ORANGE — It’s a little early yet for swimming, but contractors have been doing some nonrecreational swimming in the Mahar Regional School pond this week.
Work is underway on the Mahar dam that makes a pond of a former marsh by the back parking lot and athletic fields.
Carl Sauter a town resident, has been watching the work. He began pressing for the dam’s preservation about five years ago, when the structure looked to be headed for demolition with a state “repair or remove” deadline looming and an apparent administration preference for the latter.
A former employee of Orange hydro parts maker Rodney Hunt-Fontaine, Sauter felt the dam has educational value. That belief hasn’t wavered, despite the slow death of industry in Orange. Rodney Hunt is still operating, but reportedly on a skeleton staff. Sauter said his former coworkers were told last Friday the plant, now owned by Rexnord, will no longer be selling any products under the Rodney Hunt name. To Sauter, the local employer isn’t the be-all and end-all.
“As long as humans are around there are going to be dams, and they are serving more and more important services than they ever did before,” Sauter said. “There’s a need in general for good engineers in this country … especially in the environmental field and the energy field; there’s so many things that dams are tied in with.”
Sauter said he didn’t have any particular interest in dams as a 10-year-old, watching it built, but hopes the example of this dam and experts who could be brought in to talk about it from engineering, energy and fish and wildlife angles could build interest in science.
“It’s quite a field and it’s very unusual for there to be a high school with the potential to actually have a dam there for the purpose of education,” he said.
The original purpose probably wasn’t education. Sauter’s understanding is that the dam was originally built for aesthetic reasons. Some say it was built as a fire pond, he said, but his father was on the School Committee and chairman of the Building Committee when the Ralph C. Mahar Regional School was erected in the 1950s. He remembers the decision being made to dam Gulf Brook because qualified contractors were already on hand with a bunch of extra dirt from the grading of the construction site and athletic fields, and the thinking was that the marsh would look better as a pond.
The school district has received $100,000 toward the project from the state. Superintendent Tari Thomas told the School Committee this week the district will borrow another $100,000 soon before permanently financing the project, with the first debt assessment to member towns in the 2017-2018 school year.
Juniors LLC won the bid for the construction phase of the project, at $141,000. Contractors have pulled stumps from trees felled by Sauter and other volunteers to protect the earthen dam, and erected a temporary barrier to drain the spillway and access the old Rodney Hunt-built outlet control gate.
You can reach Chris Curtis at: ccurtis@recorder.com