Vermont Begins Drilling Investigation at Wrightsville Dam, Second on State Dam-Safety Priority List
MONTPELIER — Vermont dam engineers will spend three weeks this fall drilling into Wrightsville Dam, the 115-foot earthen dam on the North Branch of the Winooski River that holds back floodwater above Montpelier. From about Oct. 5 to Oct. 23, crews will take samples from inside the dam, the soil beneath it and the bedrock around its auxiliary spillway, investigating vulnerabilities and potential failure scenarios identified in an earlier assessment.
Wrightsville Dam ranks second of 18 on the state's dam safety priority list, behind only the East Barre Dam, according to the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation. The ranking comes from a risk assessment the state commissioned on 18 high- and significant-hazard dams, completed by RTI International for about $445,000, meant to help direct limited money for dam studies and repairs where it is needed first.
The ranking weighs both what could go wrong with a dam and what would happen downstream if it did — and because Montpelier lies below Wrightsville Dam, what a failure would mean for the city is part of the dam's score. The state stresses the ranking is not a prediction that Wrightsville Dam is the second-most likely dam in Vermont to fail.
Wrightsville is one of three Winooski River flood-control dams owned by the Department of Environmental Conservation, along with East Barre and Waterbury. During the drilling, the state urges residents along the North Branch and in Montpelier to follow state emergency alert channels for construction updates.
Sources: Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation; Compass Vermont
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：佛蒙特州议会大厦（蒙彼利埃）。摄影：Kenneth C. Zirkel，CC BY 4.0，取自 Wikimedia Commons
