Congratulations to your daughter! Hope she has a beautiful wedding day.

Best,
Shannon

Hi Scott,

The project to replace Broomall’s Dam has been in litigation, and it is difficult to say when construction will happen. There may be a ruling about the project in May, and if that resolves the outstanding issues, that would seem to be the earliest point that the engineers would be instructed to resume work on the dam. I believe that construction is limited to the months of April through October due to wildlife considerations, so the earliest that construction might occur would be April 2015. But it is unclear how long permitting with the PA DEP would take, so between planning and permitting it may well be 2016 or even later, and again that is if the litigation is even resolved.

You could try contacting Media Borough Manager Jeff Smith at 610-566-5210 about possible timing, as he may be able to give you a better prediction or estimate. But if there is a ruling in May, it should be more clear at that point what the timing might be.

To answer your second question, we do support dam removal in this project, which would remove the lake. When the plans for the Broomall’s Dam project were revealed in June 2011, we learned that instead of repairing the 1883 dam, the project would replace the dam with a new, much larger dam built to modern engineering standards – burying over 1/2 acre of the park in earthfill, and destroying 1 acre of the public park. So we support removing the dam and restoring the pre-1883 stream, which would cause much less damage to the park, and would re-create the natural waterfalls at what is now the dam (the water would still have to descend almost 30 feet!). It would be safer and not require the expensive future maintenance of a dam. For more information and reasons for our position, two places to start are:

– Information we distributed last August, with links: https://glenprovidencepark.org/2013/08/10/protect-the-park-remove-the-dam-restore-the-stream/
– Information with more links from February 2012 when we were investigating dam removal as an option: https://glenprovidencepark.org/2012/02/26/dam-removal-stream-restoration/

Thank you for your inquiry, and let me know if you have other questions. I hope your daughter has a lovely wedding!

Stephanie