In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, building hydroelectric dams to generate electricity was a great novelty. These hydroelectric plants supplied electricity to surrounding towns. But large companies realized that centralized coal-fired power plants could provide electricity to larger areas and make more money. Many of the generators at the dams were shut down decades ago.

Michigan has been demolishing more and more of these outdated dams in recent years. Demolishing dams is no easy task.

Near Plainwell in Allegan County, large construction machines are being used to finance the demolition of the Kalamazoo River dam, which will ultimately take nearly 20 years.

“So there was a dam here. The water level must have been about 12 feet higher where we’re standing,” said Mark Mills at the site where Plainwell Dam No. 1 once stood. Mills is a regional manager for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. He has spent much of his career working on this project.

“There were paper mills upstream that were essentially dumping their waste into the river as waste disposal. That waste contained many different chemicals, including PCBs,” Mills said, explaining part of the reason the work took so long.

The PCBs – which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calls “probable carcinogens” – came from a new type of carbonless copy paper. You could write on the top sheet and copy it on the second and even third sheet. This method involved putting tiny oil droplets containing the ink into the paper. When a pen applied pressure to the top sheet, these droplets burst and seeped into the paper fibers of the underlying layer. This oil contained PCBs. When the paper was returned to the mills for recycling, the pulp was kept, but the oily substance was dumped into the river. This was common practice until the Clean Water Act was passed.

In the 1960s, the state and some municipalities took over several dams on the Kalamazoo River when companies no longer wanted them.

Over time, some of them began to deteriorate and become a liability. If they failed, it could cause a flood, as happened in Midland a few years ago. A flood could wash toxic, PCB-contaminated sediment downstream into homes and businesses.

The state of Michigan first called for the demolition of the dams it owned in 1984.

“The Environmental Protection Agency said no, the dams cannot be removed until the pollutants are removed from the reservoirs,” Mills said.

The EPA lists several sites along the Kalamazoo River that should be remediated, some as part of a Superfund site.

Arranging financing, designing the structure, and cleaning up the site took a while. Work on the Plainwell Number One dam began in 2007. Getting rid of the contaminants required digging up 120,000 cubic yards of sediment contaminated with more than 4,000 pounds of PCBs, a $30 million effort.

“Fortunately, most of the money comes from the paper companies that pollute the environment,” Mills stressed.

In this case, the last owner of the paper mill was Georgia-Pacific.

This work was merely demolition and cleanup work and did not restore the river to its natural state.

The restoration began in 2017 and will not be completed until next summer.

Ryan Allison is an ecologist with SWCA Environmental Consultants. He has attached what looks like a rope net to the shore. It’s actually made of coconut fibers called coir. The manufacturer calls it BioD Block.

“It acts as a temporary erosion control while the native vegetation gets established here. It prevents the bank from eroding,” Allison said.

Across the Kalamazoo River from where Allison worked, new trees were planted to restore the former floodplain. Climate change has led to more severe storms. The river needs somewhere to flow when water levels are high so communities aren’t flooded.

These new trees and shrubs along the river also provide habitat for wildlife.

Tiffany Schriever is an associate professor of biological sciences at Western Michigan University. She said it makes sense to remove the dam and return the river to its original flow.

“Because the water flows faster and has more oxygen. And then the sediment is removed from the areas around all the rocks and everything else in the riverbed, so invertebrates can colonize and fish have more habitat to spawn,” Schriever said.

One of her graduate students is leading the team studying the river at the restoration site. Sara Diller said the samples they took a few weeks ago found a lot of caddisflies, which is a good thing. These insects thrive where the water quality is better.

“As far as fish go, we’re seeing a lot more fish than you would expect in rivers. There are these darters that are only found in rivers, and we’re just seeing them in large numbers,” Diller said.

This means that there may also be fish here such as smallmouth bass, which is popular with anglers.

A few years ago, not many people kayaked on this section of the Kalamazoo River. It was difficult to pass the dam and the views were not very nice.

Lois Heuchert owns Plainwell Kayak. She started guiding her customers through this section of the river a few years ago. Now many other people who own their own kayaks follow her lead. Things like kayaking and fishing can have a positive impact on the local economy.

“In Plainwell, you sell more ice cream or more lunch, dinner, breakfast or whatever. But more importantly, you have the opportunity to get out, enjoy nature and escape the madness of the world,” Heuchert said.

The cost of removing the dam, cleaning up the PCBs and the current remediation is in the tens of millions of dollars, but the benefits include that PCB pollution never spreads into a river that feeds Lake Michigan.

As we watched a pair of ospreys circling above us in search of fish, Mark Mills said it would take some time for vegetation and trees to grow and for nature to take over, but he predicted that eventually you wouldn’t be able to tell that there was ever a dam here.

“Our children and grandchildren should be able to live through this without ever noticing that anything was different.”