Small hydro station at Brockway Mills survives Irene

Chris Kruger, who along with a volunteer from Springfield, has been working daily for 10 months to get his small run-of-the-river hydroelectric station on the Williams River up and running again.
http://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20120629/NEWS02/706299928

ublished June 29, 2012 in the Rutland Herald Small hydro station at Brockway Mills survives Irene By SUSAN SMALLHEER Staff Writer BROCKWAY MILLS — When Tropical Storm Irene ravaged the Brockway Mills hydroelectric station, Chris Kruger thought — briefly — about walking away. He and his wife had just put 20 percent down on a boat in Maine, which they hoped would be their retirement home. At Brockway Mills, flood waters submerged the powerhouse, built 30 feet into the rock of the gorge. It covered all the powerhouse equipment with 3 to 6 feet of mud and silt. Debris measuring 5 feet high was piled up outside. Key equipment outside was gone, swept away. The force of rocks crashing on the catwalks permanently warped them. But Kruger, 58, who spent 22 years on the sea as a ship’s engineer, fixing everything where there wasn’t a hardware store anywhere in sight, didn’t give up. Kruger is tough. In December 2010, he survived a fall into the river while putting up flashboards on the dam during storm runoff. He was swept into the icy gorge but was able to climb out about a quarter mile downstream. He was injured, his clothes tattered and he suffered from hypothermia. On Friday, after 10 months of hard work, $100,000 in new state-financed debt, and countless hours of effort, Kruger is about to start generating electricity again at Brockway Mills LLC, his small run-of-the-river hydroelectric station on the Williams River. Irene had dropped up to 11 inches of rain in the Williams River watershed; two miles upstream on the river, it took out the historic Bartonsville Covered Bridge. Dramatic YouTube video taken the afternoon of Irene show giant chocolate-colored curls of water cresting over the Brockway Mills Gorge, and covering the hydro station’s powerhouse. The flood actually filled in about 20 feet of the rocky gorge and threatened to wash out the railroad bridge downstream from the hydro dam. Water rushed by at the rate of 48,600 cubic feet per second, Kruger said Wednesday. Before that, a typical storm would produce flows of 13,800 cubic feet per second, he said. Earlier last August, the flow was so low at 56 cubic feet per second in the Williams River, he had to stop generating power according to the environmental conditions of his operating license, and he went on vacation. That was one small piece of luck for Kruger, and it saved what little was left of the hydro station. “If it had been operating, there wouldn’t have been anything left,” said Kruger, a native of Gloucester, Mass., who lives in nearby Langdon, N.H., with his wife Eileen. But swept away was thousands of dollars of spare parts, tools and equipment he had gathered since 1999. He had no insurance on the small hydrostation, and the only money he ever collected was from his homeowner’s policy for $1,000 toward the lost tools. After the flood, the Krugers became even more resourceful. Instead of buying a new generator for $300,000 from Mexico City, they paid $10,000 for an old generator from a cement plant in Quebec and had $30,000 worth of work done to it. “Hopefully, it will be generating on Friday,” he said. Kruger has nothing good to say about FEMA, who, he said, only gave him two cases of bottled water and a case of Meals, Ready to Eat. “That’s all they did for me,” he said. “The two FEMA workers who stuck their heads into the powerhouse about two weeks after the flood and said, ‘we’re here from FEMA and we’re here to help you.’ They wouldn’t even help him carry two buckets of muck,” he said, with more than a trace of disgust in his voice. It took the Krugers three months, with help from a few friends to clean off the six feet of mud on the generator, and 2 to 3 feet of mud elsewhere. The Krugers, who met while both were serving in the Navy, had bought the hydro plant from the town of Rockingham in 1999, the town had got it through a tax sale after the original hydro company had gone bankrupt, Kruger said. They weren’t able to start generating power for about three years, since they had to wait for a new license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The Krugers had downgraded the power license from 800 kilowatts to 500 kilowatts and installed new equipment. The gorge has long attracted people to its beauty and cooling waters. More than 150 years ago, there were mills at the gorge, which were washed away in earlier floods, Kruger said. There was four feet of silt in the bottom of the powerhouse, which was flooded up to its roof, Kruger said Wednesday, as he continued to work toward what was once the unthinkable — getting the turbine and all its electrical controls back up and running. “We plan to spin it on Friday,” said Kruger, who along with a volunteer, Len Emery of Springfield, has been working daily to get the plant ready, including an overhaul of the electrical panels. Emery, an electrical engineer by training, was driving by one day in April and stopped by. He’s been there ever since, working on the electrical panel. Kruger said he won’t be putting power onto the electric grid on Friday, since he hasn’t signed a new contract with Green Mountain Power. Finalizing a contract will probably take a couple more weeks, he said. “I go with the flow,” he said.