Oddities

Red Oaks Mill Dam: Fading Fast

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

Red Oaks Mill dam - after collapse
Red Oaks Mill dam - after collapse

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

Red Oaks Mill dam - displaced concrete
Red Oaks Mill dam - displaced concrete

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

Red Oaks Mill dam - crumbled section
Red Oaks Mill dam - crumbled section

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

Red Oaks Mill dam - exposed creek bed
Red Oaks Mill dam - exposed creek bed

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:

Red Oaks Mill Dam - 27 Feb 2005
Red Oaks Mill Dam - 27 Feb 2005

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

Flood Stage in Red Oaks Mill
Flood Stage in Red Oaks Mill

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

Red Oaks Mill Dam - 2008
Red Oaks Mill Dam - 2008

Looks like a shovel-ready project to me…

9 thoughts on “Red Oaks Mill Dam: Fading Fast”

  1. 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.

    1. 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…

        1. 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!

    1. 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…

    1. 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!

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