SEYMOUR — The decades-long fight to restore the once heavily polluted Naugatuck River took a major step forward Thursday with the announcement that $25 million in state funds will go toward the removal of the Kinneytown Dam.
“I was over the moon when I heard the news this morning,” said Kevin Zak of the Naugatuck River Revival Group. “It puts meaning into the phrase, ‘environmental justice.’ The project is going to get done and it’s going to fix a wrong. The improvement of the water quality will translate into environmental and economic good.”
For decades, local communities, environmental groups, and advocates have pushed to take down the hydroelectric dam, which has long been a safety hazard and visual eyesore, not to mention a major blockade to fish migration, slowing the river’s recovery from years of industrial pollution, Zak said.
Built in the 1800s and no longer serving any useful purpose, Seymour’s Kinneytown Dam stands 413 feet across and 30 feet high. It is one of just three remaining from the original nine dams that once spanned the Nauagatuck River between Ansonia and Torrington during the area’s manufacturing hay day.
Kinneytown Dam has long stood as a major obstacle in the river’s revival, its removal seen as critical to reopening over 30 miles of river habitat for fish like shad, eels, and salmon, Zak said.
The Naugatuck River was once one of the most polluted waterways in America, choked with industrial waste, Zak said. Over the past several decades, however, cleanup efforts and new protections have begun to bring the river back to life.
Now, with a total of $47 million raised and earmarked for the project, Kinneytown Dam’s days appear numbered, as well.
Funds for the removal project are being administered by the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Department and the Naugatuck Valley Council of Governments, the area’s regional planning organization.
Zak has been at the forefront of the dam removal efforts and says its removal will be one of the most important steps yet in fully restoring the ecosystem. He said the slow-and-steady removal of the numerous dams that once clogged the Naugatuck River has been a watershed moment in American history.
“Nothing like this has ever happened before where they took a whole system and tried to fix it,” Zak said.
The Tinque Dam, located one mile upriver, also remains an obstacle, although much less than Kinneytown, as its specially designed fish passage remains in operation, Zak said.
Kinneytown Dam was built in 1844 to divert water from the Naugatuck River into Ansonia to power Anson Phelps' mills, Ansonia Copper & Brass.
After the mills were gone, the dam was converted in the 1980s to make hydroelectricity. “Kinneytown has been the poster-child for bad hydroelectric across the entire United States," Zak said. "On its best day, it generated only one megawatt of power."
He said the Naugatuck River is nearing the point of becoming a free-flowing river to the ocean, something that once seemed almost impossible.
“You can’t put a price on that," he said. "Up until now, or until that dam comes down, the river has been what I would consider a land-locked lake where the only way you could fish in there was by stocking it.”
NVCOG engineer Aaron Budris said removing the dam will restore the river to its natural course, eliminate dam safety concerns, reduce up and down-stream flood risk, improve water quality, restore natural sediment flows, and restore access to the Naugatuck River for residents and visitors.
Three years ago, NVCOG received a $15 million federal grant to acquire and remove Kinneytown Dam through the Connecticut Brownfield Land Bank, Inc.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the federal agency that regulates the facility, approved the dam removal project in 2023.