years. Having a pocket camera comes in handy!
Now the whole mess will go downstream fairly quickly…
Will that make it kayakable/tubable?
There’s an annual canoe race from Pleasant Valley to the park just upstream of us, although the new-normal water level may affect that.
The bedrock outcroppings downstream of the dam are (and were) impassable at low water. Given enough storm flow, you can shoot the creek all the way from the Pleasant Valley dam to Lake Wappinger… with some scary whitewater in between!
Looks like the dam is an absolutely amazing looking walk. I wish I had something this beautiful that I could enjoy nature next to my house.
What you don’t see: those upstream pix came from a four-lane bridge (with no walkway) over the creek! We enjoy the route a lot more after we get off that road and up the hill on the far side…
Mother nature takes it back…
http://worldwithoutus.com/index2.html
That time scale seems unreasonably long: after two centuries, nothing but stone would remain. It’s also unreasonably short: after less than a decade, an abandoned house a mile down the road has begun disintegrating.
In these parts foundations from the early 1900s are barely visible rubble and tombstones from the mid 1800s are illegible.
Electronics: bah!
“Electronics: bah!”
Even these ran out of juice long ago…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery