a dam(n) classic!
the drowning machine
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This is one I’ve read about and may hold the record for most fatalities. PA has had a law requiring signs and buoys for low head dams since 1998. In 2020 a law was passed making the absence of signs a criminal offense. This dam had upstream buoys and signs. Downstream signs are on the adjacent bridge and downstream buoys were also placed since the last fatalities.
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Two women recently drowned on Virginia’s James River. Strong current & lots of debris prevented their group from hitting the take-out point (above Bosher’s dam).
@F14 said “Seems like everyone knows the dangers of these dams and not to go over them.”
Not trying to argue but I think the opposite is true. Everyone thinks they are familiar with weather yet weather is one of the top causes of paddling deaths. Very few people understand the dangers of current…they dramatically underestimate the risks (sometimes while grinning at the experienced person giving warnings) and people die as a result. I don’t think it’s possible to understand the dangers of a dam unless you have personally been caught in that particular dam many times.
Strong recirculating currents (rip currents) take people from local Lake Michigan beaches every year. Everyone knows the lake is dangerous but way too many seriously underestimate the danger.
Most americans can’t pass a basic swim test yet some think they are good swimmers because they took lessons as a kid. When’s the last time you swam in a river?
Our latest dam incident (not low head):
Yes, that was a tragic event that could have killed more.
What I find a bit puzzling about this accident is the fact that the intended take out point that was missed, Robious Landing, is about 4 miles upstream of Bosher’s Dam. That portion of the James River is above the falls line which is in Richmond itself, and has so little gradient that 14 foot high Bosher’s Dam is said to back up the river for nearly 10 miles. So that section of river is therefore flat and deep.
Now the river was high and carrying a lot of volume but still amounted to moving flat water in that stretch. I saw some video taken by river rescue personnel on the day of the tragedy and although the river was moving swiftly, I estimated the current velocity to be about 3 mph in the video I saw. Even if it was 4 mph it would have allowed an hour to get over to the bank and off the river.
Granted with the river up in the trees and moving with good current that might have been a challenge, but if the women knew the location of the dam and the extreme risk to life that going over it would involve, it seems to me that it would have been possible to get off somewhere along that distance.
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The river I grew up on paddling in Jr. High and High school had quite a few low head dams. (As a young kid I can even recall the debates about the expense of putting them in.) They were put in because developers wanted to sell riverside real estate and found it difficult if there was a flood plain that left a muddy tree, weed, and mud bank that flooded in the spring or following heavy rains but otherwise just bred mosquitos. The dams made for river banks that home owners could mow down to the edge of and made the properties more saleable, more like waterfront lake properties. The real estate taxes on the newly saleable riverfront properties were supposed to pay off the expense of dam construction. I suppose by now they have.
They were a minor inconvenience for me as a paddler back then - most could be portaged around just by landing and dragging the (nearly indestructible) Grummans over the grass that was always on one bank or the other. Often we didn’t even bother to take out the camping gear: We just avoided dragging over rocks. We’d go down to the river to check how high it was in the spring and often we’d see trees or construction lumber being recycled below these dams - and the same trees and construction lumber would be circulating in the same hydraulic in the fall. Dumb kids though we were, we surmised it would do the same to us. We took a lesson from that that perhaps others didn’t bother to consider. The drop itself looks so benign after seeing Deliverance or any other whitewater footage… Its like log jams, its not noisy or immediately fear inducing, but its not anything like benign in reality.
There was one dam, however, that kept killing people. It was the one closest to where I then lived. If memory serves it killed at least 22 people over the years. Many were fishermen who waded up to the edge of the scoured-out section from the downstream side in chest waders and lost their footing. There were boaters also, though. The last I heard of was a person who got a cell phone call while approaching and went over while trying to paddle and talk. Must have been an important call. Darwin award material.
Anyhow, this is what they did (finally) to improve the situation.
Its not a major whitewater venue or anything, but it is used for instruction and swift water rescue classes and its the closest thing to real whitewater for many many miles around.
Its been a few years now but I used to volunteer with a group up here in Wisconsin who had as one of its major projects advocacy for the removal of low head dams. Most were dams that originally had been used to create mill ponds to drive small scale lumber or grist mills, were later converted to small scale municipal electric generation, and then, as larger scale hydro dams made them unprofitable were used - as were those dams on the river I grew up on - to make riverfront properties more saleable. Home owners above these dams paid a premium for that waterfront property and are often loathe to having the dams removed for fear of losing their investment value - in spite of the fact that many such reservoirs have become silted in over the decades and are of little recreational value any more, though they do provide excellent carp breeding habitat.
