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Embrey Dam to fall in February

In February, part of Embrey Dam will come tumbling down

By RUSTY DENNEN

Date published: 12/5/2003

By RUSTY DENNEN Warner will get birthday blast

On Feb. 18, Sen. John Warner hopes to be celebrating his 77th birthday with a bang in Fredericksburg.

Virginia's senior senator, an outdoorsman, fisherman and the longest-serving Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, is expected to be in town to help cheer when soldiers blast a hole in the deteriorating Embrey Dam.

Warner has been a longtime advocate of breaching the structure off Fall Hill Avenue to open the upper Rappahannock River to migratory fish . The dam, built to provide electric power and now obsolete, has a fish passage that doesn't work.

During an August 1999 visit here to push for funding for the dam-removal project, Warner remarked that it couldn't happen soon enough for him. He joked at the time that Embrey Dam could be renamed after him--then promptly blown up.

Warner said yesterday through a spokesman, "I'm looking forward to this long-awaited event that will remove the last impediment to a free-flowing Rappahannock and bring with it improved spawning for shad and rockfish and improve the environment in central Virginia."

With Embrey Dam gone, there will be no obstacles on the river from its source at Chester Gap in the Blue Ridge Mountains, 184 miles to its mouth at the Chesapeake Bay.

Warner will be among a host of dignitaries expected to be on hand, and he won't be the only one celebrating. Bringing down the dam has been a decade-long quest by area environmental groups such as Friends of the Rappahannock.

The $10 million project is being done in phases by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Early this year the agency awarded a contract for the removal of a vast shoal of sediment behind the dam that reaches nearly to the Interstate 95 bridge. That part of the job should be finished by Woodside Construction Corp. in mid-January.

In addition, a smaller 19th-century wooden crib dam 25 feet upstream from Embrey Dam is being partially dismantled to allow backed-up water to drain when Embrey Dam is breached.

Brian Rheinhart, the corps' project manager, says plans for the rather unusual event are coming together.

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Date published: 12/5/2003