Steve Landry, Merrimack County Watershed Supervisor, has a simple answer for when the Suncook River should have been stabilized: “About two years ago,” the staff member of the Department of Environmental Services said.

But there are no simple answers for the Suncook, which changed its course in the Mother’s Day flood of 2006. Landry, fellow DES staffer Steve Couture and the town of Epsom are applying for alternate funding after a grant application to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was rejected recently.

Water under the bridge The Suncook changed its course, and the face of Epsom, on May 15, 2006. The storm event, now known as the Mother’s Day Flood, rerouted the river, which originates in Alton and Pittsfield. The river used to split at Bear Island in Epsom, with a larger tributary running around the northwest and a smaller one around the southeast, before they joined up again. With the rerouting, called an “avulsion,” all the water went to the southeast, leaving the northwest high and dry.

The change of course resulted in a process known as “head-cutting.” When the level of a river drops, the river “wants equilibrium,” according to Eric Orff, wildlife biologist and longtime Epsom resident. So the river “eats at” the bed of the river upstream, trying to reduce the grade, and sending sand, silt and sediment downstream.

The avulsion has created problems ranging from recreational to real estate, according to Epsom Selectman Chairman Keith Cota. Property values have dropped, resulting in both a loss of equity for homeowners and a lower tax base for Epsom. The town has lost its flood storage capacity, he said. A second avulsion, at Round Pond near Epsom Central School, has affected a wildlife habitat and is near the Epsom Municipal Well. The town beach, on Short Falls Road, has been closed for two years due to sediment from the avulsion.

Cota said he is “extremely disappointed” at the rejection of the grant. The grant wasn’t regular FEMA reimbursement, but from FEMA’S Disaster Mitigation Fund, a funding source for projects “so this kind of thing won’t happen again.”

But the process was simply too competitive, he said, with the “little Suncook River” up against projects from all over the country. The town has $50,000 set aside from a Community Development Block Grant, but will need another $3.5 million to do the job properly, he said. And the town doesn’t qualify for federal stimulus funds, he added, because the project is not “shovel ready.”

Job specs
“It is a big job,” Landry said.

The town of Epsom and the DES co-funded a study on the best ways to deal with the river, Landry said. They had public forums and formed a Suncook River Restoration Task Force. They came up with four or five different options, and decided option 3 to be the best.

Landry said option 3 involves installing grade controls, made of large stones, in the main channel of the Suncook. These are very large stones designed and sized specifically to stop erosion, he said. They are placed in structures called “rock veins” or “weirs,” and provide the river with resistance to further erosion.

“They arrest the head-cutting,” Landry said. Ideally, the grade control needs to be installed as soon as possible -- “as of two years ago,” Landry said.

The channel also needs access to a properly sized flood plain, which it doesn’t have now, Landry said.

Over geological time, Landry said, the river would eventually right itself. But that would take decades,and Epsom doesn’t have decades, he said.

“The infrastructure is at risk,” he said.

And residents, especially those living downstream, are frustrated, he said.

Cash flow crisis
While the river is flowing, the cash is not. The estimated cost for the “full-blown” project, is $4 million, Landry said. Since FEMA denied the grant, he expects to see the town scale back and just do the highest priority item, which is the grade control. But design and permits for that should run $400,000 to $500,000, he said, “just to get it ready for construction.”

Cota and the other selectmen, Bob Blodgett and Joanne Randall, are firm in their resolve not to ask taxpayers for the money. Epsom can’t afford it, Cota said, and the river is actually a state-owned entity.

Landry and Couture are seeking other funding options for the town. They have applied for a grant from the Department of Homeland Security for the design and permit phase, and Landry said, “I feel pretty good about this one.”

The grant is actually from the DES Dam Bureau, for the costs of maintaining dams in the Suncook River Watershed, but Landry thinks Epsom will qualify. And, he said, if the grant is given, it should go through fairly quickly.

Both Congressman Paul Hodes and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen are also concerned, and have made river stabiilazation funds part of their requested appropriations for 2010 -- in the full amount, Landry said.

While he’s waiting for the federal and state funds to come through, Landry will continue to explore other ways of creative financing.

“It’s what we do,” he said.

And Cota hopes they do it well and soon.

“It’s very disappointing,” he said, ‘that we can go from 2006 to 2009 without a solution.”