What we learned in trying to convince folks to remove these dams was that timing was everything. Dams are subject to safety inspections. When a dam fails an inspection repairs are mandated and these repairs are expensive and particularly onerous to those who pay the taxes that cover those repairs. Removal is usually cheaper. If the previously flooded silted-up waterfront is converted to riverfront parkland the loss of waterfront property value is partially offset and makes removal an “easier sell” than repair.
So for those who want to encourage low-head dam removal, keep an eye on those inspection schedules, the results of safety tests, and strike while the iron is hot.
Wing dams are fine, but they aren’t always exactly safe either. There are some on the Mississippi, for example, that can create monstrous boat eating whirlpools at some water levels. Don’t underestimate those either.
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thanks to tdaniel.
What is an unintentional drowning? That suggests there are intentional ones.
What is a nonfatal drowning?
Good point - ‘unintentional drowning’ is unclear.
Perhaps ‘nonfatal drowning’ could refer to a drowning where someone loses consciousness and recovers after being rescued.
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Most paddlers I know, are aware of lowhead dam hydraulics, so I don’t know any who have died at lowhead dams. I know three whitewater paddlers who have died in hydraulics on western rivers. I lived in Bucks County PA in the late 80s and early 90s. The wing dam at New Hope / Lambertville used to claim about 2 paddlers every year. I remember one year there was a terrible accident with many boaters but I do not remember how many actually drowned. I saw this recent article. The picture looks like the drowning took place at the Wing Dam.
We have had numerous deaths in our area (the Greater Pittsburgh region) due to having 4 converging major rivers, all with dams, that feed the Mississippi drainage running through here. We have even had large commercial boats (barges and cabin cruisers) sweep over the low head dams and become trapped, with personnel on board dying in the events. And 3 years ago two young women bought a pair of cheap rec kayaks and blithely tossed them in the water upstream of a major lock and low head dam on the Ohio River and were too busy taking and posting selfies in their new toys to pay attention to all the warning buoys and signs. River Rescue extracted the first body the day of the accident, trapped in the churning sieve of junk and deadfall at the base of the drop, but it took several days before the second victims body flushed through and was found along the shore a few miles downstream. Very sad.
At the low head dams where drownings have occurred, is it more often the case that there were no warning signs, or were there more often warning signs which were apparently not seen or not heeded?
And at the dams where there have been multiple drownings, have the dam owners often added warning signs or made improvements to warning signs (at least to reduce their liability)?
There are lots of remote rivers with no warning signs. Do not expect to see them.
Learn to watch for horizon lines your only indication when looking down stream. Scout as much of the run as you can from a road traveling upstream. Then the dams are obvious.
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Do you all use satellite images in Google Maps/Earth to scout rivers?
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Yes. Encountered two unexpected dams on two early trips, one of which I couldn’t get around so curtailed my weekend. Since then I scan the whole planned length for river trips on GM/GE.
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Yes, I have. But with regard to low head dams, the satellite maps may not have been updated since a dam’s removal so a dam that is no longer there might show up.
But google maps can be helpful for determining the exact location of a dam (or other feature) you know exists. And you can use the “measure distance” feature to draw a line of dots down the course of the river to determine how far a given feature is from another.
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I’m Agoge over Google Earth. Makes me feel like we are living in the future!
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“What is an unintentional drowning? That suggests there are intentional ones.
What is a nonfatal drowning?”
I would think that suicides and murders would be two examples of “intentional drowning”. But hopefully those are extremely rare and almost never include paddlers…
What’s the typical range of river current speeds approaching these low head dams, and what’s the speed at which a paddler can paddle? I’m wondering about how often, once someone recognizes that they’re approaching a low head dam, they’re able to paddle to the river bank and exit the river before going over the dam?
That would be highly variable and dependent on the volume discharge of the river in cfs at the time. All dams will back up the river for at least a short distance so there will be essentially no gradient. But if there is a large volume of water coming downstream the current velocity can be considerable.
I would say that in my experience, in most cases the current velocity is not so great that a reasonably-skilled paddler in a hard boat can’t execute an upstream ferry to get to the bank. But I am not paddling on very high volume rivers.
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Here is a video analysis of that incident.
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