Stronger coast, stronger partners: Denise Poyer
Since the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and partners began to rebuild the Atlantic Coast after Hurricane Sandy, it’s been impossible for any one group to stand alone. Agencies partnered to bring relief to stricken areas, communities came together to share and pool resources, and many, many organizations dedicated themselves to repairing the coast — and preparing it for the future.
Over the last six years, using funding for Hurricane Sandy resilience projects, we’ve worked with dozens of partners across the Northeast to fortify the coast against future storms. Their expertise, community relationships, funding, and other support have taken these projects off the page and into the world.
In this miniseries, we recognize a few of those partners.
Denise Poyer, study coordinator, Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association | Pawcatuck River restoration
Since the first colonists began using dams to mill textiles and flour hundreds of years ago, the waters of the Wood-Pawcatuck watershed have seen major drops in fish and wildlife populations. They’ve also tended to overflow into cities and towns nearby, damaging property and threatening lives.
With more than a dozen dams gumming up one watershed, it was inevitable a storm like Hurricane Sandy would cause massive flooding. For Denise Poyer and the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association, this provided an impetus to start taking the dams out.
“Sandy brought about a lot of localized flooding, a couple of dams burst and had to be repaired, and there was a lot of property damage in the Westerly area,” said Poyer, study coordinator of the organization.
With the help of the Service and The Nature Conservancy, as well as numerous towns and other community partners in Rhode Island and Connecticut, 10 dams have now been removed from the watershed, reducing the risk of flooding and providing passage to fish like river herring and American shad.
“Sandy funding provided us with a watershed-wide flood management plan, and helped us to improve water quality,” said Poyer. “Looking at the fish passage project, it’s been highly successful — we now have fish going from the mouth of the river all the way up to Worden’s Pond.”
Even more impressive, though, was the number of projects that were completed in so many locations in the same watershed.
“You can’t get it done without partners; with 12 towns in two different states, federal regulations, you need a way to cross those boundaries,” she said. “We’re most proud to have been able to gather the communities and the agencies together to create a functional organization reaching across boundaries.”
Since the projects were completed, the watershed has seen reduced flooding — though as Poyer notes, they have yet to see “quite the event we did during Sandy.”
But as one might expect, the work is not done. Just this year, the WPWA submitted a proposal to Congress introducing a stewardship plan for the watershed to be classified as a Wild and Scenic River system. If approved, the watershed would be protected as a free-flowing river system, and federal funding could preserve water quality, reintroduce meanders to the rivers, and promote further fish passage projects within the watershed. The future for the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed is as bright as it’s ever been, thanks to people like Denise.
This year’s severe storms underscore the power of nature and the vulnerability of our coasts. While nature can destroy, it can also defend. Supported by federal funding for Hurricane Sandy recovery, we’re working with partners to restore and strengthen natural systems that provide not only habitat for wildlife, but also protection against rising seas and storm surge. This miniseries is part of a larger series of stories highlighting results of our ongoing efforts to build a stronger coast.
