Dark Hollow Dam: Contacts
Fight the Dark Hollow Dam. Write the Neshaminy Creek Watershed Plan Study Steering Committee at Town Center, New Britain, PA 18901-5182, or write directly to your representative of choice, always copying the Steering Committee so your correspondence is on the record. Some background information you might find helpful as well as agency contact are located on the back of this sheet. Also, please copy us at Riverkeeper (address below), we are equally interested in what you have to say.
Decision Makers/Officials
Bucks County CommissionersBucks Conservation District Board
Town Center
New Britain, PA 18901-5182
(215) 345-7577
Congressman James C. Greenwood
East Oakland Avenue
Doylestown, PA 18901
(215) 348-7511
Representative David Steil
North State Street
Newtown, PA 18940
(215) 968-3975
Three decades ago the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service proposed damming the Neshaminy Creek in order to reduce flooding in the Creek's lower reaches. After a hard look at the proposal in the late 1980's the County Commissioners, supported by the community, determined that the economic costs and environmental costs of the project didn't justify going forward.
Now the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) is revisiting the issue of how to reduce flood damages caused by water coming over the Neshaminy's banks. The once-rejected Dark Hollow Dam is once again up for consideration. The final decision on whether to dam the Neshaminy or to implement another solution, such as comprehensive stormwater management, ultimately rests with the County Commissioners and the state and federal agencies who would have to provide the necessary permits for the project.
The proposed Dark Hollow Dam will not solve the flooding problems in the basin. The dam was designed more than 20 years ago when land use in the watershed and the hydrology of the Creek were very different. Even then, the dam offered limited flood stage reduction for the lower Neshaminy, where the worst flooding has historically occurred. The dam would do nothing to address flooding caused by all the development below the dam site and would do nothing to prevent the increase of stormwater throughout the watershed. The dam will also provide no relief to flood victims who don't live along the Neshaminy's main stem or at the mouth of tributary streams. The dam may even increase flood damages downstream since it will disturb existing wetlands and floodplains and will open more of the floodplain below the dam to development.
If constructed, the dam would alter the flow of the Neshaminy, undermining its ecological health, and would destroy one of Bucks County's most unique and irreplaceable natural gems, Dark Hollow, which has been a county park since 1989.
There are more effective alternatives. In 1987 a county-paid consultant concluded that Dark Hollow Dam was not the most effective or cost efficient solution for downstream flooding. Instead, stormwater management coupled with local structural and non-structural solutions were suggested. Among the more effective alternatives today are: implementing the Neshaminy Creek Stormwater Management Plan, already complete and adopted; implementing stormwater infiltration on existing development sites; a voluntary buyout program coupled with floodplain and wetlands restoration; and local, site specific structural solutions for special cases like important historical and natural sites.